A quick glance at the calendar this morning reveals that it’s May first, which many consider the no-going-back arrival of spring. With warmer weather comes heated arguments. It’s the natural way of things.
Of course the political season was kicked into full swing last week as president senile Joe Biden officially announced his reelection campaign in a video worthy of a delusional old coot who thinks he’s well on his way to “restoring the soul of America” and hopes to “finish the job” he began a couple years ago. Senile Joe consistently overestimates his appeal to the American public, there are a lot of voters out there who only care about what Biden and his ilk can do for them.
On the other side of the party spectrum, we’re waiting to see how far the candidates are willing to go to challenge the poll leader. It’s game-on in Republican land, time to get serious about who will go toe-to-toe with senile Joe. In a piece titled “The Real Reason Trump Might Win the Nomination”, longtime liberal commentator Jeff Greenfield wrote at Politico Magazine last week:
“If you’re looking for reasons why Republicans continue to embrace Donald Trump as their preferred presidential candidate — he has a 58-21 percent lead over Ron DeSantis in a Reuters/Ipsos post-indictment survey — you have a rich buffet of choices in front of you...
“Much of the Republican rank-and-file regards Donald Trump not as a candidate for president, but as the president. And parties do not depose their presidents...
“It’s entirely possible that one or two or three indictments — about matters more serious than hush money to a porn star — might change Republican minds. Perhaps so would a widespread campaign among GOP officials that a Trump nomination would doom the party to November defeat (though this would require Trump’s foes actually having the fortitude to mention his name when they are making that case). For now, however, many Republicans appear to see Donald Trump as not simply their voice or their champion, but their president as well.”
It's a novel theory, isn’t it? As a longtime political observer and tenured card-carrying member of the establishment media, Greenfield, like so many others of his craft, has been working overtime to explain why Donald Trump held such powerful sway over conservatives and Republicans in 2016 and continues to enjoy virtually inexplicable loyalty in 2023 as well.
Somewhat expectedly, Greenfield suggests Trump supporters are blind to the reality – that Trump isn’t president now – in favor of imagining the lifelong real estate developer and tabloid celebrity as the acting president who was forced out of his position by circumstance (COVID) and the dark forces of fate (mail-in balloting), so that currently he’s not-so-secretly calling the shots from undisclosed locations and his backers just follow along like well-trained sheep obeying their bombastic shepherd.
I think this is the type of hypothesis that comes to a person in a moment of perceived clarity and motivates him or her to shout “That’s it!” to the empty room. They then run to the computer and start typing. Or, it could be that Greenfield was facing a deadline on a column assignment to write something about Trump so as to draw eyeballs from the disinterested political occasional reader. Perhaps he thought of it when he was in the shower and couldn’t wait to towel off.
And, no, this does not describe me.
If anything, Trump’s supporters are too connected with reality. They see the former president having been constantly dragged through the mud (official and otherwise) for years and wouldn’t dream of separating themselves from him now, when the heat is the most intense and the stakes are the highest. Trump burst on the scene articulating the issues the grassroots cared about the most in a manner they appreciated – direct, and to the point. There hasn’t been a politician like Trump in, well, forever.
Watching Trump at one of his rallies is kind of like an out-of-body experience for a lot of folks. It’s not that he’s a mesmerizing cult-of-personality leader of the transfixed cult members, it’s more like an entertainer who commands attention because of his manner of performing. Trump articulates what’s in people’s hearts and they identify with it. It’s not as though they still envision him as the president, as Greenfield’s pet notion would have it.
The fact Trump meticulously kept his promises gives him the credibility any politician would need to command such loyalty. Simply put, if Trump says he’s going to do something, he does it. Trump didn’t accomplish much of what he set out to do after Inauguration Day in 2017, but it wasn’t due to lack of effort. The DC establishment and the Democrat opposition was a lot more formidable than Trump anticipated. As the undisputed leader of a business operation, Trump was used to getting everything he demanded from those around him.
Politics doesn’t work that way. Trump may have been the head of the Republican Party, but each representative or senator was essentially working for themselves – and many of them couldn’t care less about someone else’s constituents. Unfortunately, looking out for “Number One” is the way of life in the swamp. The Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans of the world certainly didn’t see Trump as the President. They had their own agendas.
The question now is whether Trump can maintain the fierce allegiance of the grassroots long enough to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Everything looks good for him at present, but there’s still a long way to go and Trump is pushing buttons that he’s never done before, gambling that the people will respond as they usually have to his always-moving-forward philosophies. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing, especially with his over-the-top criticisms of Gov. Ron DeSantis, which are really starting to get some folks angry, and for good reason.
I can’t speak to what’s in Trump’s heart, but he seems to be following a strategy of tossing everything at DeSantis now in hopes that one, the people will start questioning whether DeSantis is as great as most conservatives make him out to be, and two, to compel DeSantis to wonder whether it would be worth it to launch a campaign in the first place. It would be much easier to just sit on the sidelines and let Trump be Trump, wouldn’t it? We can only hope letting Trump be Trump doesn’t include barbs like his recent statement “The Real Ron DeSantis Playbook” which made the case that Florida wasn’t a desirable place to live – “misery and despair” – because of the governor’s high tax policies. Besides the fact that Trump was previously highly complimentary of DeSantis’s governance, the statement just reeks of bitterness and invective, for no real reason other than to try and gain a few percentage points of political favor from people who might like Gov. Ron.
Trump purposely chose to settle in Florida when his New York City home became unlivable, so to relentlessly bash The Sunshine State now looks ingenuine and spiteful. If Trump truly has enough good things to say about his third run for president, such nasty blather is wholly unnecessary.
Thanks largely to DeSantis’s efforts, Florida has morphed into a safe red state where losing a point or two likely won’t cost the eventual Republican nominee the state’s Electoral Votes on Election Day, but Trump isn’t winning any friends there. And he has enough enemies everywhere else to last ten lifetimes already.
Why is he doing this? It’s not because he still thinks he’s president, as Greenfield would argue. And this isn’t random or a mistake. Trump sees the way he utterly destroyed Ted Cruz in 2016 and believes he can employ a similar plan to level DeSantis and get away with it. Add the fact that Biden is for sure running for reelection and Trump probably calculates that Republicans will be repulsed enough by the idea of another four years of bumbling Joe to pull the lever for the bomb thrower, no matter how off-putting the thought might be.
But Ron DeSantis is no Ted Cruz. The Texas senator spoke truth to power and had an unassailable record as a congressional boat rocker, but he hadn’t yet garnered the national attention that DeSantis currently enjoys. DeSantis has done a fantastic job in Florida – and Trump even said so himself up until the presidential race business took over the dominant part of his brain.
Further, to beat up on DeSantis takes away some of Trump’s stature as a leader and a man worthy of entrusting the country to. It makes Trump look small, frankly, which would be nearly impossible for anyone else to do. So he’s doing it to himself.
I don’t know who’s advising Trump to act like this, but he can’t afford to lose the presidential race in May, 2023, just because he wants the GOP nomination so bad that he feels he must do everything in his power to win it. Bending the facts on Ron DeSantis is something the Democrats will do in the coming months.
There’s no reason nor justification for the way Donald Trump is handling things now.
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