It’s only midsummer of 2023 but the fact that Donald Trump jumpstarted the entire campaign process early in a misguided attempt to chase away his legal headaches has put a bizarre twist on things. Nothing is proceeding like “normal” meaning in a pre-Trump world.Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence jumped into the campaign a short while ago, followed by Chris Christie, and all of those three are eclipsing Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramiswamy, who are polling at 1% to 3%.
Pence is polling in single digits and DeSantis is dropping in the polls. Ergo, it looks like Trump is going to take the GOP nomination. Again. Michael Tomasky has some solid insights into what a third Trump run is going to look like.
This is the kind of topic about which liberals generally don’t want good news. They want to worry. They assign to their right-wing foes a strength and formidability that they never see on their own side (I’m often as guilty of this as anybody, I confess). They lack faith in the common sense and decency of the average voter. They want, on some level, to think, or at least to fear, that disaster is around the corner.
I rise today to fight that tendency. Yes, it’s early. Yeah, it’s premature. But I’m going to say: The signs I see so far? They suggest to me that Donald Trump (a) is going to win the GOP nomination and (b) stands a very good chance of leading his party to an epic wipeout next November.
This makes a lot of sense. The GOP has a choice now to either let Trump take the helm and live with the consequences, or it has been suggested that Brian Kemp or Glenn Youngkin might answer the call of duty at some point. This is entirely speculative. Both Kemp and Youngkin may not want to ride into battle with Trump, especially as he becomes progressively more unstable. They may opt to wait for 2028, which is presumably a post-Trump era, and see how the political winds blow at that time.
Tomasky continues:
To understand this, you have to open your eyes to things that can be hard to see as they unfold in real time. But they’re there, and they tell us this: Trump is much more extreme, much more unhinged, much more exposed than he was in 2016. Pay attention to what you see.
The most recent example, perhaps small, but I think nevertheless telling, consists of his recent “truths” on Truth Social. He posted Barack Obama’s current address. Think about that. That’s an invitation to someone to go try to shoot him. And sure enough, someone did. Shortly after Trump’s post, Taylor Taranto showed up with a machete, two guns, and 400 rounds of ammunition. He appears to have reposted Trump’s post. He was arrested, and Obama’s block in D.C. is of course heavily protected, but none of that changes the fact that a former president of the United States pretty obviously was egging his supporters to commit violence against another former president.
Friday morning came the related news that federal prosecutors working on the classified documents case against Trump are facing threats from MAGA-heads. They’re posting the names of federal prosecutors online. These people’s blocks are not under heavy Secret Service protection. What if one of them gets murdered? And what are the odds, given the way Trump has riled these people up, that if he’s convicted before Election Day, there won’t be violence, at least of the generalized sort and at worst of the targeted-execution variety? […]
I wrote in our June cover story that Trump’s toxic rhetoric far exceeded where he was going in 2016. If you can’t see the difference between “Drain the swamp” (2016, and something any right-populist could say) and “I am your revenge” (the words of a megalomaniacal authoritarian demagogue), then you need some history lessons. I think here also of the Trump we saw in that infamous CNN town hall. He was totally out of control. I kept watching that and thinking: Is there any chance, I mean any chance, that the centrist soccer mom from the Milwaukee suburbs who took a flier on him in 2016 against Hillary Clinton is going to want to see this deranged, blubbering, vain peacock back in the White House?
That is pretty much the bottom line, that the progression from “drain the swamp” to “I am your revenge” indicates severe degeneration. Back in 2016 Trump was a sloganeer. He got millions of dollars in free advertising by piling outrage upon outrage and presenting people with something wild that they had never seen in politics before.
He might have been a gadfly then, but now he’s gangrenous. He’s a walking file cabinet full of legal cases. The day does not go by except that something new breaks in one of his cases. A former aide testifies, an analyst finds a new angle in a piece of evidence or testimony, or makes a prediction about a new legal matter right there on the horizon.
This is severely abnormal. Because it’s a case of first impression, nobody seems to quite know what to do. And the GOP, as a whole, is terrified of Trump.
I think Tomasky is right. I think Trump may indeed get the nomination again, and lead his party over the cliff.
If I were a Republican, I’d be scared shitless about what Trump might do to my party next year. The presidential election won’t be a runaway, because that isn’t how it works anymore. But I’d be very worried that Trump loses all the states he lost in 2020—and by a little more than he lost them the last time—plus maybe North Carolina, which would bump Biden’s Electoral College margin up to 319–219, which in a headline sounds like a rout. And the somewhat higher margins in Arizona, Georgia, et al. would foreclose any serious attempt to cry foul. Swing voters just wouldn’t buy it.
And yes, there’s the “Biden is old” mantra but Trump and Biden are almost the same age. So the only person(s) likely to benefit from the Biden is old card would be somebody like DeSantis or Pence. Unless something amazing happens, neither one of them is going to get within striking distance of Trump, let alone defeat him. Pence has a lot of baggage and DeSantis is not increasing his reach. Quite the contrary, the more voters outside of Florida get to know him, the lower his polls go. Right now his charming wife is supposed to be the one bailing him out and saving his bacon. Maybe she should be the one running for president?
And there’s another thing: if anybody wants to check on Old Uncle Joe’s track record so far, it’s damned impressive: To wit, 29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners. This is wonderful news. If we didn’t live in such a divided country, split asunder by right-wing media and culture war, Biden’s approval ratings would be 60%.
Heather Cox Richardson noted that Jennifer Rubin said:
As reporters focused on the horse-race aspect of politics and how voters “felt” about issues, she noted, “[w]e have seen far too little coverage of the economic transformation in little towns, rural areas and aging metro centers brought about by new investment in plants, infrastructure projects and green energy related to the Chips Act.”
Richardson further noted,
In the past two years, according to a recent working paper by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, Biden’s policies have wiped out a quarter of the inequality built in the previous forty. And at the same time that Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people, the extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.
Let us hope and pray that somehow in the din of negative rhetoric, these facts manage to bleed through.
Trump is a lot crazier than he was in 2016 and in 2020. He’s also under siege legally. I can only assume that he’s going to continue to self implode. If the Republicans can’t see that and do a course correction, then they deserve what’s going to happen to them.
Let the games begin.
Forget Trump as he changes from orange to gangrenous green, this is the real news the MSM, let alone the RWNJ media aren’t covering.
“Biden’s resurrection of the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1980 is illustrating that the economic problems in the country were the fault of Republican policies rather than of marginalized people, the extremism of those angry Republican footsoldiers is revealing that they are not the centrist Americans they have claimed to be.”
Biden and his Democratic Party are doing more to actually help Americans with practical policies that work, with easily measurable results than any of the ‘culture wars spin’ or made up ‘controversies’ of the republicans.
So why do the ‘controversies’, made up as they are, get more publicity than actual improvements in everyone’s lives brought on by policy that is working?
Luckily for the Democrats, Trump’s perfidies are even more newsworthy, the light they shine on the other side is the best advertising the Democrats can get.
I agree. I feel bad for our wonderful President Biden. He’s doing a stellar job. People who know what’s going on know that, but he doesn’t get the credit that he deserves.
And of course neither did Hillary or Obama. It’s not like it’s anything new.
Agree with the lemming scenario. trump is going over the cliff with his supporters. Let’s hope Biden stays healthy and can manage another campaign. I don’t see any Democrats talking about Plan B, but I’m sure they have one.
I think Biden is going to be fine. He takes care of himself. He’s thin, eats right, exercises, and doesn’t have to take two hours to do his hair and makeup before he walks into the Oval Office, like Cantaloupe Caligula did. He’s a class act.
I always was in Biden’s corner, even back in 2017. At that time a lot of Democrats were naysaying him but I honestly believed he could return us to normalcy (somewhat) and his background was always impressive. Thank God James Clyburn was a realist and got the party to wake up and row the canoe the same direction.
I’m happy with the government we’ve got. I just pray it continues. And watching Biden and Trump debate — again — is going to be a howler. When Biden presents the facts of his achievements and Trump starts talking about witch hunts, or chocolate bars or Swahili dances, whatever insanity he comes up with, it will be a debate for the ages.
Well after you people went and let Donnie get elected I did something I had no intention of doing. I went out and registered to vote. Yep was 59 at the time and it was just to much. I have followed the clown for years. He’s been openly laundering money for just about anyone that asks. He was involved in other stuff also. He had that Miss Teen pageant and he was constantly in the dressing room watching the girls change. That lady suing him wasn’t the only one he raped. And as Melody she was probably just about to give in till that Lake twit moved into maralado. Yeah she probably had a shot at the VP but I think you are right. Elise Stefanik has a good shot at VP no matter who runs. Because the next republican presidential candidate is going to pick a woman. Which comes down to the republicans way of thinking that a woman is alright in certain jobs mainly raising kids and cooking. Oh what a wonderful world we live in. As long as we can keep Trump out of the White House and hopefully put his lardass in jail.
I’m glad to see you here, Chris. Welcome.
Biden will be fine. Maybe Biden could utilise the instrumental ‘Wipeout’ when needed to rattle Trump just that little bit more. Or possibly the Lincoln Project could go in collaboration with Biden. Here it is:
I had hopes of playing this very song on Election Night 2016. That night I turned into a different person. I realized that the America I had grown up in wasn’t the America I was living in. Thank God in 2020 a lot of people came to their senses.
“This is the kind of topic about which liberals generally don’t want good news. They want to worry. They assign to their right-wing foes a strength and formidability that they never see on their own side (I’m often as guilty of this as anybody, I confess). They lack faith in the common sense and decency of the average voter. They want, on some level, to think, or at least to fear, that disaster is around the corner.”
There is a VERY good reason to “think, or at least to fear, that disaster is around the corner,” Mr Tomaskey, and you offered the reason in the very preceding sentence: “They lack faith in the common sense and decency of the average voter.”
If the “average voter” TRULY had any “common sense and decency,” we wouldn’t have had that 4-year nightmare of Trump in the White House in the first place.
“Oh, I can’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s so toxic and the Republicans in Congress will block her every attempt to govern.”
“Oh, Trump won’t be so bad. He just acts that way but if he’s actually elected, the Republicans in Congress will rein him in and make him understand how the government really works.”
“I don’t like Hillary but I’m not wild about Trump either so I’ll vote for someone else.”
Even after witnessing Mitch McConnell’s despicable handling of an empty SCOTUS seat in 2016 (“We should let the voters have some say so we won’t hold any hearings until after the election”–even though Scalia died in February and the election was 9 months away), you really think we had “average voters” with any kind of “common sense and decency?”
Sorry, Mr Tomaskey, but it seems to me like you’re no better than all the pundits and pollsters who were “absolutely sure” that Hillary would win in a blowout in 2016. You may think you’ve got a handle on things, but you do not. If there really was this mass of “average voters” with “common sense and decency,” Ron DeSantis would be running as FORMER GOVERNOR Ron DeSantis. And state house after state house would’ve turned blue last year and there wouldn’t have even been any consideration of a “red wave” as far as the US Congress was concerned (in fact, the Dems would’ve won all 12 House seats the GOP won by less than 3%–the 6 that flipped and the 6 that stayed in the GOP). But we didn’t get that.
Thank you, Joseph. You exhibit the kind of clarity necessary that Dems need to wake up, create powerful messages about the good Dems have done and the evil Repubs have done, and spread those messages far and wide – including deep into ruby red states.
Good candidates + good messaging + good ground game = generations of winning.