Nothing seems to truly hit Trump in any meaningful way, be it smears, legal attacks, or literal bullets. The only things they seem to have left to throw at him are disproven claims they can't seem to let go of or the old tired accusations of racism, sexism, or whatever "ism" the left limps to the barn with when they attack.
There's nothing in the tank. The man survived an assassination attempt that miraculously didn't succeed, and now any attack against him feels as cruel as it is ridiculous.
A safer target is Trump's VP pick, JD Vance. They can attack him with a little more gusto, seeing as how there have been no recent attempts on his life, coming at him with everything they've got is safe...but there's not much to attack him on. Funny enough, I kind of like watching them go after Vance, not because I have anything against him, but because the attacks are so ridiculous they're comical.
Take, for instance, this little gem.
According to the left, they can confidently say that Vance is alt-right because...he likes "The Lord of the Rings."
The attack began with Politico, who wrote:
Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.
This came complete with an artistic depiction of Vance as a pipe-smoking wizard which, if I'm being honest, only sells him to me more. I share Vance's love of Tolkien, and especially Lewis, who I learned quite a bit of my Christian beliefs and philosophy from.
If you really want to understand J.D. Vance’s politics, you’ll need to crack open a little-known work called The Lord of the Rings. https://t.co/Wv1vkwDlY5
— POLITICO (@politico) July 19, 2024
Politico also coined the term "Tolkien-pilled" to describe Catholics like Rick Santorum, someone the left despised for the same reason they hate many other Republicans; they're Christian.
This led Rachel Maddow to discuss the Politico article on her show on MSNBC, where she discussed Vance's relationship with entrepreneur and political activist Peter Thiel, also a Tolkien fan. So influential was Thiel on Vance, that Vance copied Thiel's penchant for naming his ventures after things featured in Lord of the Rings. Vance named one of his ventures "Narya," which was one of the three rings forged by the elves and discovered to have been worn by Gandalf during the war of the ring.
Maddow, seeking desperately to connect Vance to something evil, noted that if you move the "N" in "Narya" and you put it at the end, you get "Aryan." I'm sure she and her writers were really proud of themselves for that clever little line.
Rachel Maddow claims Lord of the Rings is a 'favorite' for 'far right' figures:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) July 18, 2024
"Lord of the Rings is sort of a favorite cosmos for naming things, and cultural references, for a lot of far right figures and alt-right figures both in Europe and the United States.
Mr. Vance when he… pic.twitter.com/hFagDgURNS
Then there's some talk that Vance, a marine who served his country, will be loyal to Trump and not his country...and those are the attacks. Apparently, if you're a Tolkien fan, you're an extremist and Trump, Trump, Trump.
If it's extremist to love Lord of the Rings, then the world is just chock-full of extremists, yet I think it's interesting that damn near all of these "extremists" do very little in the way of extremism. I can't say for sure that Tolkien fans have done anything extreme because when someone does something horrific, no one checks to see if they had Tolkien books in their possession because that would be a really stupid thing to connect extremism to.
But that's kind of where the left is at. Really stupid attempts to create really stupid attacks that miss completely. Only with these attacks, they don't even come close to grazing their targets.
In fact, I can confidently say they only make Vance and Trump look cooler. The left has nothing. At this point, a lot of what they're throwing at the Trump campaign looks like self-soothing.
