President-unelect
Trump has studied every play in the Coups-for-Dummies playbook
Trump’s
final hope rests with Tommy Tuberville. Sad!
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 21, 2020 at 6:23 p.m. CST
President-unelect
Trump has studied every play in the Coups-for-Dummies playbook: court
challenges, pressure on Republican officials to overturn the election, even a
half-baked plan for martial law from pardoned
convict Michael Flynn. But no luck.
Now, Trump’s final
hope rests with Tommy Tuberville.
This is like finding
out your death-row appeal will be argued by Sidney Powell.
Tuberville — or
“Tubs,” from his college football coaching days — is the Republican
senator-elect from Alabama, and he’s proposing to object to the election
results in the Senate on Jan. 6. Trump exulted: “Great senator.”
Problem is, Tubs, if
he were a Democrat, is what Trump might call a “low-IQ individual.” In their
wisdom, the voters of Alabama chose to replace Democrat Doug Jones, who prosecuted the
Birmingham church bombing, with a man who recently announced his
discovery that there are “three branches of government,” namely, “the House,
the Senate and the executive.”
In an interview with
the Alabama Daily News, he also offered the insight that World War II was not,
as many suppose, a conflict against Nazism. “My dad fought 76 years ago in
Europe to free Europe of socialism,” he said.
He further informed the newspaper that
“in 2000 Al Gore was president, United States, president-elect, for 30 days.”
(Actual number of days Gore spent as president-elect: zero.)
For obvious reasons,
Tubs avoided debates and interviews during the campaign. Even so, he imparted
some extraordinary wisdom.
On climate change: “There’s one person that
changes the climate in this country and that’s God,” he told Alabama’s Daily
Mountain Eagle.
On the opioid epidemic: “It’s not just opioids now,
it’s heroin …”
On health care: “We don’t have the answer until
we go back to open up being a capitalistic health-care system where we have
more than one insurance company.” (There are 952 health insurers in
the United States.)
On education: “We’ve taken God out of the schools
and we’ve replaced the schools with metal detectors.”
Tubs has declared his
desire to serve on the Senate “banking finance”
committee, apparently unaware that banking and finance are separate committees
— and that he is ineligible to serve
on banking because Alabama’s senior Republican senator already does.
Tuberville’s Senate
campaign (in which he also defeated former attorney general Jeff Sessions) was
a magical voyage of discovery, as he learned about such things as advice and
consent. Senators “confirm judges all across the country, federal judges, and get
them in place,” he marveled.
He also seemed to
have no clue what the landmark Voting Rights Act was, telling Rotarians:
“It’s, you know ― there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you
know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it? I think
it’s important that everything we do we keep secure. We keep an eye on it. It’s
run by our government. And it’s run to the, to the point that we, it’s got
structure to it. It’s like education.”
Now this genius wants
to make his first act as senator a doomed, symbolic challenge to the election
that forces Republican colleagues into an embarrassing vote. Trump will soon be
gone. But as long as there are mental giants such as Tubs, Trumpism will
remain.
Tuberville had a
mixed record as a football coach at Auburn, Cincinnati and Texas Tech. He had a
brief broadcasting career with ESPN, once confusing Iowa and
Iowa State, and, when asked for a game analysis, replying on hot
mic, “Y’all make me do this s---.”
He also established
his financial naivete: His business partner in a hedge fund pleaded guilty to
fraud; Tuberville claimed he knew nothing. Tubs also was lured to invest in an
alleged Ponzi scheme. He set up
a foundation to help veterans, but veterans got only a third of the
money raised.
As a candidate, Tubs
offered exotic views on why rural hospitals closed (“because
we don’t have Internet”), on impeachment (“I’ve been trying to keep
up with it but it’s so hard”) and on constitutional democracy (“We’d
probably get more done with just the president running this country. So let the
Democrats go home”).
Tuberville was
baffled by the vote counting after Election Day (“The referees are
suddenly adding touchdowns to
the other team’s side of the scoreboard”), and last week said he plans a Senate
challenge to the electoral college tally.
Would you expect
otherwise from this champion of civics education? “We’ve gotten away from
teaching … history, civics, government,” he observed. And another
time, “We’ve got to get our education back
on the right track … we’re going to educate several generations in this country
that really don’t understand this country.”
Eventually, people
might not even know the three branches of government.