Hey Santa, you wouldn’t happen to have a new reason for running a 2024 Republican presidential campaign in that bag of yours, would ya?
This fictional but easily conceivable question is probably on the minds of the not-Trump Republican candidates these days. As we march towards Christmas, the New Year’s holiday and the Iowa caucuses on January 15, 2024, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie are searching for a rationale to sustain their candidacies at this late hour.
Vivek Ramaswamy never really used a “Trump can’t win” argument to begin with, so that’s why he’s not listed with the others.
Each of the three non-Ramaswamy candidates began their presidential runs under the assumption they could go to their various campaign events and talk up how “electable” they were vis-à-vis former president Donald Trump, an extremely capable man but one with a baggage compartment longer than a Union Pacific freight train.
Unfortunately for them, it didn’t happen that way. Trump now not only leads the Republican race by leaps and bounds, he’s buoyed by a host of establishment-accepted polls showing him out in front of broken-down old goat incumbent senile Joe Biden – including some beyond the poll’s margin of error. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Biden seemed destined to surf on the crest of the usual surveys showing Democrats comfortably ahead all the way up to Election Day, whereby the requisite funny business and cheating would be plausible to those wondering how a corrupted empty-suit (and empty-brain) like Biden could win a national office again.
The fact that it looks like Trump at least has a shot to win – if not the favorite to do so – next year means DeSantis, Haley and Christie need to talk about something else for the next few weeks. Are they desperate? In an opinion piece titled “The Most Powerful Anti-Trump Argument in the GOP Has Evaporated”, establishment Republican extraordinaire Rich Lowry wrote at Politico recently:
“The Biden collapse is nearly comprehensive. He is losing in ballot tests to Trump, his approval rating is scraping bottom, he’s trailing on almost every top issue, and super-majorities think he’s too old to serve again. He is the weakest incumbent since Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush...
“Nikki Haley looks strongest of all against Biden in the polling, but for Republicans the threshold question is whether Trump can win. As long as they think he can, a few extra points for another candidate is unlikely to sway them one way or the other.
“The ideal scenario for Democrats is that Biden’s weakness is illusory, and Republicans blithely nominate Trump based on the current polling only to be shocked to learn he isn’t as strong against Biden as advertised next fall. This is plausible, but there’s every possibility that Biden’s political standing is as bad as it seems and he’s on his way to not just helping Trump get the Republican nomination, but paving his way back to the White House. It’s axiomatic among Republicans that Trump is fortunate in his enemies. Biden may be the best proof yet.”
This is similar to the narrative the establishment media set for Trump in 2020, since every outlet was penning opinion columns blaming the president for “hundreds of thousands of deaths” and stifling dissenting voices on what to do about COVID – and its origin being the Chinese bioweapons lab – rather than rallying around Trump’s solutions.
As I’ve said before, Trump wanted to open the economy back up, get rid of the masks and restore the public’s confidence in their own abilities to resist the Chinese-fostered crisis. Trump did push the “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine pretty hard, but he didn’t go for requiring that people take the jab. That was a purely Joe Biden dictate.
None of it made sense at the time, including the government’s mandating that the 2020 election be conducted via mail-in ballot, which superseded the laws in most states. I myself recall voting on a rainy afternoon in the parking lot of my local government center, the poor umbrella-armed election workers having to bring ballots to each vehicle (and us voters wearing masks, in the car) and then asking if we wanted to view our ballot being scanned after being completed.
Stupid. But that was the attitude of the times. And it led to the mess that was the 2020 election month-plus and the count inconsistencies that generated the bitterness and outrage eventually-released on January 6th. People aren’t dumb – we remember exactly what happened.
This is part of what’s made senile Joe all-but unelectable now.
It’s also become clear as day: senile Joe Biden is suffering from the Jimmy Carter effect. There are the inevitable parallels between the current president and Ronald Reagan’s predecessor, namely that the country is ravaged by inflation that’s all-but robbed large swatches of middle class and poor folks of their purchasing power and has eaten into whatever savings they’ve managed to set aside before the dark days of the COVID farce.
Interest rates, though nothing like they were in the late 70’s, have denied first-time and low-income buyers any opportunity to purchase a home and begin living a life that most decent people dream about. Instead, these unfortunate souls are stuck with paying high rents at apartment buildings and rental properties – or remaining at home living in their folks’ spare bedroom or basement -- while simultaneously denying them of the benefits of a home mortgage deduction on their taxes.
Not to mention those left-behind by the Biden economy are not building equity in a home that’s escalating in value like a rocket leaving a launch pad. Foreign policy troubles overseas are also plaguing senile Joe Biden, just like they did the straw-haired, bucktoothed former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Who would’ve thought, all these decades later, that the barely beyond third-world nation of Iran would continue to nip at the heel of the United States? For Carter it was the hostage crisis and ever-present face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in American media. I remember having one of those Ayatollah dartboards as a young teen and getting pretty good at hitting the bullseye.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter opted to boycott the 1980 summer Olympics. Something about that Russia country that Democrats just can’t seem to manage.
For Biden, Iran funds the terrorists and proxies that perpetuate conflict in the Middle East, but now, unlike with Carter, he’s contending with a Democrat Party that props up a number of blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian sympathizers. PLO leader Yassir Arafat never had such support from Jimmy Carter’s group of fellow partymen. Biden’s problem is arguably several times worse.
Then there’s Ukraine, which Biden did the opposite of how Trump would’ve handled the scenario. Under Biden’s direction, the already debt-saddled United States had dumped over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of humanitarian aid and military hardware and ammunition to the eastern European nation whose rulers are only one rung removed from Vladimir Putin on the corruption ladder. And as last week’s joint press appearance showed, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn’t likely to quit asking Uncle Sam to fund the majority of his country’s effort – and there’s no military end in sight over there.
Like Carter, senile Joe probably wishes Russia would just go away. But “peace through strength” isn’t something Biden and the Obama-type Democrats appear to buy into.
At any rate, like the establishment media’s done with making Donald Trump look sympathetic, Joe Biden has resurrected ol’ Jimmy Carter and turned him into a strong-looking president by comparison. The 39th president was merely hapless compared with Biden’s openly corrupt and law-snubbing policies of appeasement and outright sabotage.
In essence, Biden is so bad that he’s unwittingly snatched the “not-electable” line of reasoning right out from under Donald Trump’s Republican opponents.
Another matter that hasn’t received much attention from the establishment media is the extent to which the Merrick Garland-led Biden Justice Department has overstepped its legal and decency bounds to depict Trump as the worst thing since… well, Donald Trump’s first term. This phenomenon hasn’t happened overnight – it’s been a steady drumbeat of over-the-top statements from Biden himself and other corrupt or incompetent members of his inner circle.
One couldn’t help but shake their heads as Biden, Harris and Democrat congressional leaders held absurd ceremonies marking the anniversaries of January 6, 2021, where they claimed the capital riot and breach by selfie-taking guys wearing face paint and buffalo horns was akin in horridness to 9/11/2001 – or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Then there was that dark and sickening speech senile Joe delivered in Philadelphia with Independence Hall lit up in red with the doddering dolt railing against “MAGA fascists”. Biden has made it personal since day one, repeatedly breaking his vow to bring Americans together and “heal the nation’s wounds” while “restoring the soul of the nation.”
Basically, Biden has made himself un-electable, which, again, has not bolstered the cases for DeSantis, Haley and Christie (or Mike Pence or Tim Scott) in terms of claiming they’d “win” where Trump was certain to lose. This was the reality all along, but the current White House occupant’s ongoing inability to get anything right has only aided Trump in his mission to achieve MAGA 2.0. When measured against a backdrop of the economic malaise, cultural rot, “climate change” nonsense, foreign policy snafus and senile Joe’s corrupt-to-the-core family, that January 6th stuff doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
No one should feel sorry for this year’s not-Trump candidates. Time and circumstances allowed Donald Trump to rise to the top of the party once again, and the prospects of having a competent president should make all conservatives and Republicans happy. Joe Biden deserves an assist for helping Americans feel a change is warranted. Not a bad Christmas present for the nation.
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