It’s April Fools’ Day, so be wary of any strange headlines you see. Of course, some public-relations folks might advise that if you have some absurd scandal to admit or bad news to share, today is the day to do it. If it is sufficiently shocking, everyone will think it’s just a prank. Thanks to Dominic Pino and Noah Rothman for filling in for me last week.
On the menu today: There are about seven months until Election Day, but right now, Donald Trump’s road to victory in the 2024 presidential race looks surprisingly smooth; House Speaker Mike Johnson offers a few details about the “innovative” aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that the House will consider when it returns from recess — er, the “district work period”; and contemplating the lessons from last month’s trip to Ukraine.
A Winning Formula
If you’re an incumbent president running for reelection like Joe Biden, you definitely want to have a job-approval rating higher than 39.1 percent. As grim as that figure seems, that’s actually a bit higher than it has been in recent weeks.
If you’re Biden, you would prefer that people rate the state of the economy highly — they do not — and that they think the country is on the right track instead of headed in the wrong direction. Those numbers are similarly grim for an incumbent president.
If you’re Biden, you would prefer to be ahead in the head-to-head matchups in national polls, with or without the likely third-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein.
You would prefer to consistently lead in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That is not the case. You can find a good poll for Biden here and there, but the majority point to Trump leads — usually narrow, but sometimes not-so-narrow. A Fox News survey released March 27 had Trump ahead in Pennsylvania, 50 percent to 45 percent.
If you’re the Biden campaign, you’d like to see some poll numbers pointing to a chance to pick off a reddish state or two like Florida, Iowa, or North Carolina. So far, those numbers aren’t there.
If you’re pulling for Biden, you might even wonder if there was a chance of winning four of Maine’s electoral votes instead of only three, and realize that’s looking like a long shot, too. In fact, Maine as a whole could well turn red this year, at least based upon one poll conducted in mid February.
If you’re the Biden campaign, and you’re looking for recently competitive states that look pretty secure, you’re limited to Minnesota and New Hampshire. (Trump lost Minnesota by just 1.5 percent back in 2016.)
Add it all up, and you have a formula for Donald Trump winning more than 270 electoral votes in November.
Can things change and turn around? Absolutely. But Biden’s hopes rely on people who have already rejected him on some level changing their mind and signing up for another four years of his administration. While voters have a wide variety of concerns about Biden, the most widely shared one is that Biden is just too old for another four years in office. Earlier this year, an ABC news poll found that an astounding 86 percent of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term.
For perspective, 81 percent of Americans have positive feelings about Thanksgiving, and 78 percent have positive feelings about Christmas and Mother’s Day.
A Biden victory in 2024 will require at least some voters who currently think Biden is too old for another term to get comfortable with Biden’s age, or with the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over in the near future.
People know what they think of Joe Biden. They know what they think of Donald Trump, too. I am skeptical of the notion that a criminal conviction of Donald Trump will suddenly change the polling numbers dramatically. The overwhelming majority of Americans know that Donald Trump was impeached twice, that he was a notorious adulterer, and that over the past three decades, he’s been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits — both suing others and being sued himself.
Most voters recall Trump touting some cabinet member or staffer and boasting that he only hires the best people, only to start raging about them after they leave on bad terms. They know that Trump is a magnet for almost every kind of scandal imaginable, and that his social-media feed is an endless litany of tantrums, complaints, conspiracy theories, lies, and idle speciation about past wrongs to him justifying “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” (Hey, what’s the presidential oath of office again?)
Trump supporters may not know about every scandal and allegation, but they know about most of them and they either dismiss all of them or find them inconsequential compared to the prospects of another four years of Biden — or President Harris.
Just about anyone who is inclined to jump off the Trump bandwagon has done so already. He ranks among the most polarizing in American history. As of this morning, in the FiveThirtyEight average, 42.8 percent of respondents feel favorably toward Trump, and 52.5 percent feel unfavorably toward him, making him simultaneously quite unpopular and more popular than Biden and Harris.
Are there good reasons for Republicans to worry? Sure. The RNC looks spectacularly underfunded, and is prioritizing paying Trump’s legal bills. So far, 3.8 million Republicans, independents, and crossover Democrats have voted for Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary; Trump hasn’t expressed the slightest interest in reaching out to those voters. The fundamentals of the 2022 election — presidential-approval rating, right track/wrong direction numbers, perception of the state of the economy — all pointed to a red wave, but it didn’t materialize because the general electorate was not interested in MAGA candidates talking about election conspiracies and insisting Trump had won the 2020 election. Many Republican candidates like to believe that they speak for the “silent majority.” Well, if your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote, it may as well not exist.
But as unorthodox a candidate as Trump is, he’s running on the same message as every other challenger: “Everything stinks right now, and to change it, you need to elect me.” Variations of that message worked for Biden four years ago, for Trump (Hillary Clinton was a quasi-incumbent in 2016 as the continuation of Barack Obama’s policies), and for Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
At first glance, Biden and his supporters will argue that as the general-election campaign heats up, the electorate will see more of Trump and be reminded why they didn’t vote for him in 2020. And that’s always a possible scenario.
But he’s up against a man who chose to mark Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter with one tweet each; who has managed to alienate both Jews and Muslims with his shifting policies toward Israel; whose ability to win votes among African Americans is not what it once was; who’s quietly cutting funding for Medicare Advantage; whose son is a tax cheat, irresponsible gun owner, and a crook; who apologized for referring to an illegal immigrant as “an illegal”; and who is presiding over the worst inflation in more than a generation and a border policy that has proven disastrous and near-anarchic.
In other words, the Democrats’ hopes for retaining the White House rely on 81-year-old Joe Biden suddenly becoming a much better president and candidate than he has been thus far.
Mike Johnson: A Bill for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan Is Coming
House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking to former GOP congressman Trey Gowdy on Fox News last night:
What we have to do, in an era of divided government, historically as we are, is you’ve got to build consensus. If we want to move a partisan measure, I’ve got to have every single member, literally. And some things need to be bipartisan. Now, we’re talking about the supplemental that everybody’s heard so much about, which is the thing that the president presented several months ago. He called it “the national security supplemental.” And he included Ukraine, Israel, the Taiwan Indo-Pacific region, and also the border. And we said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” because we’ve all said, “we’re going to talk about national security, it begins at our own border.” So, we’ve been trying to use that, as the only leverage we have, to force change on the border. We’re still trying to get the president to use his executive authority. And most of the American people know that he has that authority, but he’s not using it. Because they opened the border intentionally.
When it comes to the supplemental, we’ve been working to build that consensus, we’ve been talking to all the members, especially now over the district work period. When we return after this work period, we’ll be moving a product. But it’s going to have, I think, some important innovations. The REPO Act — if we can use the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to allow the Ukrainians to fight them, that’s just pure poetry. Even president Trump has talked about the loan concept, where we set up — we’re not just giving foreign aid, we’re setting up a relationship where they can provide it back to us when the time is right. And you know, we want to unleash American energy. We want to have natural gas exports that will help un-fund Vladimir Putin’s war effort there. There are a lot of things we should do that make more sense, and that I think we’ll have consensus around. We’re putting that together, and we’ll be moving on it right after district work period.
Speaking of Ukraine. . .
ADDENDUM: Here’s the compendium of my coverage from Ukraine last month:
- The grim assessment from David Knowles, who hosts and produces the Daily Telegraph’s podcast Ukraine: The Latest, and national-security researcher and analyst Kyle Orton.
- Lviv resident Halyna Melnyk describing a Russian attack during her driving test, and her parents opening up their house to a flood of refugees.
- An interview with Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, and his blunt evaluation, “Without U.S. weapons, we have obviously started to lose.”
- Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, laying out how the Europeans have stepped up to provide weapons in the face of U.S. inertia.
- Kyiv Post editor Bohdan Nahaylo’s thoughts on whether Volodymyr Zelensky even wants to stay in power after the war ends.
- A tour of one of Ukraine’s secret drone factories — or at least, what I was allowed to reveal about one of Ukraine’s secret drone factories.
- Youth pastor Mark Sergeyev describing his family’s escape from occupied Melitopol and the grim fate of the Melitopol Christian Church.
Also, over at that other Washington publication I write for . . .
- Myroslava Luzina’s blunt message to House Speaker Mike Johnson: “His actions or his political stance is actually costing lives. So, he is the cause of more people getting dead at the front line, and behind the front lines, and in the occupied territories.”
- An interview with Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma legislature who is now the political head of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a group of Russians fighting alongside the Ukrainians against the Russian army, or as he calls it, “the Putinist army.”
And I’ve got a few more interviews I haven’t even had a chance to transcribe and turn into articles or columns yet. There are a decent number of columnists who have traveled to Ukraine, but I don’t think many have packed more reporting, from a wider variety of corners of wartime Ukrainian society, into a shorter amount of time than I have.
There are a lot of other war correspondents out there with way more experience in Ukraine, but I’m also a columnist. And that means that in addition to bringing you the stories of people like Melnyk and Zablotskiy and Ponomarev and Sergeyev, I can tell you exactly what I think. And I can end this column by asking: What do these people have to do to demonstrate they deserve our continued support, which mostly comes in the form of surplus arms?
What, their cause isn’t noble enough? They aren’t working hard enough, or they haven’t demonstrated they’re willing to make enough sacrifices? The enemy they’re fighting isn’t malevolent or dangerous enough?
Russia’s expanding and making changes to its military structure, in line with long-term planning for a direct conflict with NATO. What do you think happens if Russia wins the war in Ukraine?
If you’re a skeptic, what do you need to see to concur, “We ought to help these guys”? And if you haven’t seen it, is it because no one’s shown it to you? Or is it because you don’t want to see it? Or is it that there’s nothing anyone can show you that will convince you that the Ukrainians deserve our help?
No Ukrainian ever asked for this. The only thing most of them ever did to “provoke” an invasion was be born and live right next to a heavily armed former superpower that is run by a ruthless dictator who may have gone nuts during Covid and who dreams of a restored Russian empire. The Ukrainians aren’t asking us to fight for them or die for them. All they’re asking for are the tools to defend their lives, their land, and their independence.
If the United States of America isn’t willing to stand with these guys against the Russian war machine . . . just who are we willing to stand with?