The real reason Susan Collins won’t answer the question
Senator Susan Collins is, objectively speaking, awful. She claims to be a moderate, but she votes with her far right Republican colleagues the vast majority of the time. Her version of “bipartisanship” involves letting both parties know that her vote is for sale if either side wants to cough up enough pork barrel for her state and enough PAC money for her reelection campaign.
All that said, Collins isn’t stupid. She’s the kind of pragmatic villain who understands exactly how politics works, and precisely what she can get away with. The villains who survive in politics for a long time are the ones who know which risky corrupt moves not to make, in order to ensure that they can keep their seat and keep exploring other corrupt opportunities in the longer term.
This brings us to Susan Collins’ decision to appear on the Sunday morning cable news circuit. The media never challenges her on her frequent lies or extremist votes, of course. But this past weekend Collins was challenged to take a position for or against Donald Trump running for President in 2024. In response, Collins did the thing that savvy villains know is occasionally the smart move, even if it goes against every fiber in their body: she told the truth.
Collins simply pointed out that Trump is very unlikely to be an actual candidate in 2024. This goes against nearly 100% of what we’ve been hearing from the media for the past year. But the media has only been pushing that narrative in the name of chasing ratings. Collins knows what the media knows: Trump, who’s extremely unpopular, half senile, half dead, and in the process of being criminally indicted in two states, won’t be anywhere near the 2024 election. He’s just currently pretending he’s going to run, so he can rake in quasi-campaign donations and pocket them.
While it’s to the media’s advantage to push the lie that Trump is going to be a viable 2024 candidate, it’s to Susan Collins’ advantage to simply tell the truth about how Trump will be far off the stage by then. That way Collins doesn’t have to address the question about whether she supports Trump, since she knows it’s not a question she’ll have to answer in 2024 anyway.
Even when it comes to pragmatic villains like Susan Collins, we can often learn a lot just by listening to them. You never just automatically take them at their word, of course, because they’re lying most of the time. But it’s important to look at how they’re lying and what they’re giving away in the process – and in this instance, why even the biggest liars in politics occasionally decide to strategically tell the truth.
