Donald Trump’s Save America PAC paid over $108,000 for the first six months of 2023 to Hervé Pierre Braillard, a French-American fashion designer who is Melania Trump’s stylist for years, for “strategy consulting.” What kind of consulting justifies such high compensation?
Can Special Prosecutor Jack Smith convince a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Donald Trump didn’t believe his own lies when he suggested to his lawyers and subordinates that he’d been cheated out of the 2020 election, all with a Richard II-sized dollop of plausible deniability?
Special Counsel Jack Smith has indicted Donald Trump on charges that require a jury to believe that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and then conspired to change the results. If Trump genuinely believed that he won, he will defeat this round of January 6th-related charges.
Former President Donald Trump criticized Biden’s decision to give cluster bombs to Ukraine. “Joe Biden should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine–he should be trying to END the war and stop the horrific death and destruction being caused by an incompetent administration,” Trump said in a press release.
It is more likely than not that Donald Trump will be on trial, facing prison time, during the 2024 election campaign. It is also more likely than not that he will be the Republican nominee for President of United States. So it’s entirely possible that he will become president behind bars. And the Constitution doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.
Audio has allegedly captured a conversation in which Donald Trump appeared to discuss classified military documents that he knows he wasn’t supposed to have. Trump’s spokesperson claimed that he was “speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously.”
Denial is neither a river in Egypt nor just a psychological defense mechanism identified by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. It’s the guiding principle of President Biden’s reelection campaign.
Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans, including most Democrats, don’t want Biden to run again because they think he’s too old. This is not new information—Biden and the Democrats knew voters were concerned about his age four years ago, when they signaled his intention to be a one-term, transitional president.
Nevertheless, he decided to run again.
Two weeks after he announced his 2024 campaign, Biden’s approval rating fell to his all-time low, 36 percent in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. No president in the history of modern polling has won reelection with numbers this low at this stage in the cycle.
Yet he remained in the race.
Biden faces two challengers, neither of whom has been taken seriously by the media, run TV campaign ads or held a major rally. Despite being repeatedly ridiculed as a fringe anti-vaxxer and kooky New Age self-help author, respectively, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson are polling at a total of 25% among Democratic primary voters against an incumbent president. Compare that to Bernie Sanders at this point in the 2016 campaign; he was at 15% yet nearly took the nomination away from Hillary Clinton. RFK and Williamson aren’t as surprisingly strong as Biden is shockingly weak.
In 1968, when LBJ announced he wouldn’t run again—after the Tet Offensive—he was polling better than Biden is doing now.
And Biden persists.
But he refuses to break a sweat. Democrats tell The Hill that “Biden’s circle would like to run a ‘light’ campaign this time around, too,” as he did in 2020 when he used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to campaign from his basement in Delaware. Biden doesn’t want any debates. He’s running on the same policies as 2020. Such deflection reflects Democrats’ refusal to acknowledge how voters perceive the president: feeble, erratic, falling down every other week, possibly senile. A hard-charging 50-state campaign full of big rallies and vigorous debates and town halls could counter that image, but Biden isn’t up to it and/or his aides are in denial. They won’t even work up a fresh issues platform.
This is a not a reelection bid. It’s a slow fade.
Never mind our guy, Democrats are thinking, their guy is in real trouble. Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee and he’s facing multiple criminal charges that could land him in prison for nearly half a millennium! Legal woes may not be hurting him with spite-voting Republican primary voters (quite the opposite), but wait for the general election! Joe Biden will be sitting pretty!
Except that the Hunter Biden laptop stuff could well be at a full merry boil by then. Did Joe “Big Guy” Biden accept $5 million from a Ukrainian energy company as a bribe in return for getting a prosecutor who was looking into that company fired—a company that employed his son in a country in which the U.S. is now involved in a proxy war? Maybe yes, maybe no, but House Republicans might well turn up evidence of Joe’s perfidy big enough to make voters forget about Trump’s penchant for hoarding top-secret memos.
Democrats do not appear concerned about this possibility.
Wildest of all, no one—not the president, not Democratic leaders, not even Democratic voters—seem at all worried about putting Trump on trial during an election campaign.
They endlessly declaimed the yucky incivility of Trump and his supporters chanting “lock her up” about Hillary (mere words), yet are untroubled by the optics of Democratic prosecutors, one of whom won elected office by promising to go after Trump, actually working to put the Republican frontrunner and most recent Republican president, behind bars. Election Day 2024 might find Trump in prison.
Yes, Democrats, this is a problem. Trump is not merely a candidate. He’s an iconic populist, the leader of a movement. You’d have to go back to Huey Long to identify another American political figure as simultaneously beloved and reviled. The January 6th Capitol riot followed Trump’s obviously false claims of election fraud; how will Trump’s followers react to the factual spectacle of his being handcuffed and confined to jail—by Democratic prosecutors conducting politically-motivated prosecutions—during a presidential campaign? How can a two-party system where one party’s candidate is locked away in a prison cell still call itself a democracy? Democrats don’t care. They just want Trump gone, yet they’re not willing to run a viable candidate with a realistic strategy to beat him at the polls.
There is nothing to fear but the pigheaded obliviousness of those who would back their adversaries into a corner with no escape.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
“I would like to be less controversial,” Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier . “I find the press is extremely dishonest, and if I’m not combative, I don’t get my word across.” His remarks occurred during a contentious interview.
Democrats who are currently prosecuting Donald Trump promised in their election campaigns to do so. Now Trump is promising to do the same thing to Biden if he gets elected. Here comes an endless cycle of spite-based lawfare.
“Trump always gets all the coverage,” an adviser to one of Trump’s opponents tells Politico. “This is what it’s like to run against Trump.”
Poor babies! If only Trump’s rivals could do something to get attention.
Trump gets more media attention because he’s unpredictable and therefore interesting. “Listen, because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those [Trump rallies] on the air,” CNN President Jeff Zucker explained in an effort to defend the fact that his network covered more of Trump’s live appearances than Hillary Clinton’s. Ratings drive revenue. Why air Clinton’s cut-and-paste stump speeches—a campaign staple that should have remained in the 19th century—when you know bored viewers will tune away?
Memo to Hillary: you could have played the same game. If you had, you might have won.
Trump’s secret sauce is out there in plain sight. If one of his viewers wants to mount a serious challenge to the former president’s current lead, they ought to try out his formula for attracting free media: ditch the boring scripted speeches, speak extemporaneously, identify voter concerns that politicians have never addressed before, defy party orthodoxy, avoid jargon, make fun of other candidates, use straightforward, simple language.
In a political world of bores and prigs, Donald Trump is entertaining. Hey Republicans! You can do it too!
During his first campaign Trump hammered away at deindustrialization. “George,” he said on ABC’s “This Week,” I’ve gone all over this country over the last three—really, more the eight weeks than ever before. And I’ve gone over and I’ve seen factories that are just empty, beautiful factories, although now they’re not so beautiful, because they’re starting to crumble. But I’ve seen buildings that used to house thousands and thousands of people and they’re just empty. You can buy them for $2. And I stayed in New York…Pennsylvania…Carrier, Ford…I want them to come back.” No American politician had ever spoken to the hollowing out of the Rust Belt before, much less promised to reform trade agreements to protect U.S. manufacturing jobs. It won him the Midwest and the election.
Who would have thought that so many Republicans agreed with him that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake? He understood something other Republicans didn’t: it was always Pat Buchanan’s party.
Trump takes chances. He’s bold and brash. He doesn’t give a F. Which is why his supporters love him.
Wanna win? Embrace the risky lifestyle, anti-Trump Republicans! You have nothing to lose but the Republican nomination—which you’ll lose otherwise.
N.B.: This advice is not for all of Trump’s rivals. Nikki Haley, the Republicans’ Kamala Harris, sits in low single digits. Like the Clive Owen character in the movie “Inside Man,” however, she’s exactly where she wants to be. She’s running for vice president; she needs to be noticed without exuding the Bernie Sanders-level charisma that intimidates a presidential nominee. Chris Christie is a Fury out to hound Trump just because. Asa Hutchinson wants people to know he’s alive. (It’s not working.) No one, including Mike Pence, knows why Mike Pence is in the race.
“[Trump] has a wide lead because he dominates the conversation,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, another challenger, said on Fox News. “And I think the press—and you know I don’t want to fault the press—but that’s all they want to talk about. If we keep talking about the former president, frankly, I’m sure he’s sitting at home in Mar-a-Lago smiling and laughing because they’re giving him the nomination.”
Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Doug Burgum are classic attentistes. If and when something happens to Lord Trump, God of the RealClearPolitics National Average, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Shamed, running 51 to 53% in the polls and rising—if and when he chokes on a taco bowl, goes to prison, is eaten by vengeful orcas, whatever, please, God, they pray nightly, do something—the attentistes will vie for the title of heir apparent to the throne of Maga-stan. Until that time, soon may it come, the Great Orange One reigns supreme and the attentistes defend him against persecuting prosecutorial Democrat infidels, vowing fealty and obeisance as they bide their time.
Waiting around like a toad hoping that Trump will die or go to prison before next summer’s Republican National Convention is not a serious strategy. True, Trump is old and fat and never exercises; he is under indictment on serious criminal charges. Still, odds are he’ll survive and remain free on appeal for at least a year. The fact that DeSantis has raised hundreds of millions of dollars speaks to how easily donors can be persuaded to waste cash on a high-risk investment.
DeSantis et al. face a choice. They can keep on keeping on, waiting to fight for Trump’s spot if and when he drops out, wallowing in wonkdom (c.f., DeSantis’ “medical authoritarianism” and “cultural Marxism”) as the electorate and TV producers fight their collective urge to fall asleep.
Or they can become interesting.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
