For Democrats, Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy announcement presents a dilemma. When they interfere in the 2024 Republican primary process as they have so effectively demonstrated the capacity for doing, will they work to stop Trump or stop potential candidate Ron DeSantis?
Stopping Trump seems like the course of action more consistent with the wrap-around narrative that spews from every institutional outlet. But there’s an even more tempting alternative. Why not help Trump defeat the up-and-coming Ron DeSantis? The oligarchical forces have severely wounded Trump and still have the get-Trump apparatus they have been building over the last six years. Democrats have reason for confidence, if not overconfidence. Their improved ballot-gathering techniques deflected the 2022 red wave after securing record ballots for candidate Biden in 2020. The raw power of the Democratic machine elected a senator with a severe mental handicap and a congressman whose death presented no obstacle to his reelection. Trump derangement and the relentless propaganda against Trump played an undeniable role in both elections.
DeSantis, in contrast, has already demonstrated the ability to reach the ears of people Democrats normally rely on to be in their coalition. Even the liberal stronghold of Miami-Dade county voted for DeSantis in the last election. DeSantis won after facing down the corporate woke agenda. He pushed back against the efforts to confuse public school children with a gender fluidity curriculum. He shrugged off the accusations of intolerance and phobia. That’s not what well-behaved Republican politicians do. They’re supposed to shrink in fear in the presence of the Left’s outrage. While the corporate/Left alliance can certainly spin up a new DeSantis derangement syndrome, essentially they would have to start over. The get-Trump infrastructure has already been built. Why abandon it by letting Trump fade away in the primary process?
The reaction to Trump, like the reaction to COVID, has proven 1,000 times more of a plague than the original problem ever could have been. Nobody will forget the immediate reaction to his last candidacy announcement speech that enraged liberals and establishment Republicans alike. Trump said what you could never say without provoking reflexive accusations of racism and xenophobia: that mass illegal immigration harmed working families by diluting bargaining power for wages and contributing to an environment of lawlessness. Whether you agree or not with Trump’s 2015 speech, it’s been impacting the direction of history ever since.
Anti-Trump reactionaries so often told us how they felt “triggered” by Trump’s words, as though rioters and anti-democratic resisters within the government were mere inanimate objects (like guns) who bear no moral responsibility for the discharge of their outrage. This is the argument Democrats increasingly make to support censorship of the Right. If your words make me angry, then my violence is your fault.
We forget that the media played a cynical game in 2016. Legacy media ushered Trump through the primary process by starving his many opponents of any serious coverage. We forget that in 2016, the Democrats and the media, who were caught coordinating political strategy, held back the infamous “Access Hollywood” audio recording until after Trump had secured the nomination. Nobody could survive a scandal like that, they assumed. It was a foolproof plan to elevate the Republican contender then-candidate Clinton felt most confident in opposing in the general election. If the “Access Hollywood” bombshell didn’t sink Trump, Clinton held the Russia Collusion Hoax in reserve, just in case.
Trump hatred has operated as a get-out-of-jail free card for the elites ever since. Fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried recently explained why so many of the rich and powerful signed up for the political armor the movement provided, admitting he feels “bad for those who get” harmed by “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right [political platitudes] . . . so everyone likes us.” FTX used the get-Trump mania to deflect all effective oversight as it perpetrated its schemes. It famously bragged, “on the balance sheet of FTX is ‘Trump lose.’” Trump hatred became a justification for the obvious double standard employed by the Justice Department. The Department of Justice literally knelt before BLM rioters while savagely punishing January 6 vandals and trespassers.
Biden has made it crystal clear that he has no intention of allowing Trump to contend for the White House. And Merrick Garland, easily the most politically corrupt attorney general in U.S. history, has already worked to weaken candidate Trump’s prospects. It’s what the Iranians and the Russians do before their own elections. Only candidates approved by the party in power are permitted to run doomed election campaigns. After the FBI raid on Trump’s private residence for laughably dubious justifications, Trump may have seen a quick announcement following the midterms as the best way to emphasize the obvious electoral motives of the Justice Department.
Garland, who can’t seem to find anything wrong with the Biden family’s cash-for-influence dealings with Ukraine and China, has now appointed a special counsel to harass Trump over presidential documents and an obviously sketchy theory that Trump somehow organized the January 6 incursion into the Capitol. In case you doubt whether the Biden Administration aims to use the Justice Department to stop Trump from mounting an electoral rematch of 2020, Biden admitted exactly that during a November 9 press conference.
So why wouldn’t the Democrats want Trump to gain the nomination for president in 2024? Their operatives in the Justice Department are poised to indict the former president for cooked up charges. Trump derangement has proven an effective motivator to generate huge counter-historical masses of ballots. Obedient NeverTrump Republicans maintain significant control over the Republican infrastructure. Under the banner of get-Trump, the Left has advanced on all fronts. Why stop the gravy train now?
I can already visualize the bumper sticker, “NeverTrumpers for Trump!” Don’t say the Democrats won’t do the opposite of what they say they want. They do it all the time.