Trump's Least Important Supporters Begin to Waver
The Wavering of Right-Wing Writers Shouldn't be Discounted but Put in Perspective...How Losing Twitter Has Hurt Trump...The Problem with Bari Weiss' COVID Declaration
In the past week, there has been some interesting speculation on former President Trump losing support and the rising talk of Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and the rivalry between them. Fox News Host Laura Ingraham indicated she’s not on-board yet with a Trump 2024 run, Rich Lowry of National Review has suggested a challenge to Trump from the Populist Right could be successful. Major Trump defenders like Kurt Schlichter have suggested that he favors DeSantis over Trump. Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union celebrated DeSantis as “America’s Governor.”
So what’s going on here?
I think there are a couple of things.
First, I think that there’s a few folks from the Trump skeptical wing of the conservative movement who, whether they voted for Trump or not really want to move past Trump, bring on-board as many folks on the right who said no to Trump and have as much unity as possible to defeat the left.
Secondly, I think there’s a realization by some columnists who really lean towards populism that feel Trump is not their best spokesmen. He cuts against the real anti-vaccine feeling on the populist right and can’t back off as I explained here. In addition, however one feels about the 2020 election results, it’s the past and more often than not, Trump makes news by just not being able to shut up about it.
The more sage folks in both groups also realize that the GOP could be looking at a chance to crush the Democrats in 2024. Biden and the Democrats are ripe targets for 2020. He and Vice-President Harris couldn’t beat any Republican…unless that Republican’s name is Donald John Trump.
Imagine what Republicans could if they could hold Trump’s core voters, gain back five percent of the college educate white vote and more easily make in-roads with minorities with a nominee that doesn’t have near Trump’s racial baggage. Democrats could lose in 2024 and lose bigly.
Yet, there’s a problem. Those most toying with jumping ship from President Trump are probably those who are least influential and least important for him actually winning. Much of the right wing commentariat wasn’t with Trump from the beginning. As for CPAC, it held its straw poll in 2016 in the middle of the GOP Primaries and Trump won 15%.
While polls indicate openness other than Trump, who’s that going to be. In response to the suggestion that a lot of Republicans with governing experience challenge Trump, National Review Columnist Dan McLaughlin had an exasperated but correct observation:
Trump could be defeated in every non-Trump vote went to one candidate, but who gets to pick that one candidate? Right wing media figures, hack right wing activists? Many of these same people thought Ted Cruz should be the conservative standard bearer and imagined that somehow he could win big winner-take-all-states like New York.
In the end, if Trump runs, there’s going to be a split vote that will allow Trump to win, certainly in early states, where Trump’s personality cult will be enough to carry the day.
The two most important elements for Trump are his grassroots personality cult and the parties which make the primary rules. The RNC could finish a Trump 2024 presidential run by simply making a rule requiring Presidential candidate to submit their tax returns and agree to a psychological evaluation. They could also decompress the primaries and standardize the method of delegate allocation so that no candidate could come in and win a bunch of winner-take-all contests and able to dominate the nomination contest with a relatively small percentage of the vote. But the RNC and most state parties depend on Trump for their fundraising. He’s the center of their fundraising universe. So if anything as I wrote last year, I expect the rules to slant more towards Trump.
I think a lot of folks on the right who are continuing to support the GOP and want the Trump show to end are practicing a form of self-deception to believe that it can be ended in the GOP primaries and that a leader less decisive, more popular, and better able to cope with the left will emerge. I get the reason they’re doing it. It’s just not reality. In the end, the GOP remains a lost cause and time spent hoping for a good candidate to emerge from the GOP primary is time that’s not being spent building institutions and parties that actually work.
How Absence from Twitter Has Hurt Trump
Twitter’s ban of President Trump from Twitter may have hurt him far worse than initially thought. The ban hasn’t been entirely effective in keeping Trump’s voice off the platform. Trump issues press releases that are written in standard Trump-style and images of these are shared on Twitter.
However, not only are these hard-to-read, they’re missing a certain something. I think much of the analysis of Trump’s Twitter use has been on it as a way for him to transmit information to his followers. But I also think Twitter was a source of information. It was a way for him to see what was trending in the Right-Wing infotainment sphere and to catch the wave of that in real time. Trump not only tweeted, he liked and retweeted and made stories bigger. Without that tool, Trump’s finger isn’t on the pulse of his base and his response is slowed down.
How much this might hurt him in GOP politics, I don’t know. I would bet on people who are used to his more instantaneous remarks and insertion of himself into the news cycle and like it will go off the residual effects of that. I do think if anyone could challenge Trump, it will be someone who can match that speed of throwing him and herself into every topic for conservation. Without Trump’s pre-existing celebrity that’s hard to do.
The Problem with Being Done with COVID
A video clip of left-leaning podcaster Bari Weiss saying she’s done with COVID has gone viral on the right:
I can understand the sentiment behind what Ms. Weiss is feeling and at this point, many of the COVID restrictions in place across the nation feel less like public health measures and more like theater.
And the problem is that many public health authorities, in particular, the Biden CDC have delivered inconsistent and uncredible messages, making it hard for the public to understand what to do. The Holderness family which has captured so much of the mood of the time, nailed it with this viral Encanto-song parody, “We Don’t Talk About COVID.”
That said, there’s a problem with declaring yourself “done” with COVID. Nearly 4,000 people are dying it of everyday. You can’t just wave it away based on your declaration. We can’t just make a statement and declare it so:
Imagine an ICU where the supervisor is telling people they’ll have another night of overtime to take care of COVID cases and a nurse says, “Excuse me, but I’m done with COVID. Let’s move on to something else.”
If that nurse intends to stay in nursing, she’s not done with COVID. In a functioning society, we would dispense with restrictions that don’t make sense under current conditions with current variants. Unfortunately, we don’t have a functioning society.
We have people who see wearing a mask to be a virtue regardless of its effectiveness or practicality against a given variant. It’s good for its own sake for part of the new normal.
On the other hand, we have other people who see the removal of any restriction as proof that restriction or condition was always wrong and only the dumbest dumb stupid head would have ever had the restriction in place in the first place.
For this reason, many who supported restrictions when they made sense or they thought they made sense at the time are loathe to remove them lest they be called dumb stupidheads by their opponents.
At this point, it’s silly to imagine that people can declare themselves “done” with something that’s still killing Americans at a solid pace. But it’s probably past time for the government to be the one making the calls about these issues, particularly with as little credibility as they have. Leave the decisions in the hands of individuals and businesses to make their own decisions about how we proceed. It would be great if these decision makers could keep their egos out of it, but that might be too much to ask.
I should also add there’s reason to be optimistic about the pandemic phase or COVID actually ending with the anti-viral pills for COVID-19 becoming more readily available. I’m hopeful that we will be able to truly call the COVID-19 pandemic as truly being over, though probably not on a day when 4,000 died of it and the ICUs are filling up.