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ESSENTIAL READING NOT ABOUT DONALD J. TRUMP
None.
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ESSENTIAL VIEWING ABOUT DONALD J. TRUMP
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So, who is rallying to the cause of Donald Trump now that he faces indictment?
Per the Washington Post:
On Friday, the Trump campaign distributed an email collecting statements from six governors, 26 senators, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and 63 other House Republicans, and 10 state attorneys general, proclaiming “united support” from the party. Trump’s super PAC released a poll showing overwhelming support among Republican primary voters and posted a video that received more than 1 million views on Twitter.
Also rallying: The current governor of Florida:
Even the Trump-loathing former governor of Florida is on the bandwagon:
The low-dollar donors:
Oh, and, just maybe, the voters:
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — one of the first conducted after former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star — shows Trump surging to his largest-ever lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his likely 2024 GOP primary challenger, as Republican voters rally around the only president in U.S. history to face criminal charges.
In the previous Yahoo News/YouGov survey, which was conducted less than two weeks ago, Trump (47%) led DeSantis (39%) by eight percentage points in a head-to-head matchup among registered voters who are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. As recently as February, it was DeSantis who was narrowly ahead of Trump, 45% to 41%.
But the new, post-indictment poll suddenly finds Trump lapping DeSantis by 26 percentage points — 57% to 31% — in a one-on-one contest. The former president even attracts majority support (52%, up from 44% previously) when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field of declared and potential GOP challengers, while DeSantis plummets to 21% (down from 28%).
Now, Dan Balz correctly points out that it is all too early to assert with full confidence that this development helps Trump in the nomination fight – or/and/but precludes him from getting back to the Oval:
The fact that so many in his party rushed to his defense in the hours after news of the indictment came out does not equate to the political judgments that will have to be made when the primary season begins next year. Right now, Trump faces an accounting in the criminal justice system. The political accounting comes later….
If Trump is the party’s nominee, as things stand today, he could be reelected, given the divisions that exist in the country and doubts that exist about Biden’s job performance and age….
Ross Douthat makes his old and familiar “here’s the way to beat Trump” argument, which many still find unpersuasive:
I have argued this before, but there’s no reason not to state the case again: The theory that in order to beat Trump, other Republicans need to deserve to beat him, and that in order to deserve to beat him they need to attack his character with appropriate moral dudgeon, is a satisfying idea but not at all a realistic one. It isn’t credible that Republican voters who have voted for Trump multiple times over, in full knowledge of his immense defects, will finally decide to buy into the moral case just because DeSantis or any other rival hammers it in some new and exciting way.
Instead the plausible line of attack against Trump in a Republican primary has always been on competence and execution, with his moral turpitude cast as a practical obstacle to getting things done. And as others have pointed out, including New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, nothing about defending Trump against a Democratic prosecutor makes that case any more difficult to make.
You can imagine DeSantis on the debate stage: Yes, I condemn the partisan witch hunt that led to this indictment. But the pattern with my opponent is that he makes it too easy for the liberals. If you’re paying hush money to a porn star, you’re giving the other side what it wants.
It was the same way all through his presidency — all the drama, all the chaos, just played into the Democrats’ hands. Into the deep state’s hands. He would attack lockdowns on social media while Dr. Fauci, his own guy, was actually making them happen. He tried to get our troops out of the Middle East, but he let the woke generals at the Pentagon disregard his orders. He didn’t finish the Wall because he was always distracted — there was a new batch of leaks from inside his White House every week. He’s got valid complaints about the 2020 election, about how the other side changed election laws on the fly during the pandemic — but he was president, he just watched them do it, he was too busy tweeting.
I admire what he tried to do, he did get some big things accomplished. But the other side fights to win, they fight dirty, and you deserve a president who doesn’t go into the fight with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds.
Is this argument enough? Maybe not. It certainly doesn’t have the primal appeal that Trump specializes in, where all those self-inflicted wounds are transformed into proof that he’s the man in the arena, he’s the fighter you need, because why else would he be dripping blood?
But it’s the argument that DeSantis has to work with. And nothing about its logic will be altered when Trump is fingerprinted and charged.
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Here is what one wise Wide World of News reader asks and says:
My questions, once the indictments are unsealed, are:
Would they have pursued this if Trump had lost the election in 2016 and faded away?
Are these charges serious enough to be worth crossing the Rubicon of charging an ex-President with a crime?
Will the serious charges (e.g., felony crimes) survive the pre-trial legal wrangling and actually make it to a trial?
Can they get to a trial well before the election?
Can they get a conviction or guilty plea on serious charges (e.g., not just a plea bargain admitting minor crimes)?
Will Trump serve jail time (vs. an easily-fundraised-$ slap on the wrist)?
The answers bloody well better be a strong yes to all of them, because the DA will be have his hands tied for months while Trump eviscerates the charges in the court of public opinion and his lawyers work to eviscerate them in the court of law.
HALPERIN SAYS: The answers to all those questions are almost certainly “no.” Trump is a plant that grows large in the soils of division and resentment. By making the prosecution of Trump by a DA who has made his name for selective enforcement of the law the center of all discussion, Trump’s political and media supporters and his enemies from MSNBC to the Lincoln Project to the New York Times make themselves rich -- and further pollute the soil. So we wait for Tuesday, repeating 2016 as both tragedy and comedy….