I’m not sure what’s funnier about the current state of affairs in the country.
The fact that Donald Trump seems ready and eager to have his day in court as a means to propel his 2024 campaign, or Democrats making themselves sick over the possibility that indicting the former president might actually help make him president once again.
There’s a lot of quiet grumbling among Democratic officials and party members around the country that they fear putting up the “Mission Accomplished” banner too soon. Remember, Trump was supposed to be taken down by the Russian collusion narrative and not one but two impeachments. As it stands now, he’s still the odds-on favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination and has at least a 50% chance of winning the White House.
Needless to say, some Democrats are getting queasy because they’ve seen this show before and, as Politico reports, they rarely see the plot twist coming at the end:
These should be celebratory times for Democrats. But as Donald Trump is set to get booked on Tuesday over a hush money payment he made to a p-rn star, a chunk of the party is growing anxious. An uneasy déjà vu has set in.
“Last time people were rooting for Donald Trump, he ended up president of the United States,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif). “We’ve seen this story before.”
The electoral potency of Trump is once more the central element of the Democratic Party’s internal debates. Back in 2016, Trump was supposed to have been the perfect opponent: too crude and way too outrageous to win a general election. As Hillary Clinton’s campaign geared up for that November’s race, many were rooting for Trump to be the GOP nominee, believing that he’d be the easiest Republican to beat.
It didn’t work out as planned. And the shock many in the party experienced because of it compelled them to pledge that they’d take a more sober-minded approach to the possibility of a Trump revival.
But with Trump once more eyeing the White House, the conventional wisdom is again forming that he would be the easiest Republican to defeat, owing to the myriad of legal problems he’s facing.
“I’d say in a general election Trump may be the weakest of the major GOP contenders,” said Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh. “And he likely will take on more water over time as several of the other legal cases play out.”
Tommy McDonald, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist who worked as a media consultant for Sen. John Fetterman’s campaign, conceded that the “universal consensus” was that Trump was “the weakest candidate” in the GOP field. But he said he’s personally not sure of it — given the passionate following he maintains and the historic underappreciation of his support.
Relying on “conventional wisdom” in 2023 should be a disqualifier for further comment on modern politics.
If conventional wisdom was a proper guide, Hillary Clinton should be in the middle of her second term right now and Republicans would be looking to nominate someone like Chris Sununu in 2024, not Donald Trump.
That universe doesn’t exist and it hasn’t since Trump came down the elevator in 2015 and turned conventional wisdom on its head.
Democrats know this but they keep hyping themselves up that this time it’s different. This time the walls really are closing in.
Well, the walls have “closed in” many times previously only for Democrats to be disappointed and come out on the losing end.
There’s no denying Trump has been bruised by some of the attempts to force him out of politics altogether, but sometimes the bruises have actually helped propel his efforts forward. There’s also no denying that a weaker politician, in either party, would’ve been put to pasture by a mere fraction of what Trump has been through.
Beyond Democrats, some Never-Trumpers are also getting weak in the knees as they watch the political landscape begin to resemble that of early 2015:
Rick Wilson, the anti-Trump strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, listed all the ways that 2024 is shaping up to be like 2016: The media covering Trump wall-to-wall despite promises not to, Trump’s GOP opponents planning scripted zingers about him that don’t land, and Democrats feeling suspiciously confident that Trump will sink himself.
“A lot of Democrats in 2016 were like, ‘Oh yes, Hillary will wipe the floor with Donald Trump.’ And I warned them at the time: Don’t you bite that apple,” he said. “I feel like we’re in a very, very twisted time loop where God is punishing us for our sins.”
The other wild card is President Joe Biden himself. His age is a problem along with the likelihood of an ongoing sluggish economy. Reports that gasoline could top $4 per gallon on average again will also help embolden Trump’s argument that the country will never prosper under Biden’s leadership.
It’s quite an amazing time to observe the political landscape.
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