Don’t be distracted by Biden’s weakness; Trump is still the candidate he wants to run against.
Don’t be distracted by Biden’s weakness; Trump is still the candidate he wants to run against.
I had to be up early this morning (stealing some of Dominic Pino’s boundless wisdom so I could discuss striking Biden administration staffers with our friend Brian Kilmeade on Fox). As a result, I took in a wide array of television and web coverage of former president Trump’s 30-point win in the Iowa caucuses last night.
What I found most curious was the Trump crowd’s crowing that Democrats woke up this morning to the news that their plan has failed — because, the irrational exuberance goes, Trump looks strong while Biden is floundering. This misapprehends the Democrats’ plan, which, in fact, continues to be working to perfection.
The plan was built on the four indictments and sundry civil suits, all brought by Democratic partisans (led by the Biden Justice Department). The point of the lawfare siege, which is the target of Trump’s constant ire and is thus scoffed at by his fans as ineffective partisanship, was to get Trump nominated. In that sense, the siege has been effective beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams.
As intended, the indictments rallied the Trump base. That base is big and ornery enough to be decisive in the Republican-nomination contest, but it is woefully insufficient to carry its champion to victory in November: not nearly big enough, and its orneriness, while intimidating to Republican officials, catalyzes Democrats and center-left moderates to new heights of Trump hatred across the spectrum, from college-educated suburbanites to wild-eyed wizards of woke.
The Democrats know this because they’ve field-tested their strategy in election cycles since 2018: You work from winter into summer to get Trump-backed candidates nominated for state and federal offices, then you trounce those candidates when they run against Democratic nominees in the fall elections. The ultimate Trump-backed candidate is Trump himself, and the indictments have succeeded in ensuring that Republicans who would actually have had a decent shot at beating Biden got no traction.
The media–Democrat complex is dying to run against Trump — so much so that press outlets couldn’t contain themselves last night, announcing that he’d romped to victory while caucusing was still under way and before many Iowans had voted. Democrats want Trump to be the nominee, which requires convincing skeptical Republicans that he is a juggernaut who can roll over Biden. Hence the early victory projections last night that touted Trump potentially getting over 70 percent of the vote. At this point in the game, Democrats want you to believe Trump could annihilate Biden. Are they unnerved by Biden’s astonishingly low poll numbers? Sure they are — but that’s all the more reason to double down on inducing Republicans to nominate the one guy they’re confident he can beat, the guy he’s beaten before by laying low and letting Trump beat himself.
In reality, when the dust settled, Trump got about 51 percent in Iowa. That would be a huge margin in a normal primary, in which a broad field was making first impressions on voters. But this isn’t a normal primary. It’s, in effect, an incumbent primary in which everyone knows exactly what to expect if Trump were president again. Based on last night’s result, 49 percent of Republicans don’t want that. Some significant percentage of them will never vote for Trump under any circumstances. They’re not getting to know the options; they’re against the option they know quite well.
Mind you, Democrats have barely jumped into the election-messaging fray at this point. They haven’t yet begun the barrage of billions of dollars in negative campaign advertising they are going to start running at Trump once the GOP nomination is sewn up (which it may already be).
The biggest factor in Trump’s early clinching is the Democrats’ lawfare. Phil Klein explained this well a few weeks back. Before the first indictment, Ron DeSantis was within striking distance. Once the indictments began, the base rallied to Trump and he blew the field away. As Phil notes, even DeSantis now concedes that the indictments “distorted the primary.”
That was Part One of the Democrats’ plan. Now, Part Two is unfolding.
Sometime in the next week or two, we will get a verdict and judgment from Judge Arthur Engoron, the elected progressive Democratic judge in elected progressive Democratic New York attorney-general Letitia James’s civil fraud lawsuit. With the eleven-week trial now drawn to a close, expect Engoron to bang Trump with something close to the $370 million in disgorgement damages James is seeking (despite the absence of any fraud victims), in addition to putting Trump out of business. Maybe some or all of this will be reversed on appeal, but that process will take a year or more. In the interim, Trump will run for election judicially stamped as a fraudster who’s been put out of business (much of the country won’t care about the details, or know that the judge is a partisan hack). And remember, that’s only after the Trump organization was convicted of tax felonies in an earlier New York state criminal trial — the amounts were trivial, but the media–Democrat script will be to repeat the word felony and not dawdle over the details.
As I noted yesterday, as primary coverage shifts from Iowa to New Hampshire, Trump’s attention has to shift to lower Manhattan, where yet another federal civil trial, E. Jean Carroll II, starts today. That’s an opportunity for Democrats to remind voters that, in E. Jean Carroll I, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexual assault as well as defamation. Consequently, the one- to two-week trial commencing today, on additional, related defamation claims (because Trump continues berating Carroll), is only about damages. Carroll is seeking $10 million, double what she won last year.
Judge Lewis Kaplan has insisted that the second trial will not be a “do-over” because the liability issue (i.e., the finding that Trump committed the civil wrongs of sexual assault and defamation) was conclusively determined against Trump in the first trial, over which Kaplan also presided. As Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, put it in a ruling last week, “Mr. Trump is precluded from offering any testimony, evidence or argument suggesting or implying that he did not sexually assault Ms. Carroll, that she fabricated her account of the assault or that she had any motive to do so.” Yet Kaplan will permit Carroll, once again, to play the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump — in what he later dismissed as locker-room banter — bragged about being sexually aggressive with women. As predictable as the morning sun, Trump responded on Truth Social, branding Kaplan a “crazed, Trump hating Judge” who presided over an “Election Interference Witch Hunt, disguised as a trial, of a woman I have never met before.” Meantime, as I detailed yesterday, Trump and Kaplan are grappling over the latter’s refusal to grant a week’s adjournment, requested by Trump because the funeral in Florida for his mother-in-law is Thursday.
The next couple of weeks should be a hoot, no?
But here’s the thing: Hard as this is, Trump-sympathetic Republicans need for analytical purposes to set aside their seething over the Democrats’ exploitation of punitive legal processes against the former president. You need to put yourselves in the shoes of the country as a whole. Most Americans do not see this as you do. They vote, but they don’t follow politics closely. They are not attuned to the partisan machinations, the way incumbent Democrats convert the legal system into a campaign weapon. They know only the broad outlines of news coverage.
To the extent that the majority of the country has formed impressions, they are that Trump tried to game the system to steal an election he lost in 2020, that he probably brought his legal troubles on himself, and that they don’t want him to be president again. They see the Trump–Carroll escapade coming around again and they recoil. They hear Trump say, again and again, that he never knew this woman, and then the press shows them the photograph introduced at the first trial, depicting Trump and Carroll chatting, apparently amiably, at a party decades ago. They are reminded of the Access Hollywood tape, they hear that two other women at the last trial testified that they, too, were subjected to unwanted sexual advances (although not to the degree of rape, which Carroll alleges). They hear Trump ranting that all of these women are lying — just like the porn star and the Playboy model; the government officials who said there was no material voting fraud that would have overturned the 2020 election; DeSantis, who had the temerity to notice that Trump seemed like a rubber-stamp for Anthony Fauci; and, well, nearly every Trump administration official who started out lauded by the president as the very best of the best but ended up leaving in acrimony and warning the country that Trump oughtn’t be trusted with power.
Get ready. That is what the coverage has just begun telling the public. That is what the next year, starting today, is going to be like, day by day and commercial break by commercial break, as we get closer to November.
I don’t know if any of the criminal cases will make it to trial, but I do know that Democrats will try very hard to get the 2020 election-interference case to trial because they like their chances with a D.C. jury and an Obama-appointed judge whose predisposition against Trump is patent. Is Trump being subjected to abusive prosecutions? Yes — Democrats intentionally timed these indictments in order to affect the 2024 campaign. But that doesn’t change what the reporting will be. The election-interference charges are legally dubious, but coverage of the pretrial and (potential) trial proceedings will remind the public of Trump’s mendacious “stop the steal” campaign, as well as the Capitol riot — which, outside of Trump circles, is loathed as a national disgrace.
Even the preposterous case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will remind the public about Trump’s alleged flings with the aforementioned porn star and Playboy model while Melania was home at the time with their newborn son, and that Trump dealt with the fallout from these dalliances by turning to his “fixer,” Michael Cohen — since convicted of various felony charges. Are Bragg’s false-bookkeeping charges ridiculous? Sure, but that’s not what the coverage will be about.
The Georgia RICO case on election-interference charges is flying under the media radar for now because it is mired in scandal and incoherence. Mainly, we hear that four defendants have pled guilty — which makes the case sound credible because the reporting obscures that the defendants pled to trivial charges (not RICO or anything close to it) all calling for no prison time (despite the hyperbole about a plot “to destroy our democracy”). The Georgia case is duplicative of the federal election-interference case, so the press will not need to cover it extensively to keep the “stop the steal” business and the Capitol riot front-and-center.
In the Mar-a-Lago documents case, the charges are stronger but it seems increasingly unlikely that a trial will take place before Election Day. Still, there will be pretrial proceedings. Coverage of them will remind the public that Trump recklessly caused highly classified national-defense intelligence to be shipped to his resort club in Florida, refused to return it for over a year, and then caused a grand jury to be misled about whether it had been surrendered to the FBI as lawfully demanded by a subpoena.
Not helpful.
This is what the saturation coverage is going to be for the next ten months. It is foolish to think that because many (though far from all) Republicans are satisfied to wave all of this away as an “election interference witch hunt,” the majority of the voting public is going to feel that way.
Right now, Trump couldn’t be doing better and Biden is reeling. Yet they’re essentially tied — some polls showing Trump slightly ahead (as our editors note), some showing Biden slightly ahead, some even. Could things get worse for Biden? Of course — he is Biden, after all. But you have to figure he’s now close to his floor (which is higher than it would be if Trump were not the opponent). The onslaught against Trump, meanwhile, is just getting started. And you’ve never seen ugly like the ugly this is going to be.
The Democrats’ plan hasn’t failed. It’s working.