Three polls have come out in the last week showing Trump trailing DeSantis by double digits in the Republican 2024 primary, including a USA Today/Suffolk University poll that had Trump below the horizon. Two-thirds of Republicans don’t want Trump to run again, and DeSantis leads Trump 56% to 33%. Trump has never been in a political hole this deep, and he’s never shown any ability to come from behind. Trump is the consummate frontrunner who destroys people coming up on his tail.
All of it was on the table this morning on CNN, where Kaitlin Collins and Maggie Haberman tossed around what it all means. (I have shortened the discussion to throw out the irrelevant, transcript from Mediaite):
KAITLAN COLLINS: I feel like you can kind of hear the screams from Mar a Lago from here over those numbers when it comes to DeSantis.
MAGGIE HABERMAN: I don’t think any of this is making Donald Trump happy. And this is you know, the CNN poll looks like what we’ve seen with other polls. This is clearly a trend. Donald Trump’s calling card is strength and being seen as strong within his party.
True, and sometimes one shows strength through humility. Trump could lift himself up by admitting to some mistakes of late (“I should never have had dinner with Kanye or Fuentes, I abhor anti-Semitism, it was a big mistake”.) Stop laughing. I’m fully aware of the fact that Trump is physiologically incapable of admitting to mistakes. I’m just saying that in an alternate universe consisting of anti-matter there is a path out of this for Trump, literally reinventing himself.
Instead, he’s promising to become a combo Superman-Batman-Godzilla. That’s sure to work, Ace. Back to Haberman:
And when that starts to erode, it’s very hard for him to keep other people at bay. Now, he’s the only person who’s running right now. You wouldn’t know that, Kaitlan, because he’s done no events. I don’t, I can’t really remember the last time I saw somebody announce for president and do not literally nothing. I’m told it’s going to change next month, but we’ll see what happens. But this is obviously not where Trump wanted to be.
The left is way too hard on Haberman, who is a fantastic reporter. But on this one, she’s way off. Trump hasn’t “done anything” because the announcement that he is running had nothing to do with becoming President and everything to do with becoming a candidate. Trump believes that being a “2024 presidential candidate” makes it harder to indict him or gives him a ready excuse… “They can’t beat me so…” He doesn’t have time to go out and tour when he needs to bunker down in Mar-a-Lago with staff and attorneys and figure out how to handle the avalanche of lawsuits and likely indictments. He is far more concerned with possible guilty verdicts than actually becoming president.
Not that he wouldn’t erase DeSantis off the face of the earth if there was a way, and he could get away with it. Maybe that explains the superhero thing, the only one who can defeat the candidate created by God.
MAGGIE HABERMAN: … Elon Musk, of all people, is actually really hurting Donald Trump’s campaign because he’s made himself into the main character on Twitter… And if you have somebody doing Trumpian things on Twitter, why do you need Trump?
Now that rings true.
The only thing holding “MAGA” or “America First” together as a single block is a need to “own the libs.” Whoever “owns the libs” hardest and most often is, by definition, the leader of the MAGA movement. There is a case to be made that Elon Musk could be that guy.
There is no doubt that Trump is raging in a manner that would make anyone else’s head explode. It’s possible that Trump’s superpower is the ability to withstand a blood pressure above 400. But I suspect that Trump is most concerned about the fact that he’s weak in every way, none more so than his exposure to indictments that one expected before Christmas but perhaps will happen after the turn of the calendar.
He isn’t “running for president” yet. He is running for his life, and the poll numbers show he’s taken some hits and will make it that much harder. He was counting on being able to intimidate DOJ by calling out an army… which may no longer exist.
Rage is one of the few things Trump’s good at, and I’d imagine this week it’s at epic levels. I don’t feel sorry for the staff that has to put up with him, or his attorney’s either. They made the Faustian bargain to take his money to serve him knowing just WTF he was, and that he will toss anyone including wannabe Princess Ivanka under the bus in the blink of an eye. Or maybe make them suffer (remember former AG Jeff Sessions?) for a while first. Every room he’s in down there is subject to sudden hurricane level damage during his eruptions. The local Serve Pro (motto: “Like it never happened!”) is probably getting rich beyond their wildest dreams these days cleaning up all the messes.
Interesting poll haberman came up with. Dominico Montenaro put out some poll numbers that while looking at percentages of folks wanting the idiots in congress to work together, also looked at potential prez candidates. For the ‘pubes, while death sentence is nipping at his heels, trump holds a slight lead. President Biden holds a lead over potential dem candidates. Kind of curious where haberman got her info-it’s often pulled out of her ass though so there’s that…
One poll was USA Today/Suffolk. One I think was CNN, and I’ll look up the other. I think Haberman is a pretty good down the middle reporter but reasonable people can disagree.