Seven weeks and five days ago, Donald Trump announced he was running for president. He evidently believed that to be a pronouncement on par with the Gettysburg Address, a bit of political rhetoric that would live on in the minds of Americans for decades and possibly even be memorized by school children in the years to come.
Maybe by some homeschooled MAGAs. Everybody else has forgotten the speech was even made. In fact, on that very night CNN and Fox News decided to cut away after 55 minutes because they didn’t know how long Trump could go on complaining and repeating himself and they didn’t want to find out.
The situation has not improved since then, either. Vanity Fair:
Trump’s virtually invisible campaign––he has yet to hold a rally and rarely leaves Mar-a-Lago––is a topic of much debate and increasing concern among his allies. In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen Republicans close to Trump, and the consensus is that his campaign is a “mess,” to borrow a preferred Trump epithet. “He is in a weird bunker and doesn’t want to go anywhere.
Even the inner circle is worried he’s getting no traction at all,” a former Trump administration official said. “Literally nothing. It’s like it’s not even happening,” a prominent Trumpworld figure said when I asked what he was hearing about the campaign. “The early ’22 announcement was a historic flop. Talk about how not to create momentum,” a top GOP strategist said.
There are several theories about why Trump’s campaign has been so underwhelming out of the gate. “Money is a real issue,” the former administration official said. Already, prominent GOP mega-donors, including billionaires Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman, have said they aren’t supporting Trump’s 2024 run.
As a presidential candidate, Trump isn’t allowed to tap into the $100 million war chest his various super PACs have amassed since he left the White House, meaning he either has to raise the money himself or spend his own. “A rally is expensive. They cost a half million dollars easily,” a veteran of Trump’s 2016 campaign told me. Trump’s 2024 campaign has yet to file a fundraising report with the Federal Election Commission, but two sources close to Trump told me the money spigot isn’t flowing like it used to.
Perhaps that’s why Trump recently promoted a widely mocked NFT collection of Trump superhero trading cards. “That was the most pathetic thing,” the former official said.
Trump’s got the digital trading cards and we hear Junior is selling Bibles, We The People Bibles, to be precise.
And what about a vice president? You’ve heard all the rumors, Marge Greene is supposedly in first place, although Kari Lake is salivating, but don’t count out Kristy Noem altogether — unless, unless they see the handwriting on the wall and realize the futility of a run. (Noem and Greene might, Lake is a lost cause.) In which case, maybe Trump could and should, even, return to good old stalwart Mike Pence.
Think about it, now. Pence is planning to run against Trump but do you think for a moment that Pence wouldn’t delight in the good old days, when he and Trump were the MAGA gods? Pence is delusional enough to believe, along with Trump, that it’s possible to rerun 2016 and have the same result.
I don’t know if Trump would seriously consider it, but when it comes to Trump we’ve all learned that the first rule is that there are no rules. And Pence would find a way to rationalize all so that he could do it.
It’s not that far fetched. In the months ahead you’re going to hear a great many strange combinations for the GOP ticket proposed and this one, in fact, is far from the strangest.
I think part of the reason traitor tot announced, was to try and get the legal issues against him to stop. Obviously that’s not having any effect. Combine that with the lack of funds for rallies and it appears to be going nowhere.
He still remains the leader of a nazi cult.
Trump has always had a damning lack of intelligence … He cannot visualize the absurdity of his actions … The Truth never occurs to him, the lack of a steering hand on his bizarre actions when the Pandemic struck, at those times, he was hiding support for the frontline Doctors and Nurses, who went to their horrible deaths, in spite of his song and dance about how well things would go, “It will just go away by itself in 15 days”, infantile drivel from the dumbest man in the world … And, he had access to the codes to incinerate Mother Earth !!
And, as we have seen over the last 4 years of his idiot supreme joke of an office holder, it is a challenge to call up any worse things he did, then the 1-million+ citizens that have died because of Trump’s stupidity …
The attack on our Capitol was just a game to his lizard mind, watching TV while more people died or were seriously injured, just pieces of plastic on the gameboard, to be sent to kill and maim at will … somebody wrote some where, that Trump has amassed 500. million in booster funds, some unknown sources of cash set asides hidden, but like the note above, he cannot use those funds in his own pocket …
Perhaps SOME of that money has already been made available to Trump’s defense funding, but it is beginning to look like Trump is finding spiderweb-filed corners of the Mar-o-golf to hide in until he HAS to go to Court … That seems to be coming shortly as the States are now going after him full blast, not waiting for the Feds to invite him to the BIG ONE …