The Gaetz Close On Trump's Dictatorship And Morning Joe Continues To Nosedive

What does the defeat of Matt Gaetz's nomination to be attorney general really mean? Also, Morning Joe's ratings nosedive.

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The Gaetz Close On Trump’s Dictator Dreams

Donald Trump tried to bully the Senate. He really did. The president-elect got on the phone and threatened Republican senators with primary challenges that would be paid for by Elon Musk. He issued the threat that every Republican must vote for all of his nominees, or else they would pay. More accurately, Musk would pay to primary them.

A couple of hours later, Matt Gaetz issued a statement about not being a distraction and withdrawing his name from consideration to be attorney general.

There are some out there in the DC pundit class, the ones who seem to live to make Trump out to be smarter than he really is, who are saying that the Gaetz nomination was a set up by Trump to make sure that all of his other nominees get through.

This is the same kind of bad take that has millions of people turning off mainstream media, but more on that later.

The president-elect and his staff made it clear in their comments that the Gaetz nomination was a power play to break the Senate. If Trump and his team could break the will of the Senate by getting them to surrender their power to him, it would be a bigger development than getting any one heinous nominee confirmed. Breaking the Senate would give Trump the unlimited power that he craves.

Trump has been fighting with Republicans in the Senate for years because they refuse to surrender their power to him. The Senators understand that they will be around long after Trump is gone, or at least most of them. They don’t need anything from Trump.

The transition team has flooded the zone with unqualified and incompetent nominees. The bad news for the country is that most of these people will get confirmed.

The good news is that Trump’s dream of being a dictator is already dead.

Speaking of things that are dead….

Morning Joe Registers Its Third Lowest Rating Of The Year

If the Morning Joe team was waiting for everything to blow over and the audience to return after their apology tour of Mar-a-Lago, they got some bad news.

About those ratings:

According to Nielsen, the four-hour broadcast of Morning Joe drew only 680,000 total viewers on Tuesday, representing a 12 percent dip from Monday’s airing. Additionally, the program only averaged 86,000 viewers in the coveted advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54, also down 12 percent from the previous day.

Compared to the average viewership for 2024, Morning Joe’s total audience on Tuesday was down 38 percent and 37 percent in the key demo. Tuesday also represented the third-lowest-rated Morning Joe broadcast of the year.

Things are actually getting worse for Morning Joe. The viewers who left didn’t return, and more viewers thought about it and decided to turn off the TV. I assume they turned off the TV probably because I have never had much use for the morning shows, whether they are cable news or network TV.

MSNBC has a problem. They have already surrendered four hours of weekday airtime to Morning Joe and related programming. If viewers decide that they don’t want to watch a pair of hosts who will so willingly and easily yield to Trump, a network that is already struggling could see a bad situation get worse.

Nothing is turning out the way that Trump and his big media enablers planned.

The power still rests with the people, who are delivering a reality check to the president-elect and the media that helped restore him to office.

What do you think about Matt Gaetz's withdrawal and Morning Joe's continuing decline? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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