Try to imagine turning on MSNBC on a Monday night in April of 2020 and seeing Rachel Maddow talking to the camera and telling Nancy Pelosi to block any economic legislation to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic because then-current President Trump’s poll numbers were falling and he would lose reelection to Joe Biden easily, so there’s no point in working with Trump now to get some half-measures done when they could just wait until next January to get a much better deal. Not to mention that it could help Trump politically with an issue the public sees him as very weak on.

Now you’re probably thinking something like “Oh that’s so unrealistic, Maddow isn’t that insane” and you’d be right. The sad truth is that scenario is the closest analogue we have to what’s going on within the MAGA media complex-Republican Party axis when it comes to this inchoate border security package that Senate Democrats and Republicans are working on together to pass and send to the House. And that’s where Jesus dork Speaker Mike Johnson faces an almost certain motion to vacate from the Freedom Caucasians if he puts it on the floor – where it would probably pass.

In the real world the COVID-19 pandemic and the Mexican border do not in any way belong in the same sentence in terms of “crises.” There’s just no comparison, no matter how badly Texas Governor Low Energy Greg Abbott exploits the influx of migrants by bussing them north. The pandemic killed more than a million Americans, put tens of millions out of work, and nearly destroyed our economy.

But as the right wing propaganda-industrial complex and elected Republicans would have you believe, thousands of impoverished Venezuelans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, and other nationalities streaming through the border is just as bad if not worse than a viral outbreak that forced tens of millions of kids into “remote learning” for the better parts of three school years in a row.

Times Square, New York City, circa 7:00 PM on March 30th, 2020.

However we believe that a very solid majority of MAGAmerica, for better or worse, do actually sincerely believe, as strongly as Democratic constituencies did with the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, that the situation at the southern border is an extremely grave national crisis that the incumbent president is not taking seriously enough during a crucial election year.

For all those intents and purposes of political context, the situations are worth comparing and presenting that really stupid scenario of Rachel Maddow commanding then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to fuck up any effort to address the grave economic fallout of the pandemic in Congress.

And the inverse is what’s actually happening right now:

For the past two weeks or so, Fox News propagandist Laura Ingraham has been talking to the camera and telling Mike Johnson to block any legislation to deal with the border because she thinks current President Biden’s poll numbers are falling and he will lose reelection to Donald Trump easily, so there’s no point in working with Biden now to get some half-measures done when they could just wait until next January to get a much better deal. Not to mention that it could help Biden politically with an issue the public sees him as very weak on. Twelve days ago Ingraham literally said that any deal made in the Senate would give “Biden an opportunity to take a victory lap.”

That last “quiet part out loud” is what makes the present situation so stunning. Texas MAGA Congressman Troy Nehls earlier this month said the same to CNN, with “I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating. I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I? Chuck Schumer has had [some insane bullshit bill the House GOP passed] on his desk since July.”

Not even the Orange God Emperor himself has been saying that much (though he did come pretty goddamned close) when he wrote on Truth Social this week “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”

(Privately however, Rolling Stone reports that Trump has, of course, recently been telling his minions that the “RINOs” are too eager to hand Biden a win on the border ahead of November.)

Senate GOP RINOs are about to cut a deal with Joe Biden and the Democrats to give us the biggest amnesty in years combined with billions more to Ukraine.

Any "Republican" who votes for this deal needs to face a Primary challenger!!!

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 19, 2024

We could get into the weeds of the deal’s provisions but what’s the point? That Ingraham and Trump aren’t themselves doing it should tell you that the specifics don’t actually matter here.

At the end of a lengthy tweet mostly jerking himself off about the primary election the MAGA radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday wrote “…in the meantime, the GOP must insist on the 900 miles of Wall or walk away from the Supplemental. This is a national security election. The border is a crucial part of the GOP’s argument. It cannot take a ‘little security.’ It needs to be the party of real national security, starting with a serious Supplemental,” which should further make it clear to you that anything short of the wall that Mexico didn’t pay for is unacceptable to them.

Even on the other side of this intra-party Kabuki rift was mostly a douchebag but sometimes rational Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw who put it bluntly to Politico Playbook with “How many hundreds of thousands of illegals would you allow in the country just because it might help your chances of the election? I ran for Congress literally on getting the border secure. So if I have a chance to do that, and I don’t do that, I’m a traitor.” Histrionic “traitor” bullshit aside, the specifics don’t matter to Crenshaw either. He wants it done and doesn’t care.

We CANNOT let Biden & Congressional Dems off the hook regarding the border.

They're the one's who caused this crisis, they want this crisis & it could all be fixed tomorrow but they won't.

We're not taking the Senate deal.
The Senate deal is TRASH.@HouseGOP must stand STRONG. pic.twitter.com/0B1umTmA8s

— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) January 20, 2024

We could buy that a significant fraction of these anti-border deal Republicans in Congress really are that fucking stupid and deluded that they simply cannot contemplate the value proposition of something being better than nothing. That “they’re the one’s” who incapable of understand the meaning of the term “opportunity cost” let alone foreseeing that they might actually be turning that they’re turning what’s supposed to be a strength into a vulnerability for Dems to exploit.

It’s the “smarter” ones, the “chess players” like Laura Ingraham, Trump, and their ilk who aren’t seeing that next step and failing to anticipate that the other guys might just be able to make a case to the voters that Republicans aren’t taking the border “crisis” all that seriously?

Joe Biden is leading a deadly insurrection on the Southern Border in order to remake the American electorate and disenfranchise the American citizen.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 17, 2024

These motherfuckers are literally calling it an “insurrection” (because they’re trying to will into existence a pretext for disqualifying Joe Biden from the November ballot in retaliation for what happened to Trump, but that’s a whole other can of Stephen Millers). They’re going to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security for dereliction of duty. Every single day for the past three years (and more often than not before that while Trump was still in office) you could not open the home page of a right wing news site and not see at least one story about the goddamned Mexican border.

And yet these last few weeks have made it clear that MAGA Republicans would rather hang onto it as an election issue than do at least something now when they have a chance. Pretty fucking crazy that here we are, where we don’t have to speculate about that anymore, that the ulterior motive we had suspected for years of dicking around has now entered the daylight for all to see.

We guess the only real question now is whether that’s going to end up mattering, if Biden and the Dems are going to be able to make this whole case to voters and neutralize all this “Biden Border Disaster” bullshit if this deal collapses. Make it clear MAGA Republicans were the ones responsible for it. Not very likely, but we would think if Dems hammer it enough that it gets closer to a draw.

And who knows. Maybe it will actually pass. Mike Johnson didn’t say no here when Ingraham sandbagged him with this “I just got off the phone with the president” shit. He may just find the pressure from Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Senate GOP too much to bear and it’ll hit the floor, where it’s pretty likely to pass. He’s really the only person standing in the way right now. The Freedom Caucasians can jump off the motion to vacate bridge when they get to it.

Maybe Jesus dork will listen to reason. “You’re going to make an enormous amount of progress on the border however this comes out – and you’ve still got your political issue because you think there’s more that needs to be done,” Washington Dem Adam Smith told Johnson this week.