I must say, this latest article by Andrew McCarthy in National Review is quite the head spinner. Supposedly the Democrats are running the narrative for both parties, their own and the Republicans. McCarthy acknowledges that the 2024 version of Donald Trump is ballot box poison and he can’t support him anymore — but he blames the fact that Trump is the presumptive nominee on a Democratic plot. According to McCarthy, Trump is in the race for the nomination because Democrats want him there and have put him there via the good offices of something called the ‘media-Democratic complex.’ Whether that’s the name of a building, a consortium of strategists, whatever, I have no idea.
The Democrats I read are not only not advocating for Donald Trump to get nominated again, they are gobsmacked and appalled that the conversation is even going in that direction. But what is refreshing about this piece is that the author is point blank, cock sure, dead certain that Trump can’t possibly win and that is music to my ears. Come and explore this nirvana with me.
What I want to talk about is the defect in the Wall Street Journal polling that shows Trump ahead of DeSantis by 13 points among likely GOP primary voters, even though those Republicans give DeSantis higher marks than Trump on favorability (84–78), on the likelihood of his ultimately beating Biden (41–31), and on his presidential temperament (48–28). Indeed, when the lens is widened to include all registered voters in the survey (i.e., not just Republicans), the same poll has the governor leading President Biden by three points, while Trump trails Biden by the same margin.
I believe we will remember this poll as Trump’s high-water mark. That should be a hint. What the poll fails to convey is that there is no potential of upward climb for the universally known former president. Donald Trump cannot win a national election.
It is in the interests of the media–Democratic complex to obscure this fact for now because Democrats desperately want Trump to be the Republican nominee. But the question for every Republican is not “Trump or DeSantis?” Nor is it, “How would you vote in a matchup between Trump and Biden?” It is: “Regardless of whether you would vote for Trump in a matchup with the Democratic nominee (likely Biden), do you believe Trump could beat the Democratic nominee in a national election in which the vast majority of voters will not be Republicans?” […]
No, I am not playing along. At this point, I concede only that we cannot say with certainty who will be elected president in November 2024 — or even who the nominee will be for either party. That said, I am as certain as I am writing this that Donald Trump will never again be elected president of these United States.
I love that conclusion. Reading those words gives me a dopamine high. And frankly, I believe them to be true. The reason that I post pieces on Trump’s 1-in-4 chance of being elected is because it would be gross negligence on the part of this site to not look at every conceivable angle of the upcoming race and game out every possible scenario. Only forewarned is forearmed and remember, vigilance is the price of liberty. We need to look at everything that’s out there.
What is intriguing here is that McCarthy voted for Trump twice and he overlooks Trump’s gross incompetence, rationalizing that his “Republican subordinates” provided “solid governance” the four years he was in the White House. But the events of post-election day 2020, leading up to January 6, were the bridge too far for McCarthy. Nice to know that some people have standards. The rest of us saw January 6 long before it happened. Michael Cohen predicted it.
I can’t do that anymore. I believe Trump should have been impeached on an array of high crimes and misdemeanors in 2021 (not just the ill-conceived, politicized “incitement of insurrection” article pushed through by House Democrats), and then convicted by the Senate and thus disqualified from future public office. I have to answer for having rationalized Trump’s unfitness for office, to the extent that his post-2020-election enormities were merely a more blatant demonstration of that unfitness, which was obvious all along (and that other commentators were savaged for having the temerity to notice).
McCarthy is right about one thing, and that is that Trump riding this stolen election fantasy any farther is the train to oblivion. It’s not just McCarthy’s opinion, a recent RNC paper which dissected the 2022 midterm election said the very same thing.
Trump’s “stop the steal” hooey based on voting-fraud claims was laughable (as his lawyers demonstrated by folding every time a judge invited them to provide evidence). Maddeningly, the stolen-election hoax persists in GOP circles, refined into a more respectable theory: Trump was cheated because media-Democratic chicanery combined with the dubious lifting of election-integrity safeguards must have had some effect.
Even though Trump lost the popular vote by a whopping 7 million and the electoral vote by 76 (i.e., by slightly more than the 74-vote margin he described as a “landslide” when he was on the winning end in 2016), his champions insist that this “some effect” need only have been marginal to swing the election: just enough to shift 44,000 votes from Biden to Trump in three battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
This, the fantasy goes, would have knotted the Electoral College vote at 269; under the Twelfth Amendment, the election would then have been decided in the House, where the GOP held a 26–24 edge in state delegations. (No point interrupting this pleasant hallucination to observe that Wyoming’s vote would have been decided by anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney, then the state’s only representative. Had there been a 25–25 tie in the House, the likelihood is that Kamala Harris would have become president under the Twentieth Amendment, though the mind reels at the possibilities.)
This is desperation: from the GOP standpoint, a delusional depiction of a certain 2024 loser as not only a potential winner but as a sympathetic one who is somehow owed the second term he didn’t get in 2020.
The stolen election fantasy needs to be abandoned, agreed, but I don’t see how that is possible. Trump touts it at every public gathering. That is his downfall, according to McCarthy, who doesn’t want it to be the GOP’s downfall — anymore. It already cost them the Senate majority and gave them a thin, ungovernable majority in the House.
This has nothing to do with whether you thought Trump was a good or bad president. It is about recognizing — now, before it’s too late — that he will never be president again.
In what for him was the best of times, solid majorities of Americans voted against Trump. But now, the unimpressive 46 percent he got against Clinton, and the even less impressive less-than-47 percent he got as an incumbent against Biden, are unattainable. Mind you, even if he could attain them, he’d still lose.
Democratic and independent opposition to Trump has intensified since the Capitol riot. On the Republican side, millions who held their noses and gave him a chance as an unknown quantity against Clinton, and then did it again for the sake of having a Republican administration instead of a Biden administration, will never do it again.
I pray to God that’s true. What I see is the GOP being totally gutless and letting the man walk away with the nomination yet again. Nobody is standing up to him.
Here’s McCarthy’s conspiracy theory about what Democrats want.
We’re now seeing polls — such as the Wall Street Journal one — that show Trump in striking distance of Biden. Some even have him tied or slightly ahead. Understand: For the moment, that’s how Democrats want you to see it. They want Republicans and conservatives to believe he’s got a shot, to be gulled into nominating him. Then, once he gets the nomination, and it’s too late for Republicans to reconsider, Democrats and the media will hit him with everything they’ve got: all of the January 6 ammo, all of his 2020 denialism, his lunatic tweets and “Truths,” his attacks on popular Republicans, his praise for Democrats and dictators, and any possible indictments against him that they’ve been holding back on — long narrative indictments that lay out, in chapter and verse, felonies far more serious than what Alvin Bragg has brought and much tougher to slough off as weaponized law enforcement.
Again, the Democrats that I read are stunned that the GOP is so gutless that they’re allowing Trump and MAGA to continue to plow the party under. Where McCarthy gets his information about a Democratic plot to get Trump nominated is something I wish he would disclose to the rest of us.
Here’s McCarthy’s conclusion — which, curiously, is the same one as the New York Post editorial board reached a few months ago, that Trump is unelectable.
The point is not how Trump is polling today against DeSantis and Biden. It is that he cannot win a national election. That is why Democrats are working so hard to lure Republicans into nominating him. The question is not how you personally feel about Trump, or what you think about the accomplishments of his presidency. The question is whether you are content to have Democrats unilaterally rule Washington. That’s what a Trump nomination would guarantee.
If and when Trump lands on the top of the GOP ticket, it will be the GOP’s doing. Not ours. I’m fascinating by this complete abrogation of all responsibility. And I’m elated by McCarthy’s conclusion that Trump cannot possibly win. From his lips to God’s ears.
Never underestimate those that are willing to trade democracy for fascism.
I saw a poll on MSNBC this morning that had Tfg with an overwhelming amount of R favorability. I’m seriously amazed that so many of them could think anything favorable about the guy. Fewer of them want him to be elected again but they’ll vote for him anyway because we Dems are so “woke”.
It does seem consistent with the view that everything that turns out badly is the fault of democrats and/or the media. Still, I find it humorous that he believes we are somehow engineering Trump’s nomination.
After everyone laughed at Hilary for her ‘vast right wing conspiracy’ comments, we then found out, ( and are still finding out!), how true they were. So now they’ve been caught out, the right wing have decided that they can get away now with saying it about the Democrats. It’s pure projection on their part.
It’s actually still stacked the way Hilary said, we don’t have mainstream media, we have billionaire owned and steered media. Their bias against the Democrats has led us to a time where, almost unbelievably, they still try to ‘both sides’ a situation with actual fascism on one side, versus everyone else on the other. Worse, we are expected to take seriously their choice of a charismatic criminal moron as a leader, because they do.
And now they’re trying to blame Dimwit Donny on us?
Pure projection.
“Where McCarthy gets his information about a Democratic plot to get Trump nominated is something I wish he would disclose to the rest of us.”
Well, if McCarthy answered honestly with “pulled from my a$$,” absolutely no one would take him seriously. (He might score some points for his honesty but what credibility he might have would be shot all to Hell.)
Mccarthy is on a permanent lsd trip and wouldn’t recognize reality if it came up and bit him in his incompetent ass.
One thing that ALL republiCLOWNS have in common is that they have never had real jobs.
Take that dumbass Grassley for example.
Who would hire a dumb f4ck like that for anything more complicated than slopping hogs?