I talked yesterday about how the Biden team, and the top leaders of the democrat party are assuming that Joe Biden can win another term-because they assume he will be facing Donald trump.
And we’ve been thru this before: 2/3 of the independents who will decide the election say in polls that they will not vote for Donald trump again.
Additionally, there is some chunk of republicans-whether it’s 15 percent or 25 percent- or whatever-
There is ‘some chunk’ of republicans who are also saying-they are ‘done’ with Trump. Would they vote for him again, over Biden, after another terrible two years of this guy?
Probably-
But- we know the basic ‘lay of the land’ on a Biden/Trump match up, again.
And while I have been putting a few qualifiers on another Trump run-such as:
-don’t count him out on anything-
And- we must assume he’s still the most likely nominee based on the one-third of diehard republicans who will never abandon him-
With those caveats still ‘valid’-I will also say this: the chances of Donald Trump getting the 2024 nomination- are- waning.
This is also true-because over the last several months and weeks- Donald Trump is doing the best he can to anger and alienate people.
Over the last few weeks-his silly, nasty, and out of the blue attacks on gov Ron DeSantis have had several major donors and two major conservative organizing groups say ‘we are done with trump. We will work for a DeSantis nomination’. Both Americans for prosperity and Club for Growth have said ‘we are out’ on Trump’.
As for me? The ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ stuff...and Trump’s attempt to lie about DeSantis’s record on covid -and his own-
That’s one thing.
To me? That’s trump’s attempt to define DeSantis early by muddying the waters on his own covid record-which i also think is fine-
But-whatever. Those attacks fell more in line with ‘that’s politics.
But the posts he featured on his truth-social account on Tuesday, attempting to smear Ron DeSantis as some sort of groomer or pedophile-go way too far, for me.
With those, Trump is now entering in the arena of nasty smears. Already disproven lies. And scummy behavior on Trump’s part.
As I tweeted yesterday….
And what I mean is-done. Will not go out of my way to defend him in the primaries and will not vote for him, myself.
If -after decrying the awful, indefensible, politics of personal destruction that has been used against him from the left-for seven or 8 years- trump is now going to engage in the same scummy activities and lying that the democrats have? Against his GOP opponents?
I have no interest in seeing him be the 24 nominee or a leader of this party, anymore. If, by some series of events, the 24 general election match up still turned out to be ‘Trump versus some democrat’, yes, I’d almost certainly vote for him again, because I don’t believe in sitting out elections ‘in a pout’....
I have often voted for the ‘best of two poor choices’ over my decades of voting...
But....if this is trump’s 2024 approach-I hope he loses in the primaries. After all the smears and lies, the left has used to ruin him...to have him leap to ruin Ron DeSantis and his 24 challengers with the same techniques? Is seriously disappointing, and scummy on his part.
If you missed the story because virtually all the news coverage yesterday was on Biden’s gas lighting speech.
Trump re-posted- and amplified- a long-time smear against Ron DeSantis...based on a photo of him at a high school graduation party way back when he was a teacher.
It shows him with a beer bottle in his hand. Posing for a photo with 3 or 4 high school senior girls.
The photo doesn’t show anything inappropriate. None of the girls are drinking. Ron has what looks like a beer bottle-but he was ‘of age’.
And it turns out that -in his last races for governor- Florida democrats and his opponents have used this same smear.... based on the same photo.
That’s how we already know the claim of Ron hitting on high school girls has been debunked. The girls in the photo have done interviews that say- he was a young teacher who stopped by two or three graduation parties that summer and this was one of them. He wasn’t ‘dating’ any of us. It was a teacher who stopped by a graduation party for a beer. Other parents were there, etc.
So-here’s Trump- forwarding a long-debunked smear that relates to Ron DeSantis in his 20s-and again-
It’s a dumb attack on DeSantis’ character, given all the scummy stories that have circulated around Donald Trump and women- for years.
For heaven’s sake-it’s clear that he paid Stormy Daniels hush money. It’s just that his -perfectly legal- affair with her had nothing to do with politics, or what sort of president he would be.
So, a lot of us defended him on that.
But-here he goes smearing DeSantis?
Come on.
This had reporters rushing to try to get a comment out of Ron DeSantis yesterday, and for a second time, he brushed it off as ‘Trump nonsense’.
Once again-that’s a perfectly crafted response to trump’s nutty nastiness, here. It had to have trump fuming, again, about how he cannot draw Ron DeSantis into some sort of silly slap fight.
I have said before- with the covid-related attacks-this is a dumb strategy by trump that will end up backfiring, because he comes off looking like the petty wingnut and DeSantis comes off looking like the measured adult.
And if these two- do-end up being the ‘showdown’ event in the primaries, as expected, which candidate is going to be more appealing to most republican and independent conservative voters who go into the race-already suffering-from trump fatigue?
Their reaction is going to be: really? This sort of jackassery-again? -from Trump? Nope.
And they’ll vote ‘Ron DeSantis’.
And according to Fox News- the DeSantis team’s strategy here is to ignore trump and watch him get increasingly agitated and snotty.
And so far, it’s working.
Trump wants to ‘go low’...and DeSantis is only going to look better and better if his response is to make it known he’s taking the ‘high road’ before adding in a dig that he knows is going to infuriate Trump... Like...I’m still in power. He’s not. I’ve got more important things to do. He doesn’t.
My voters elected me with 70 percent of the vote. Trump lost after a single term.
Even those little digs-simple truths-will drive Donald Trump bat-crap crazy.
photo credit: Getty Images