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****
The Blues and Never Trumpers have spent going on eight years now telling us (and, more revealing, telling each other) why Trump will never win, can’t win, won’t win.
I had my 10,001 conversation like that last night, over dinner with a friend who fits into a very specific and very populated category – people who feel that Donald Trump is not only the worst thing to ever happen to America but the worst thing to ever `happen to them personally. By hap, this person has lived his life in New York City, Cambridge, MA, and the Palisades area of Los Angeles.
Folks in this cohort spend an enormous amount of time thinking about and talking about all the reasons that Trump is going to prison or, at least, political oblivion. They spend far less time (a/k/a almost none) pondering three other things:
1. Why Trump won in the first place in 2016.
2. How Trump almost won in 2020.
3. Why and how Trump could win again in 2024.
In the current news cycle, we see this Trumpian yang-ying on vivid display.
You probably know Mr. Trump went to East Palestine, Ohio, on Wednesday. You probably didn’t watch a word of what he said at the fire station and at a local McDonald’s, in part because the Big 3 cable news outfits did not offer live coverage.
Unless you are a fan of President Trump, you probably think anything he said in Ohio was demagogic hooey, populist pablum, lies wrapped in insults and fakery.
But you would be making a mistake if you thought that’s all it was.
Forget the message Trump drove, the symbolism of the pictures, or what the execution of the day demonstrated about Team Trump’s capacity to effectively deploy his plane, his unemployed status, his Secret Service detail, his experienced squad of advance men and women, and the principal’s status as a great television producer and communicator.
Better, dear Never Trumpers, to just wish away the reality of what Trump in Ohio meant.
Better to assume he will be indicted by someone (right?), with the New York Times doing its umpteenth “Where do all the Trump investigations stand?” piece, alongside the paper’s exclusive about how Jack Smith wants to talk to Ivanka and Jared. (And turn your head away from the possibility that the special grand jury’s foreperson might have just tanked the Georgia prosecution that so many of you have been counting on….)
Instead, shoot your gaze at the certainty of Janesville, Wisconsin’s resident political genius, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who expressed confidence in a Washington Post interview that his former ally and current nemesis is done and dusted:
“He’s a proven loser,” Ryan said. “I think his unelectability is his Achilles’ heel, and that in and of itself is going to be a unifying argument to move on from Trump.”
Trump is indeed dead dead dead! You can see the signs everywhere!
Fox News has banned him, DeSantis is smacking him in very meaningful two-way polls, Tim Scott is taking Iowa by storm, and even the Ohio trip was just an awkward, hypocritical stunt, per the theater critics at the New York Times, who wrote of the day
It was evocative of the former president’s time in office: an at-times meandering address, punctated by self-promotion — his brand-name Trump Water — and an undercurrent of grievance…. [H]e still appeared to struggle with showing empathy in public.
In fact, relax: Politico suggests that Trump’s miserable record on train safety and the environment means his foray into the Buckeye State was awesome news for Team Biden:
Here is where I could repeat my warning: Trump can win again.
He might not, of course, even end up the Republican nominee.
But he is one of the three most likely people to be elected in 2024.
And, as in 2016, our politico-media industrial complex is built around the premise that our news discourse should be framed in terms of all the reasons that Trump is dead and dying, why he can’t win, why the math doesn’t add up, why whatever support he once had has shrunken to near the vanishing point.
Instead of using text this time to snap you out of it, I will go with the equivalent of 2,000 words:
Study these two photos closely; the clues to a Trump return to the White House are embedded in these images.
If Joe Biden makes the trip to East Palestine to feel its citizens’ pain, his advance team better think it through pretty carefully. For that Red part of a once Purple state is Trump Country – and it isn’t the only part of America that still fits that description.
To be continued……
****
ESSENTIAL READING
* Literally none, unless you are interested in diving deeper into the staying power of Putin and the Chinese puzzle.
As I say, trust me – I read and watched a lot of news this morning.
As Josh Barro wrote in an almost-essential-reading Substack about Politico’s piece teasing the notion that Joe Biden might not seek reelection:
We are currently undergoing a structural decline in the quantity of news — 2023 is shaping up to be the least-newsy year since 2014 — and that’s bad for traffic, ratings, and employment. It’s also boring. It’s more fun to be a reporter when interesting things are happening.
See you tomorrow.