June 29, 2022
"HUMPTY DUMPTY" TRUMP WILL NOT BE 2024 NOMINEE

Be careful what you wish for. Democrats are hell-bent on destroying the viability and legacy of Donald Trump while still expecting him to be the flawed Republican candidate for president in 2024. Those expectations are mutually exclusive. Democrats DON’T want to run against Ron DeSantis. But they will.

The Jan. 6 Commission has revealed the ex-president to be neurotic, narcissistic and delusional. But President Joe Biden’s performance over the past 17 months has revealed him to be incompetent, feeble and delusionary. What inflation? What open border? What crime spike? There’s no imminent recession. A recent poll showed him losing 42-39 to Trump. Unbelievable.

To be sure, the 2020 Biden-Trump vote was 81,268,925-74,216,154, a 51.3-45.9 percent victory and a clear repudiation of Trump. This was the fourth election in a row (2008, 2012, 2016, 2020) in which a Democrat out-polled a Republican. Demographics are moving the country leftward.

Can you imagine, in a country of 335 million people, that we will have to pick between Biden and Trump in 2024? Like in Nevada, which has a ballot line entitled “None of the Above,” that characterization should be on the 2024 ballot in every state. It would get a third of the vote. America does not want another 4 years of Trump. Nor does it want 4 more years of Biden-Harris. But it’s not going to happen. Neither will be on the election ballot in 2024.

Trump reminds me of the Humpty Dumpty fable of my childhood, where Humpty was caricatured as a bloated giant egg sitting on a wall wearing a crown: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty took a great fall; And all of the King’s horses and all of the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Trump is on the wall, and if (or more probably when) he falls by losing some primaries, he will crack like an egg.

The premise of Trump’s presumptive 2024 candidacy rests upon two prongs: ENTITLEMENT and INEVITABILITY.  Trump still mumbles and grumbles about 2020’s election “fraud,” and thinks he is entitled to a re-run. He thinks he was a much better president than Biden, which, arguably, is true depending whom you ask. And likely, if it wasn’t for the COVID pandemic he would have won a second term. He is a billionaire, and has unlimited access to campaign money. And he thinks that once he announces, in early 2023, he will clear out the Republican field. That is not going to happen (see list of Republican aspirants).

He has two strategic options: One is the “early bird special” and announcing early and mobilizing his fervent base. This is what he will do. The second is “savior,” in which he announces late, after the primaries, premised on the fact that no Republican is beating Biden-Harris or Harris-Buttigieg. That won’t happen. Every Republican will be winning in the polls. But, based on Democrats’ obsession with identity politics, their post-Biden 2024 ticket will be Kamala Harris, an African-American woman of part Asian-Indian ancestry and Peter Buttigieg, a gay White man who is married with children.

The calendar works against Trump, as does the enormity of the 2024 Republican field, which will number at least a dozen. Trump will not intimidate them, especially given his spotty record of success in 2022 primary endorsements.  In 2020, 20 Democrats ran for president, and in 2016, 17 Republicans.

Should Biden not run, there will be 15-20 Democrats hoping for the nomination, perhaps even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) on the Left.

The legendary Iowa caucuses are in January, and it should be remembered that Jimmy Carter spent a whole lot of time in Iowa in 1975, won the caucus, and went on to win the nomination and presidency in 1976. Buttigieg won Iowa in 2020. Retail politics, meaning talking to voters one-on-one, is what wins. Trump will never do that. He will hold rallies.

And then on to New Hampshire in early February. It’s played critical roles in candidate-elimination in the past, or, as in 1992, candidate-salvation (Bill Clinton). Slogging through the snow is obligatory. Trump will never do that. One early NH poll has Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating Trump. That’s all it will take for Trump to fall off the proverbial wall. And once he does the anti-Trump media will pounce like vultures, proclaiming him dead on arrival. And whichever Republican beats Trump will be lionized as a giant-killer.

But that may be moot, as popular NH governor Christopher Sununu (R), who won re-election with 65 percent in 2020 and will win ever bigger in 2022, may announce for president. He would surely win his home state’s presidential primary. Most suspect Sununu is angling for the VP nomination.

Then come the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary in March. Sanders won NH and NV in 2020, but Biden got Black support in SC and then went on to win 10 of the 15 Super Tuesday primaries in early April. That clinched his nomination. There is no way Trump can or will sweep those 18 early contests. Whoever beats him first, either DeSantis or Cotton will be the Republican nominee. And if the U.S. is amid a 2023-24 recession, that Republican will win.

It should be remembered that in 2020 Biden won 25 states, and so did Trump. But the electoral count was 306-232, compared to 2016’s 304-227 Trump-Clinton vote. Trump won MI, PA, WI, GA, NH and AZ in 2016, but lost them in 2020. Trump was 38 electoral votes of a 270 majority. If a 2024 Republican wins GA (16), AZ (11), NV (6) and NH (4), all of which voted for Biden in 2020, plus just one of MN (10), PA (19), WI (10) and/or MI (15), they win.

The Democrats’ 2022-24 strategy is based on tying the Republicans to “Trumpism” and insurrectionists and, now, to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Trump-appointed 6-3 conservative majority’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and 2nd Amendment reaffirmation.

Their argument is that a continued Democrat majority, now 50-50 in the Senate and 223-212 in the House, can roll-them back by passing laws to overturn those decisions.

That won’t happen after Republicans flip Congress on Nov. 8.

The Republicans’ goal in 2022, and pathway to 2024 success, is to de-Trumpize – not further Trumpize – the party. It’s not to whine about 2020.

Given Biden-Harris’s record, Republicans should be ecstatic they lost in 2020  Republicans will have a wondrous cycle in 2022 and 2024 – but the need Trump to be gone.

That happened in Georgia, where Trump-endorsed candidates got crushed in the recent Republican primaries. It will be famously remembered that Trump demanded that the Secretary of State “find 12,000 votes,” slightly more than his margin of defeat. Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp and SOS Brad Raffinsperger did not roll over, did not collude with Trump’s fantasies, and got renominated, Kemp by more than 600,000 over a former senator. GA Republicans have effectively purged themselves of being the “Trump Party” and are instead the non-Biden-Harris Party.

PREDICTION: When an incumbent president is governing worse than his predecessor, who he beat by 7 million votes, demographics don’t much matter. A Republican is going to win back the presidency, probably DeSantis, in 2024. And Biden, who touted himself as a “transformative” president, will go down as another Millard Fillmore – failed and forgotten.

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