Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of an even more prominent fat man seems a big win for Donald Trump, regardless of how the case is decided. If convicted, Trump is a martyr, managing to portray himself once more as a persecuted Washington outsider, a status that’s quite a feat for a politician to retain after setting up shop in the White House for four years. If found not guilty, Trump is exonerated, a contrived case likely to rely on tentative legal reasoning exposed as an overtly partisan manhunt. After all, in a Quinnipiac poll last week, a plurality of Americans (42 percent) considered the charges in New York either “not too serious” (16 percent) or “not serious at all” (26 percent). A hefty majority (62 percent) believed the Stormy Daniels criminal case is mainly motivated by politics — including 93 percent of Republicans, an electorally crucial 70 percent of independents and a not-insignificant 29 percent of Democrats.
Either way then, Trump 1, Dems 0, right? Not quite. It’s been obvious for some time that Democratic mandarins badly want Trump to be the 2024 GOP nominee. So Bragg’s arguably counterproductive ploy must have them wetting themselves in excitement.
Trump is the only credible Republican nominee the Dems think Joe Biden can beat
This preferred outcome was glaringly on display during the Republican primaries for last fall’s midterms, when Dems ran ads for, as well as contributed considerable money to, Republican congressional candidates who supported Trump — the loopier the better. The reasoning ran that crackpots would be easier to defeat. It was a cynical strategy that willingly ran the risk the crackpots would win. Moreover, nothing stops Republicans from adopting the same tactic, thus swelling the treasure chests of the most woked-out police defunders on Democratic rosters. The real losers in a world where both sides are running around campaigning for the other side’s most atrocious politicians are merely the voters — and who cares about them?
Trump’s most likely GOP challenger is often pooh-poohed as lacking charisma, but for Democrats the downside of Ron DeSantis’s placid demeanor is that he doesn’t enrage people enough. Some voters might deplore his policies, but they’re less apt to deplore the man. For his opponents, Ron merely inspires dislike or mild distaste — it’s hard to imagine the coinage “DeSantis derangement syndrome” — whereas Trump inspires in his detractors a crazed, Pavlovian loathing.
Negative emotions such as antipathy and disgust are more powerful electoral drivers than paler positive corollaries such as admiration or affinity. A substantial whack of the American public would vote for absolutely any candidate other than their reviled 2016 nemesis — even, at a pinch, for Joe Biden. Dems do not want to run against a younger, more clean-cut Republican with an impressive conservative track record. They want to run against an established asshole. In that Quinnipiac poll’s head-to-head between Biden and DeSantis, the Florida governor led the President, if by only two points.
As ever, I’m tearing out hair that at my age I can’t afford to lose. A hefty majority of Americans want neither Trump nor Biden to run again (in a November CNBC poll, 61 percent wanted to be shed of Trump altogether, while an astonishing 70 percent didn’t want Biden to bid for a second term either, including 57 percent of Democrats). That would be me: please, please, can we move on from this presidential Groundhog Day? Yet so far, an even more wearying and more geriatric redo of 2020 seems on the cards. Sorry — this is functional democracy? How is this happening? Isn’t the main merit of this system of government meant to be that the majority of us get at least what we sort of want?
It’s significant that Biden’s Justice Department did not reach out to look-at-me-I’m-making-history Alvin Bragg and quietly suggest he desist, as the department has done in the past with some state-level cases which had a federal component. The administration has therefore accepted the risk that going after the former president in court over, say, a niggling-sounding violation of business accounting rules redounds to Trump’s benefit — and since the NY indictment, Trump’s Republican support has soared. If Democrats really wanted to damage Trump’s chances in the presidential primaries, they might at least have whittled down the multiple criminal cases brewing against him to concentrate on the most persuasively damning charges percolating in Georgia, whose governor is a well-liked Republican. That case reads to ordinary people loud and clear: Trump tried to fix the 2020 election by pleading over the phone to be gifted a few stray votes surely rattling around some rural ballot box like grains of rice left behind in the bag.
In not so secretly rooting for a Trump nomination, Democratic apparatchiks are overly sanguine about the certainty of a Trump defeat in the general election. Recent polls put him and Biden neck and neck, so the Dems are placing a dicey bet. All these criminal cases could either stain Trump, or they could backfire. Besides, Democrats putting their chips on a rematch against Trump betrays their own weak hand. Biden is old and unpopular. Trump is the only credible GOP nominee they think their man can beat.
As far as I’m concerned, the prospective peril for the US is equally great if Biden is re-elected. While the president may have tacked incrementally towards the center in recent months, the abundance of his domestic policies have been dictated by far-left identitarian loons. Yet I’m even more terrified of his vice president, who Biden has given every indication will again be his running mate next year. Every day our friend Joe advances into his ninth decade, the likelihood of his second-in-command being obliged to take the oath goes up. By now, we’ve accumulated conclusive evidence that Kamala Harris is a blithering incompetent. Point out she’s an imbecile and even Democrats rarely give you grief. At least as surely as a vengeful Trump comeback, Harris cackling manically from the Oval Office could betoken the end of the republic.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
