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Will the Republican Party nominate Donald Trump in the 2024 elections? |
Trump’s crash and burn political career
has now effectively come to an end, and the former president will be lucky to
avoid being indicted on criminal charges by the Department of Justice once the
committee has handed down its findings.
In his opening statement last week,
Democrat committee chairman Bennie Thompson alleged that Trump was “at
the center of a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the 2020
presidential election.”
The evidence provided at the public
hearings has already gone a long way to confirming the truth of that
extraordinary charge – and much more testimony damning of Trump is expected
when the hearings resume in mid-July.
The evidence
given in the past two weeks shows that:
- Despite knowing that there was no credible
evidence of voter fraud (then-Attorney General Bill Barr told Trump that
such allegations were “bulls**t”) Trump knowingly promulgated
the “stolen election” claim.
- Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to
certify the election results.
- This pressure was applied on the basis of dubious
legal advice provided by an obscure lawyer (who later sought a pardon from
Trump) that had been contradicted by Trump’s own White House legal
advisers and the Department of Justice.
- Trump pressured state electoral officials into
falsifying the election results.
- Trump pressured Department of Justice officials
into supporting his claims of electoral fraud. At one point, he told
then-acting Attorney General Richard Donoghue, “Just say that the
election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
- A number of Republican congressmen who tried to
prevent certification of the election result in Congress later cravenly
sought pardons from Trump before he left office.
- When the DOJ officials refused to comply with
Trump’s demands, he threatened to appoint a compliant low-ranking lawyer,
Jeffrey Clark, as acting attorney general. Only the threat of mass
resignations by DOJ officials prevented this from happening.
- Trump pressured the chairperson of the Republican
National Committee to appoint alternate electors who would falsely claim
that Trump had carried a number of key states.
What is
surprising about this litany of improper acts is that Trump committed each of
them personally. They were not delegated to intermediaries – a reflection
perhaps of Trump’s own paranoia, megalomania, and innate distrust of others.
Trump is no practitioner of the doctrine of plausible deniability.
Trump has
apparently watched all the recent public hearings while bunkered down at the
Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey. His public response had so far been muted.
Trump has
condemned his own daughter Ivanka for testifying that she did not believe the
‘stolen election’ claim, and denounced Republican minority House leader Kevin
McCarthy for having urged pro-Trump Republicans to boycott the January 6
committee – which he quite possibly did at Trump’s own direction, to begin with.
Trump now
appears to be an isolated figure, who believes that he does not need to offer
any substantive defense to the serious allegations of misconduct made by the
plethora of credible witnesses who have appeared before the committee so far.
This
fundamental error of political judgment alone should be enough to ensure the
end of his political career. No matter how frankly irrational politics in
Western democracies have become, politicians are still obliged to defend
themselves when allegations of serious impropriety are leveled against them.
Would Boris Johnson still be British prime minister if he had simply ignored
the allegations of misconduct recently made against him?
It is
significant that none of Trump’s former prominent Republican supporters have
seen fit to publically defend him. Only the long-retired Newt Gingrich has done
so.
Trump’s arrogant refusal to defend his
actions has caused public opinion in America to now turn against him.
Ominously for Trump, Fox News reversed its
initial partisan decision to refuse to broadcast the committee’s public
hearings after the opening day’s proceedings – which attracted a substantial 20
million viewers.
Recent polls suggest that the public
hearings are already having an adverse impact on Trump’s reputation. Pollster
Frank Luntz said this week “I see people are no longer drinking the
Kool-Aid. I see people moving away from Trump for the first time.” And
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now outpolling Trump as a Republican
presidential nominee for 2024 for the first time.
The decline in Trump’s popularity may also
be reflected in the fact that Trump-backed candidates have achieved only
moderate success in the recent midterm primaries, and that wealthy Republican
donors have deserted them.
In these circumstances – and things will
no doubt get worse for Trump as the committee continues its hearings and
deliberations – it seems clear that Trump cannot possibly win the presidency in
2024.
This has been apparent to sensible
Republican powerbrokers for some time – which is why they have surreptitiously
assisted the Democrats in using the committee hearings to bring about an end to
Trump’s political career.
But the expunging of Trump personally from
American politics is hardly an occasion for celebration.
As the committee hearings have made clear,
it is only Trump’s own lack of political judgment that has brought about the
destruction of his political career.
Test that proposition this way – assume
that Trump had even grudgingly accepted his electoral defeat in 2020; assume
that he had never promulgated the ‘stolen election’ lie; assume that he had not
incited the January 6 riot; and assume that he had spent the last 18 months
criticizing the Biden regime instead of clinging to the ‘stolen election’
falsehood.
Can any sensible observer of American
politics seriously doubt that, in such circumstances, Trump would now be in a
very powerful position to regain the presidency in 2024?
After all, the crippling and seemingly
ineradicable political and ideological divisions that propelled Trump
to the presidency in 2016 have only intensified since 2020 – and, more
importantly, the Biden presidency has been a complete and abject failure.
America is on the verge of a recession,
and significant parts of Biden’s legislative program have not, and never will
be, enacted. Large numbers of the working class, Hispanic, and black voters are now
deserting the Democrats, and Biden continues to slide downwards in the polls.
Apart from defeating Trump, Biden’s only
‘achievements’ have been to pander to transgender activists and prolong the
Russia-Ukraine conflict. No wonder Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called
‘radical’ wing of the Democratic Party have recently refused to endorse the
doddering septuagenarian as their presidential nominee in 2024.
In the past week, two Supreme Court decisions relating to America’s two most divisive political idea fixes – gun control and abortion – have further exacerbated the debilitating divisions that have characterized American politics for decades.
Democrats are now openly condemning the
Supreme Court as ‘illegitimate’ for having overturned the universal right to
abortion created in Roe v Wade – even though the majority decision is
undoubtedly correct in terms of pure legal principle.
These critics of the Supreme Court’s
legitimacy have conveniently forgotten that feminist icon and former Supreme
Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had for years espoused the view that the
legal reasoning underpinning Roe v. Wade was untenable. They have also
forgotten that the #MeToo movement was bound to provoke a conservative backlash
against women.
Do these Democrats seriously believe they
will make American politics more stable by attacking the legitimacy of the
Supreme Court?
Trump, of course, has always been
contemptuous of the Supreme Court – especially after it dismissed his attempt
to legally challenge the 2020 election results. Yet this week, he cynically
praised the court for overturning Roe v. Wade, and tried to take personal
credit for the decision – after all, hadn’t he appointed three conservative
justices to the court?
Even though Trump’s political career
appears to be effectively over, millions of American voters still
unconditionally support him and continue to fervently believe the election was
stolen.
Precisely how these voters will react to
Donald Trump’s political demise is not yet clear – perhaps the best that can be
hoped for is that they will remain broadly within the Republican fold and vote
for DeSantis.
In any event, the conflict-ridden shambles
that currently passes for politics in America suggests that the country’s
foreseeable political future – even without Trump’s participation – is unlikely
to be any more stable than its pathetically troubled immediate political past.
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There was a TON of voter fraud and it's all in plain sight. When the courts and the Executive branch CHANGED VOTING LAWS... ANY VOTE COMING IN BECAUSE OF THAT CHANGE IS VOTER FRAUD... ONLY the legislature can change voting laws.. as prescribed in the constitution.
ReplyDeleteArticle I, Section 4, Clause 1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; not the governor, not a judge, not their supreme court but the LEGISLATURE... all votes resulting from any other change is nul and void
As far as electors are concerned for president
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:
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