Do you remember as a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons? I believe it was the old Warner Bros ones with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck that, at the end of each episode, Porky Pig would come out and say, "That's all, folks."
That is how I feel about the Donald Trump announcement that came out Friday about current or, errrrr, former Michigan GOP Chair Kristina Karamo.
That's all, folks. Except for all the court battles, which should be brief.
Donald Trump finally jumped into the fray of Michigan State Party nonsense last night and verbally kicked Kristina Karamo and her Democrat-lite nonsense to the curb. Of course, I had politely asked the former POTUS to get involved in my piece right here, at the beginning of January.
From that article.
This brings us to the issue at hand here for this note about the current state of Michigan GOP.
It's a damn disaster.
Imagine Joe Biden running the country, but on a smaller scale and with really powerful steroids.
I'm not kidding.
You know of Kristina Karamo because you endorsed her for her Secretary of State race early in 2022. She got her rear handed to her by 14 points in the general election and refused to concede because of fraud.
There was no fraud.
Ask whoever your closest political advisor is right now if someone who is the victim of fraud loses by 14 points. After they stop laughing...
Karamo then decided she would run for State Chair, and her camp and Matt DePernos' camp fought pretty darn hard to get your endorsement. Yet in the end, for reasons only known to you, the call came that you would endorse DePerno, and he went on at the convention to lose in a four-ballot contest to Karamo.
One of the deciding factors, according to media reports, for delegates deciding to choose Karamo was that she would carry out the Trump plan of exposing corruption better than the person that you endorsed. While I'm not a member of the party and was not in Lansing that day, I was a bit surprised by that rationale, but it was as it was.
Anyway, Don, early on in Karamos’ time as the top person for the Michigan GOP, her inexplicable decision to abandon the headquarters because it was costing too much money as a fiscally responsible move raised a flag with me. As a real estate guy, I'm sure you understand how this works. She abandoned the building because she said it was much too expensive to keep the lease, and then when the party got into too much debt, she decided to sue the trust owners to gain custody of the building so she could sell it to try to alleviate some debt.
The lease on the building was for a dollar a year, and she choked on that, saying it was about fiscal responsibility. However, it sounds more like the words "gross" and "incompetent."
As some of you may recall from your history, Donald Trump made billions in real estate. So, I do not doubt that when the former president was shown what had happened up here in Michigan, the documents of the lease on the Michigan GOP headquarters, and what Kristina had done regarding that, he could not have been very well pleased.
If he had read those documents, that was probably when he gave the order to chuck her out of the office that he had once praised her for attaining.
The official word came late Friday night that Trump had pulled the trigger and endorsed his former ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, to take over the embattled state GOP, which I read about right here
Former President Donald Trump endorsed Pete Hoekstra as the Michigan Republican Party's chairman on Friday night, issuing a potentially devastating blow to Kristina Karamo's push to hold onto the job.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump, who's currently a heavy favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, said he looked forward to working with Hoekstra as chairman of the Michigan GOP. In recent days, Hoekstra and Karamo have been battling for control of the state party, and there's an ongoing lawsuit on the subject in Kent County.
Trump continued
"Pete will make the Republican Party of Michigan great again and has my complete and total endorsement to be its chairman," Trump wrote about his former U.S. ambassador to The Netherlands.
It wasn't immediately clear what prompted Trump to intervene in an intense fight among Michigan Republicans over the chair position. Both factions of the party are dominated by supporters of the former president, meaning his comments could be influential.
At the end of next week, the Republican National Committee will be in Las Vegas for their annual winter meeting. They released a statement saying Hoekstra and Karamo will be invited and given credentials to attend the meeting. Still, they will only decide after this event to weigh in on who they will officially recognize as the Michigan chairperson.
Trump's endorsement of Hoekstra holds a ton of weight and power, and there's no doubt in my mind that, other than for the court cases during the first week in February, Kristina Karamo will be sent packing.
She'll continue to make a nuisance of herself and rally people whose critical thinking skills I question, but at least this sad debacle of a GOP chairperson acting as an agent of the Democratic party will be somewhat behind us.
Hopefully, some Michigan state races will be salvaged for the 2024 election season; that's the best this state can hope for.
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