Yesterday I received a letter from the DNC asking me for some dough. I notice that the letter refers to the GOP as ‘MAGA Republicans,’ which is what the Democrat(ic) Party will try to make 2024 all about.
And this will be the blue team’s strategy whether Trump is or isn’t heading the ticket for the red team, which is to remind everyone of how far the GOP has moved into the alt-right space.
Because the problem for the Dems is that with the Florida indictments and probably another raft of charges coming down from Georgia, running a national campaign against Trump will be a piece of cake. But what if Trump’s no longer leading the charge for the red team? Then what do you do?
One of the legal issues in the current Smith-Trump imbroglio which appear to be overlooked is the fact that while Trump is claiming he innocently took classified materials out of the White House when he flew the coop on Joe’s inaugural day, the regulations covering how to protect classified documents didn’t kick into effect on January 20, 2021. Those rules had to be observed by Trump from the moment he took office in 2016.
I was security officer at Columbia University in the mid-1980’s, and the most important responsibility of my job was to make sure that everyone and anyone on the campus who might have access to classified data and documents possessed both the appropriate security clearance and was also advised about all security regulations and rules.
I had to maintain a roster with the names and security clearances of everyone who had access to classified research or classified data on the campus, I also had to give each and every one of these individuals a current statement covering the security rules, and this roster was subject to inspection by agents from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) and the FBI (you know what FBI means, okay?)
Whether he paid attention to the briefings or memos or not, Trump would have been subject to the same regulations and rules even before he was elected, because it is SOP to give the Presidential candidates of both major parties, security briefings during the campaign. And if Trump had started waving classified materials around in the Oval Office, for sure someone would have noticed what was going on and at least one of the many tell-all books published before 2020 would have mentioned this errant behavior in print.
There is simply no way that Trump can be found innocent of most of the 37 charges enumerated in the indictment that was handed down earlier this week. And let’s not ignore the fact that these charges are all found in a law known as the Espionage Act, and the word ‘espionage’ has always been a kind of behavior that nearly all Americans want to see prosecuted to the ‘full extent of the law’ (to steal a quite from Dragnet, among other TV shows.)
Which doesn’t mean that Trump will drop out of the 2024 race or even that he can’t win. As to the former, Trump wouldn’t be the first Presidential candidate to run a national campaign from jail – the Socialist Eugene Victor Debs was in jail during the entire 1920 campaign and still racked up 3.4% of the popular vote, which is three times a higher percentage than Jill Stein pulled for the Green Party in 2016.
As to the latter, if he runs again Trump will be the first candidate of a major party to lose the popular vote three times. But let’s not forget that what really counts are the electoral votes from three states – MI, PA, WI – which Trump flipped in 2016 and then lost in 2020 by less than 2% of the total popular votes counted in those states.
Trump may have just lost Florida to DeSantis. Not that DeSanctimonious is running such a strong campaign, but because Trump stopped off at a popular eatery in Miami’s Little Havana, promised the crowd he would spring for everyone’s eats and then skipped out before anyone had time to order anything at all. Word gets around fast in the Cuban community.
Anyway, back to what I said at the top of this post, which is that I believe that Joe will try to make the 2024 campaign a contest not between himself and the GOP nominee, but between himself and he so-called MAGA ‘movement,’ particularly if the GOP continues to wage electoral and rhetorical war against Woke.
Granted, I live in a very blue state (Massachusetts) but all the electronic signs on every interstate highway are carrying a positive message about pride. I’ve never seen that one before.
Comments