Trump and his frenemies in the Democrat-leaning press have a mutual interest in convincing you that he can win in 2024. Don’t be fooled.
Trump and his frenemies in the Democrat-leaning press have a mutual interest in convincing you that he can win in 2024. Don’t be fooled.
‘ Biden Casts Himself as the Trump Beater. Polls Suggest That’s No Sure Thing.” I’ll admit it: The ostensible pessimism of the New York Times in yesterday’s — for the Gray Lady — splashy headline (above an analysis by Peter Baker) had me chuckling. Ruefully.
The plan is coming together, hidden in plain sight. And it’s working: Even here at NR, there is resignation, and in the Never-Ever-Trump precincts of the Right, there is downright consternation, over the notion that Donald Trump could be elected president in 2024.
That doesn’t mean you can relax. It means that, if this continues — which, of course, is the plan — either Joe Biden or some other Democrat will take the oath of office on January 20, 2025.
I’d rather not use the trendy term “gaslighting” for the Big Con that is underway. Suffice it to say that you are being told, breathlessly, that Trump can win — that he’s suddenly taken a sizable lead in a poll pitting him against Biden. The news is so startling that the reliably pro-Democrat outlets trumpeting it — it’s a Washington Post-ABC News poll — could make you forget that we’re well over a year from such a match-up, and that the poll is thus meaningless.
Why would the New York Times and its woke–progressive, Trump-loathing comrades be serenading us with, “Trump Can Win”? Because that’s what they want us to think at this moment. They want to get us believing that Trump not only could but probably would beat Biden. Convincing us of that is the trigger for what they need right now: a 2016-style Trump juggernaut that rolls over Ron DeSantis and the rest of the GOP-primary field before the contest even starts.
At this early phase, they need Trump to start seeming inevitable as the Republican candidate. The Democrats are comfortable with that because they know it’s a long game that Trump can’t win. With the election a year-and-a-half away, Trump’s early-inning momentum is only a problem for the GOP; for Democrats, it’s an unpleasant-but-essential phase of the plan.
It is only when Trump is inevitable, when he has the Republican nomination locked down, that the media–Democrat barrage will start. And it will be a barrage like there has never been, against a candidate who already has no shot at even reaching, much less exceeding, his high-water mark of 46 percent of the vote — which itself would not be enough to win in November 2024.
We need to stop focusing on Biden’s current weaknesses. Biden is Biden — a now-senescent clown who, in his prime, couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag. The Democrats don’t want Biden, but they do want a Democratic administration and they’ll turn out in sufficient numbers to get one. Not record numbers, but numbers easily robust enough to beat Trump if that’s all they need to do.
My friends seem to think that, with a rematch of 2020 in the cards, if Biden is the same old Biden, Trump must be the same old Trump. You know: Write him down for 46 percent and, if the 2016 miracle can repeat itself thanks to Biden’s Hillary-esque weakness, eke out an Electoral College win.
If that’s where you’re at, you’re deluding yourself.
Trump is not the same old Trump. Yes, he is a candidate with no upside. That 46 percent — which he no longer has a prayer of reaching after the post-2020 election fraud and mayhem — is a hard ceiling. But it’s not like the floor is 45, or even, say, 42.
We don’t know how low Trump can go once Democrats fire the barrage of campaign messaging (most of it courtesy of Trump himself), strategically timed indictments, and ruinous civil proceedings — in particular, the massive civil-fraud case in New York, in which Trump took the Fifth 450 times in a deposition, and trial is scheduled to start on October 3 (thus extending into debate and primary season). Conservatively, we can estimate that Trump’s floor is somewhere under 40. If our country were not so deeply divided and tribally inclined, if there were not so much (well-deserved) contempt for the Bolshevik Left, I imagine Trump’s floor would be somewhere under 30 — i.e., down to the last of the MAGA diehards, of whom there will be gradually fewer over the next 18 months than their current uproar suggests.
But here’s what we can say with confidence: Whatever Trump’s polling strength seems to be right now, in spring 2023, it won’t be anything close to that by autumn 2024, not once the Left launches what’s coming if Republicans are daft enough to nominate him.
Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump: You’re never going to know what the bottom is, or if we’ve finally hit it.
Take this week, for example, as a jury in a federal civil trial in Manhattan deliberates over the allegation that the prospective nominee raped a woman in the mid Nineties — an accusation she sought to prove by calling as witnesses two other women who claim Trump sexually assaulted them, and by playing an infamous recording of Trump bragging about being sexually aggressive with women. I wrote this in the New York Post on Monday:
If Trump is found liable for committing a sexual assault and assessed heavy damages, it will be a political earthquake. Nothing like that has ever happened to a significant candidate for the presidency, let alone to a former president. No, Trump wouldn’t face imprisonment or even prosecution — the criminal statute of limitations long ago lapsed. But the damage a jury finding of liability could do to Trump’s candidacy could be devastating.
It’s no lock that Trump will be found liable. But it is a very real possibility — I’d even say, as the civil-preponderance standard puts it, that it’s more likely than not. Do you know what effect on a presidential candidacy a verdict of liability for sexual battery could have? I sure don’t — I only know that it wouldn’t be good, and that it could be really bad. Maybe worst of all, none of us can say with great confidence that he didn’t do what he’s accused of doing. That’s not the same as being convinced that he did it. But again, we’re not talking about convicting him; we’re talking about electing him to the nation’s and the world’s most consequential political office.
The country is not going to elect Trump, no way, no how. Institutionally, Republicans seem strangely cowed by his supporters. A strong majority of the country, though, is done with him. Permanently, irrevocably done. Will Republicans figure that out in time?