Okay folks, now it really begins. The Iowa GOP caucuses are in 2 weeks minus 1 day. New Hampshire is the following week. Two weeks later we have the Nevada GOP caucus, two weeks after that we have South Carolina and Michigan a couple of days after that.
So, between today and the end of February, 159 delegates will be chosen to nominate someone at the GOP national convention on July 17th.
I’m only going to focus on the Republic(an) Party unless those so-called Progressives in the Democrat(ic) Party does something remarkably stupid and commit political suicide by sabotaging Joe’s decision to seek a second term.
But who knows? Maybe the so-called Progressive wing of the Democrat(ic) Party really is that dumb. After all, I know some people who claim to be progressive Democrats and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and the 100,000 votes that Nader racked up in Florida effectively handed the Presidential election that year to George Bush.
I just watched a speech that Trump gave at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, and in the first 4 minutes and 30 seconds of his speech, he told no less than four blatant lies, including claiming that the gasoline price under his Administration was a buck less than it was, and that he sent back more ‘gang members’ who illegally crossed the border than any other President had ever done.
But the best was his comment about how interest which were ‘the lowest of all time’ under him had now climbed back to a level which made it impossible for anyone to buy a home. Now in fact, the current rate, which is around 7.5%, is where it was in 2008. It dropped down to less than 4% in 2018 because of the Pandemic, which Trump continues to claim that he ‘solved’ the ‘China flu’ problem by not listening to Anthony Fauci and those other liars working for the Deep State.
But Trump then went on to say (and this is the point when I turned the video off) that even if rates were lower, conservatives wouldn’t be able to get mortgages because the banks only would deal with liberals, which was a policy forced on the banks by government regulators working for ‘crooked Joe.’
I can’t imagine that a single person cheering for Trump at one of his rallies could ever take something that loony to be a serious reason why they should vote for Trump again.
You would think that someone whose entire Presidential campaign is defined by the continued bitching about how the 2020 election was stolen from him would begin to lose support from at least a large minority of the people whose votes in the upcoming primaries and caucuses will determine who leads the red team into the contest against ‘crooked Joe.’
In fact, the only reason why Nikki Haley is touted as having become a serious competitor to Trump is because she has picked up the support that Ron DeSanctimonious has lost. In mid-September the New Hampshire polls showed Trump with a 31-point lead over DeSantis and now he’s got an 18-point lead over Birdbrain Haley, but that’s a lot of ground for her to make up in 3 weeks.
And if Trump cleans Haley’s clock in Iowa, where right now he has a 32-point lead, and then sticks it to her in New Hampshire, even if he wins that primary by only 7 or 8 points, you’ll see that all the talk about how Trump is the wrong person to represent the GOP in 2024 will begin to disappear.
Which brings me to the all-important question for today: What will happen if we actually elect (or re-elect) someone who can stand up in front of a public audience and say something as loony as what he said about the banks not lending money to conservatives and keep a straight face?
I’ll tell you what will happen, notwithstanding how various liberal influencers and experts (What is fascism, and is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in. - Vox) would prefer to call him an autocrat or some other term which stops short of making him into the 21st Century version of Hitler.
Not one, goddamn thing will happen for the very simple reason that what Trump says and what he does has absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Until Trump took over the Oval Office in 2017, the Presidency was considered to be primarily an informational exercise in which the President informed the country about important events. Hence, only the President delivered a State of the Union speech each year.
But Trump was the first President to use social media as a method for informing America (and the rest of the world) about what everyone needed to know. And how he defines the content of his narratives has absolutely nothing to do with reality or honesty or anything else, except what will entertain the people who tune in.
The sooner that Nikki Haley and the other 2024 GOP wannabees stop taking themselves so seriously and begin to think of themselves as competing with Trump for who will open on Broadway next year instead of closing in New Haven, maybe one of them will have a shot at the big prize.
If not, not.
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