Donald Trump stood before Republican National Committee donors in Nashville, Tennessee last week and responded to his critics’ claim that he had nothing new to offer the American people other than his grievances over the outcome of the 2020 election by outlining his new vision for the country’s future. He argued that his first-term successes qualify him for another chance to finish the dramatic transformation that he started as president nearly eight years ago. Trump also claimed that his influence had “saved” the Republican Party from “the establishment class.”
Trump told GOP donors that previously, the “Republicans were a party known for starting wars overseas, cutting Social Security and Medicare at home, and pushing mass amnesty for illegal aliens.” He declared that now that he is its leader, the “old Republican Party is gone, and it is never coming back.” Trump said that giving him another term as president would make the GOP an “unstoppable juggernaut that will dominate American politics for generations to come,” according to a transcript of his closed-door address in Nashville obtained by Politico.
Some of Trump’s critics speaking at the GOP donor’s retreat, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, decried Trump’s tendency to look back to criticize the previous presidential election rather than forward at the country’s current challenges. Kemp predicted that “Not a single swing voter in a single swing state will vote for our nominee if they choose to talk about the 2020 election being stolen.”
Pence said that “If 2022 taught us anything, it’s that candidates that were focused on the challenges facing American families did well. But candidates focused on the past, on litigating the last election, did not do well.”
But during his Nashville speech, Trump avoided the temptation to dwell on his past electoral grievances. He did call the 2020 election “rigged” and accused Democrats of mounting “election interference” campaign in 2024, but he did not linger on those complaints as he usually does.
Instead, Trump spent most of his speech touting his many accomplishments as president, including the appointment of three reliably conservative Supreme Court justices, and the movement of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Yerushalayim. He also described what he intends to do if elected president again. Without providing any details, he promised that he would find a way to end the war between Ukraine and Russia “shortly after” winning the presidential election. He also pledged to put an end to the illegal activities of the Mexican drug cartel networks at the southern border, “just as we destroyed the ISIS caliphate.”
During his hour-long speech, Trump promised to “totally obliterate the Deep State,” bureaucracy that controls Washington, and to order his Department of Justice to go after soft-on-crime local prosecutors who promote “Marxist” ideas and practice “racism-in-reverse.” He also pledged to sign an executive order cutting federal funding from schools that teach critical race theory and “inappropriate” moral content to young children, and to penalize schools and colleges that implement mask or vaccine requirements.
ADJUSTING TO NEW VOTING REALITIES
Trump also urged Republicans to reverse their previous opposition to the voting reforms that have been instituted by the Democrats nationwide, such as early voting and ballot harvesting, which Trump has blamed in part for his 2020 electoral loss.
“Our goal will be one-day voting with only paper ballots,” Trump declared. “But until that day comes, the Republican Party and the RNC (Republican National Committee) must compete using every lawful means to win. That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes, and Election Day votes. Where we can’t get rid of [vote] drop boxes, we need them in every church and veteran center. And until we can eliminate ballot harvesting, we must become masters at ballot harvesting,” Trump told the Nashville audience. “We need every vote we can get, whether it’s early or late,” he added.
Trump unveiled his new campaign approach less than 10 months before the first Republican primary events. At the same time, Trump’s campaign has been boosted by a highly sympathetic reaction by GOP supporters and campaign donors to the legally dubious 34-count felony indictment by a New York City grand jury, brought at the behest of liberal Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, regarding payments made on Trump’s behalf seven years by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who later pled guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The reaction has enabled Trump to further expand his already commanding lead over the rest of the GOP 2024 presidential field. In last week’s closely followed RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls, Trump had the support of 51.4% of Republicans, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had 24.7%. After that, Pence has 4.9%, Haley 3.9%, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 1.3%, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie 1.2%, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy 0.9%, South Carolina Governor Tim Scott 0.8%, and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin 0.5%.
STILL MOSTLY A TWO-MAN RACE
While Trump’s lead over the rest of the GOP field has been growing, DeSantis’ support is strong enough to still call it a two-man race, with DeSantis well-positioned to make his move should Trump’s candidacy stumble.
The indictment also inspired a surge in small-dollar donations to Trump’s campaign. Other potential or declared competitors for the 2024 GOP nomination who have been active in fundraising include Haley, Scott, and DeSantis, who has more than $85 million in leftover campaign funds from his 2022 gubernatorial re-election race.
The Trump campaign said that it had raised about $15 million in the two weeks after the indictment was handed down on March 30, nearly equivalent to all of the money that the campaign raised during the first quarter of 2023. The Trump campaign also said that nearly 25 percent of those recent contributions came from new donors.
The next major turning point in the GOP primary campaign will be the first of the candidate debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee in August. It will take place in Milwaukee, hosted by Fox News. Many are already looking forward to the interaction on the debate stage between Trump and DeSantis as the first direct test of the Florida governor’s ability to stand up under the withering criticism of his former political mentor.
TRUMP GAINING IN MATCHUPS WITH BIDEN
Trump’s hopes have also been buoyed by a number of recent national opinion polls showing him to be roughly even or slightly ahead of Joe Biden in a 2024 presidential election rematch. Last week’s RCP average of national polls showed Trump with an outright lead over Biden of 1.7 points, something which never happened during the runup to the 2020 presidential election.
The change in the poll standings appears to be mostly the result of growing voter dissatisfaction with President Biden’s performance since the same RCP poll average shows DeSantis beating Biden in a 2024 White House race by a nearly identical 1.6-point margin.
On the other hand, Trump’s main pollster, John McLaughlin told RCP that “In the short term, [the Manhattan DA’s indictment] is really helping us in the [GOP] primary.” McLaughlin rejects the theory of Trump’s opponents in the GOP establishment that most Republican voters would prefer a so-called Trump-lite candidate, someone like DeSantis who supports Trump’s populist policies but without Trump’s personal baggage and controversy. He says that his polling shows that conservatives who dominate the primaries already strongly favored Trump over the GOP alternative candidates, and if they needed additional motivation, they have now been angered by what they see as “a double standard of justice” being used against him by vengeful Democrats.
A BAD DAY FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Trump’s media enemies were disappointed that he was not subjected to the indignities of a “perp-walk” or the application of handcuffs when he appeared in a Manhattan court to answer the indictment. But the spectacle of his political enemies hauling a former U.S. president into court on trumped-up criminal charges was enough to make it a sad day for American democracy. Not since a police officer stopped President Ulysses S. Grant for speeding in his horse-drawn buggy in 1872 has a current or former president been arrested.
Trump flew to New York City from his Mar-a-Lago home to surrender and be fingerprinted before his arraignment in court, where he sat stone-faced between his lawyers with his hands clasped.
While Trump’s accusers claimed that the spectacle was necessary to prove that “nobody is above the law,” that claim has little credibility when you compare the kid-gloves treatment that Hillary Clinton received from the FBI in 2016, for equally serious offenses, to the way that Trump has been treated.
TRUMP BEING DENIED EQUAL TREATMENT UNDER THE LAW
Democrats would have us believe that simply because he is Donald Trump, they have the right to deny him the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America, and the same applies to Trump’s MAGA supporters and the majority bloc of conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Then-Secretary of State Clinton set up a private email server in her home to hide the dubious activities of the Clinton-family slush-fund charitable foundation. The server had 110 emails containing marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information. Eight of the email chains contained “top secret” information. Every one of those instances was a potential felony punishable with up to ten years in prison. Yet Clinton was unilaterally immunized against prosecution for those crimes by then-FBI Director James Comey, and allowed to go free without even having to pay a fine.
Similarly, DA Bragg wants us to believe that he has the right and duty to enforce federal election laws, which are not under his jurisdiction, against Trump for writing off a payment as legitimate “legal expenses.” Does that mean that Bragg is also prepared to prosecute Hillary Clinton for criminally directing her campaign to hire Christopher Steele through Fusion GPS to manufacture false Russia collusion accusations against Trump and peddle them to the FBI — and then cover up the payments as legitimate campaign “legal expenses?” Don’t hold your breath.
Bragg rejects the criticism that he is pressing for felony criminal charges against Trump for minor bookkeeping and paperwork offenses which would merit no more than a slap on the wrist and the payment of a fine if committed by any other businessman. Bragg claims that his investigation of Trump was strictly routine, the “bread and butter of our white-collar [prosecutorial] work.”
DEMOCRAT DOUBLE STANDARDS
But a review by the Albany Times-Union of New York State Court Administration cases tells a very different story. It indicates that the type of charges lodged against Trump for having his lawyer falsify business records to conceal payoffs almost never result in felony convictions in New York unless other, far more serious criminal offenses are also involved. In almost all such cases the result is a plea bargain in which the severity of the charge is reduced to a petty violation or misdemeanor, with no jail time required. In fact, because of New York State’s 2019 liberal cashless bail policies for most criminal offenses, Trump was not even required to post bail in order to go free while his next trial date was pending.
Unfortunately, the unequal administration of justice and the abuse of government power by Democrat elected officials and administrators against their conservative political opponents is not limited to Donald Trump. It has become standard Democrat operating procedure ever since the Obama administration turned a blind eye to discrimination by the Internal Revenue Service against conservative political action groups seeking tax exemptions, and allowed the FBI to launch a criminal investigation, based upon the flimsiest of evidence, against Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for alleged collusion with the Russians.
SOFT-ON-CRIME PROSECUTORS RESULT IN A VIOLENT CRIME WAVE
Equal protection under the law is also under assault by George Soros-supported liberal big-city prosecutors who have made the streets unsafe for ordinary citizens and given a license to shoplifters to steal with impunity by refusing to press charges against most of those arrested for serious crimes. Compare the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of the Russia collusion hoax to the lack of prosecutorial interest in President Biden’s connection to his family’s influence-peddling schemes. And contrast the tolerance of big city law enforcement officials of violent Black Lives Matter thug-protestors during the summer of 2020 riots with the dogged pursuit by the FBI of any Trump supporter, no matter how peaceful, who came anywhere near the Capitol building on January 6, and the refusal by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to enforce the federal statute making it illegal to for liberals to protest outside the homes of the conservative Supreme Court justices who struck down the Roe v. Wade decision last year.
All of this is further proof that liberal elected officials today, from the White House down, consider themselves to be bound only by those laws and judicial rulings which serve their own partisan interests. It is much more serious than just the application of a double standard. The flagrant violations of Trump’s legal rights by these politically motivated investigations are only the most blatant example of the coordinated liberal attack on the safeguards of due process of law in this country today when it is conservatives being accused.
WOKE INTOLERANCE FOR DISSENT AND FREE SPEECH
Even within the ranks of the Democrats themselves, no dissent in the name of freedom of speech can be tolerated. Those few free-thinking liberals who dare to speak out will be immediately attacked and their careers destroyed by the self-appointed agents of the cancel culture. All are required to accept without question the radical, anti-American propaganda of progressive activists in politics, media, entertainment, and academia, or risk being condemned as racist Trump MAGA supporters.
One of the primary goals of the leftist woke revolution is to delegitimize and dismantle American institutions and traditional moral and patriotic values. Instead of presenting America as Reagan’s ideal of the shining city on a hill, they depict America as an immoral colonial enterprise run by and for the benefit of white men who have exploited all minorities in this country through systemic racism, slavery, and discrimination. This is how they justify their shabby treatment of Trump himself for his total rejection of their corrupt, immoral “woke” value system.
According to RCP commentator J. Peter Zane, the cynicism of woke progressives is undermining the core values of American life, freedom, and democratic values, “A cynic might note that politicians have always done whatever they could to gain power. But their conduct has long been constrained by the American people, who have long believed in American institutions and American values.”
THE POLITICS OF WHITE GUILT
That is no longer true. Zane writes: “The criminal justice system is rigged, so why prosecute people (other than our political enemies) for most crimes?
“The education system is rigged, so why expect kids to study or behave themselves?
“The economic system is rigged, so why work hard?
“Other human beings are a bother, so why get married or have children?”
Ironically, those who are suffering the most from these woke policies are those liberal men and women who support them. Not only are they being taught to hate Trump and his fellow Republicans, but also the American society around them and ultimately themselves, for their own irredeemable racist self-guilt.
Trump’s next scheduled court appearance for the New York indictment is in December, with a trial possibly starting as early as January.
WEAK CASES AGAINST TRUMP
Meanwhile, Trump is also under investigation in Georgia by the Fulton County (Atlanta) district attorney’s office, based upon allegations that he illegally put excessive pressure on Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in a phone call to overturn Trump’s 11,780 vote loss there in the state’s 2020 presidential election. But in fact, a transcript of that phone call with Raffensperger confirms that Trump did not ask him to falsify the election results.
Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, also has two ongoing investigations, one into Trump’s mishandling of classified material and another surrounding Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building in Washington DC. Each case currently falls far short of the level of evidence needed to prove that Trump acted illegally. President Trump’s political comments to his audience outside the White House in January did not explicitly call for violence and fell under the free speech protections of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Also as president, Trump had unique legal rights to access and declassify government documents, and to maintain them in his possession, much more so than Joe Biden did as a former vice president.
Conservative legal experts, such as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, have been highly critical of all three investigations, noting that there has been very little if any clear and credible evidence that Trump’s actions in any of them rose to the level that would justify a serious criminal charge.
PAYMENTS ARE NOT A CRIME
Of the three, the allegations against Trump in the New York case are, by far, the most flawed. First of all, the alleged payments made on Trump’s behalf were not, in and of themselves, illegal. Such payments are commonly utilized in civil non-disclosure agreements. The alleged crime relates to the fact that Trump described his monthly installment repayments to his lawyer as legal expenses on his company’s books. The 34 counts in the indictment refer to 11 falsified invoices, 12 falsified general ledger entries, and 11 checks falsely recording the repayments as legal retainers. The indictment also refers to two other alleged repayments made on Trump’s behalf to silence other accusers threatening to create a public scandal a decade earlier.
Such instances of accounting fraud are normally prosecuted as misdemeanors subject only to a civil fine under New York State’s business laws, unless they can be connected to a related felony. Manhattan DA Bragg insists that there was such a felony, but refuses to divulge what it might have been. That part of the indictment is so vague and incomplete that it is impossible to determine exactly how Trump allegedly broke the law, and makes it impossible for Trump’s lawyers to mount an effective defense.
TRUMP’S ACCUSER REFUSES TO NAME HIS CRIME
That alone is sufficient grounds under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 200.50 of the New York Criminal Procedure Law which says that an indictment “must contain” a “plain and concise factual statement in each count which … asserts facts supporting every element of the offense charged and the defendant’s … commission thereof with sufficient precision to clearly apprise the defendant … of the conduct which is the subject of the accusation…”
Finally, there is a two-year statute of limitations on all of the alleged criminal activities cited in the Manhattan indictment, including the irregular re-payments Trump made to Cohen and their false bookkeeping entries, which took place at least five years ago.
For any one of these reasons, many conservative legal experts expect the indictment against Trump to be thrown out when the case finally comes to trial. If the case against Trump had been stronger, the federal Justice Department or the previous Manhattan DA, or the Federal Election Commission would have moved for an indictment years ago. The fact that they looked at the evidence and chose not to do so is further evidence that the case now being brought against Trump by DA Bragg is without legal merit, and politically motivated.
DEMOCRAT PROSECUTORS PRACTICING REVENGE POLITICS
However, despite its obvious legal flaws, Bragg’s indictment of Trump is a feather in his cap in the world of New York Democrat politics. Bragg has won the first-to-indict-Trump sweepstakes fulfilling his campaign promise to hold Trump “accountable.” It gives him an advantage in the eyes of liberal Trump-haters over New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who openly campaigned for that post in 2018 on a promise to pursue Trump more zealously than the other candidates for that office. Unlike Bragg, she was unable to come up with criminal charges against Trump personally that had any credibility Instead, James satisfied herself with prosecuting the Trump Organization for its questionable financial dealings, and pressuring Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, to plead guilty to 15 felony charges, in a failed effort to get Weisselberg to testify against Trump himself.
To highlight DA Bragg’s hypocrisy in going after Trump while ignoring the plight of New Yorkers who are now afraid to walk in the streets of Manhattan or ride the subways, Republican Congressman Jim Jordan convened the House Judiciary Committee Monday morning at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan — just around the block from Bragg’s office.
“In this country, justice is supposed to be blind, regardless of race, religion, or creed. However, here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics,” Jordan said. “For the district attorney justice isn’t blind; it’s about looking for opportunities to advance a political agenda, a radical political agenda.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been trying to differentiate himself from DeSantis in particular as well as his other opponents for the GOP nomination by accusing them of having supported the scaling back of Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to prevent the trust funds which support them from going bankrupt in the years ahead. Under current benefit policies, both trust funds are running at about a 20% annual deficit. Reserves for Medicare’s hospital-insurance fund are forecast to run out in 2031, while Social Security’s retirement trust fund is to run out in 2034.
TRUMP OPPOSED TO GOP MEDDLING WITH SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE
Trump is well-aware that Democrats have been accusing Republicans unjustly for years of trying to undermine the Social Security and Medicare systems under the guise of trying to rescue them from looming bankruptcy. He has therefore sought once again to align himself with the many working-class voters who are counting on the two entitlement programs to help support them during their retirement years and are suspicious of any proposals that would reduce their benefits.
Trump has said that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.’’ He also specifically criticized DeSantis, accusing him of “trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare,” based upon the fact that when he was a member of Congress, DeSantis voted for budget blueprints that would have raised the Social Security retirement age to 70 and changed Medicare into a system that would help seniors cover the cost of buying their own private health insurance.
TRUMP-DESANTIS AD WARS HAVE BEGUN
A Super PAC supporting Trump ran an ad last weekend which claimed that DeSantis “has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements.” DeSantis declined to respond to the ad, but in his more recent statements he has declared that “we’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.’’
A group supporting DeSantis ran a counter-ad that starts by reminding viewers that Trump is facing criminal charges, and then asks, “Why is he spending millions attacking the Republican governor of Florida?”
The ad then accuses Trump of repeating false claims by Democrats that DeSantis wants to cut Social Security, and then closes with an old clip of Trump suggesting that entitlement reform “at some point will be” on the table, at which point, “we will take a look at that.”
Meanwhile, two other potential GOP 2024 presidential candidates, Nikki Haley and former vice president Mike Pence, have proposed measures to contain the burgeoning costs of the two major entitlement programs. Haley supports raising the Social Security eligibility age for future generations, changing the formula for cost-of-living raises and limiting benefits for wealthier Americans, as well as expanding government support for private insurers to enable them to compete with traditional Medicare.
Pence says that he would like to enable Americans to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private retirement savings accounts, an idea that was originally proposed by then-President George W. Bush in 2004.
In his budget proposal for next year, President Biden has proposed a tax increase on the country’s highest earners whose proceeds would be used to extend the solvency of the Medicare trust fund. Meanwhile, GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has taken any cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits off the table as part of the package of spending reductions that House Republicans want in return for their agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling which must be enacted by Congress as soon as July to enable the government to continue borrowing money to pay its bills.
HOW TRUMP HAS TRANSFORMED THE GOP
Many establishment Republicans have been deeply disappointed by the resilience of Trump’s popularity with today’s national GOP voter base. They were hoping that they would hold Trump responsible for the loss of the 2020 presidential election, and the disappointing outcome of the 2022 midterms, yielding a 51-49 Democrat majority in the Senate and a very slim GOP majority in the House. The old guard of the GOP establishment was also uncomfortable with the fact that Trump’s populist campaign platform proved to be so effective that it transformed and expanded that GOP base to include large numbers of ethnic and working-class voters who have been alienated by the Democrat’s embrace of extreme leftist policies, while ignoring those voters’ needs and concerns.
If the GOP is to remain competitive in upcoming national elections, it will have to continue to embrace Trump’s populist political instincts which paved the way for his upset victory over Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016. Even though other conservative Republicans, such as Governor DeSantis, have adopted those positions, to this day nobody can sell them as effectively to that segment of the electorate than Trump himself.
TRUMP IS THE OPPONENT DEMOCRATS LOVE TO HATE
There is another, very ironic factor at work that has been prolonging Trump’s political popularity despite his electoral defeats: the need of the Democrats and Trump’s bitter enemies in the mainstream media for a suitably evil villain to attack. Trump and his allegedly “racist” supporters continue to serve as the ideal scapegoats for the many failures of the Biden administration which have left this country in crisis on so many fronts, from rampant inflation, to chaos along the Southern border, to renewed energy dependence on OPEC, to a nationwide explosion in violent crime, to the catastrophic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, to declining influence with America’s traditional allies around the world, such as Saudi Arabia, to an avoidable proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. The list goes on, but whenever the Biden administration, now in office for more than two years, is asked for an explanation of what went wrong, their answer is always the same: “Don’t blame us. This is all Trump’s fault.”
After having spent the last seven years depicting Trump as epitomizing all that has gone wrong with America, the Democrats are loath to give him up as their arch-villain and ready-made excuse for their own failures. The anti-Trump mainstream media, especially the cable news networks, CNN and MSNBC, have been even more dependent on Trump to attract their audience and drive up their advertising rates. In the year leading up to his election in 2016, Trump stories consumed $5 billion worth of free network air time. Using his skills and experience as a network media professional, he was able to dominate the daily news cycles even though, toward the end, almost all of this free news coverage was negative.
To this day, Donald Trump loves to court media controversy because he believes that where his self-made combative image is concerned, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Even though they would be loathe to admit it, Trump’s enemies in the mainstream media have also profited greatly from his notoriety. He was the evil villain that they loved to condemn at every opportunity. Throughout his four years in the White House, viciously anti-Trump news stories and rumor-mongering were highly profitable ratings-gold for CNN and MSNBC, and earned Pulitzer Prizes for the New York Times and the Washington Post. When Biden took office, those ratings fell and only revived when Trump was again in the spotlight, in the show-trial hearings that the Democrats conducted on the January 6 riot, during the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home looking for classified documents, and most recently with Trump’s appearance to answer a criminal indictment in a Manhattan court.
SETTING UP A 2024 BIDEN-TRUMP REMATCH
As the media pounds the drums for a 2024 rematch between the aged and faltering Joe Biden and the ever-popular Trump arch-villain, there is a growing sense that a repeat of the 2020 election is inevitable. Democrats have been running against Trump for so long that many of them have no idea what they would do if DeSantis or another popular conservative Republican running on Trump’s successful policy agenda would win the nomination. At this point, how could they deny Biden the nomination, or admit that he is probably no longer physically or mentally fit to run a vigorous national presidential campaign next year, let alone govern the country for another four years after that?
Biden lucked out in the 2020 election because the Covid pandemic relieved him of the obligation to run a traditional, vigorous nationwide presidential campaign. He had the luxury of being able to hide out in the basement of his Delaware home, avoiding the rigors and potential embarrassments of the campaign trail, while the hostile mainstream media was mercilessly critical and dismissive of Trump’s policies at every opportunity. It is not at all clear that Biden and his supporters will be able to get away with the same tactics in 2024.
DEMOCRATS LACK AN ALTERNATIVE TO REPLACE BIDEN
But unfortunately for the Democrats, as deeply flawed as Biden is, at this point, they have no credible replacements for him in the 2024 election. Certainly not Vice President Kamala Harris, whose record has been a deep embarrassment, nor other prominent liberal Democrats, such as Biden’s incompetent Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose records in office have also been disappointments.
If for some reason Trump had to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, most Republican voters would be satisfied with any of at least half a dozen well-qualified substitute candidates, such as Governor DeSantis, former vice president Pence or Mike Pompeo, who would agree to run on Trump’s policy platform.
Pompeo announced last week that he had decided not to make a formal run for the 2024 GOP nomination, but he is still likely to be considered an attractive substitute should both Trump and DeSantis drop out of the race. His video statement on Twitter clearly left that possibility open, saying, “To those of you this announcement disappoints, my apologies, and to those of you it thrills, know that I’m only 59 and there remain many more opportunities for which the timing might be more fitting as presidential leadership becomes even more necessary.”
But Democrats currently do not have any such qualified replacement candidates waiting in the wings, someone who could emulate Biden’s ability to win acceptance from across the broad spectrum of racial and other special interest groups and the perpetually guilt-ridden liberal elitists who have redefined the Democrat party in their own radically progressive woke image.
DEMOCRATS FEAR A 2024 GOP TRUMP REPLACEMENT
Despite recent polls to the contrary, Biden and his supporters remain confident that he would beat Trump once again in any 2024 election rematch, but they are much less confident in Biden’s ability to compete with a different GOP presidential candidate who is one generation younger and running on a Trump-defined policy platform, but without Trump’s love of controversy and other obvious character flaws. That is why many Democrats are so eager to see Trump win the GOP 2024 nomination once again, so that they can be confident that Biden will beat him in the November general election.
But if Trump continues to look forward by laying out his new proposals, as he did in Nashville, and stops complaining about past electoral injustices, real or imagined, then Democrats stuck with Biden’s candidacy for a second term should be more careful about what they are wishing for.
