The last time that someone ran a national Presidential campaign from a jail cell was Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, who got almost 4% of all the votes cast in 1920. Remember a guy named Donald Trump? He used to be President of the United States. Maybe if Letitia James or Cy Vance can come up with some juicy investigative results, Trump can try to outperform Debs in 2024.
Trump stayed out of sight from January 20th until yesterday, when he showed up at the CPAC conference in Orlando to make a much-ballyhooed ‘return’ to public life. I fell asleep after 60 minutes into his incredibly boring speech, so I missed the recitation of the enemies list as well as his final prediction that the GOP would take back the Senate and the House in 2022.
Meanwhile, for all his rather muted bluster and usual bullshit about the ‘millions’ of illegals coming into the country because Joe has refused to put the finishing touches on his beloved wall, even the CPAC crowd is beginning to sell him out. This morning, the Fox pundits were talking about how Trump ‘won’ the Presidential straw poll with 55% of the votes.
In other words, almost half the people who attended CPAC and voted in the poll don’t want Trump to stick around. That’s a great victory? And let’s not forget that CPAC allegedly represents the Trump ‘base.’
I think the best thing we can do to maintain the Congressional blue edge in 2022 and the White House in 2024 is to figure out some ways to keep Trump visible and in the race. Let’s not forget that the mid-term campaign gets underway in six months – it gets serious right after Labor Day, 2021.
So, between now and then, the GOP has to figure out which party luminaries will set the tone both for that campaign and the next Presidential contest in 2024. Obviously, there are already some names out there – Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, and maybe a new one, Kristi Noem.
Noem is the Governor of South Dakota who refused to issue any kind of lockdown order and meanwhile the percentage of Covid-19 deaths in her state happens to be higher than what her state’ represents as a proportion of the country’s population as a whole.
Talking about Covid-19, I couldn’t get over how Trump kept bragging that everything being done by Joe about the virus was just implementing the Trump ‘plan.’ There was no Trump plan. When Joe’s team took over, the Trump bunch couldn’t even tell them how many vaccine doses were lying around.
For those of us who want to see the GOP retain its status as America’s minority party (by that I don’t mean attracting minorities, if you know what I mean) the best part of Trump’s harangue last night was what he didn’t say. There wasn’t one, single word about what happened in D.C. on January 6th. Not a word from Trump or from any other CPAC speaker, not one word.
I am still waiting for one of the ‘fake news’ pundits, just one, to figure out what happened in Georgia on January 5th. You may recall that the night before the election, Trump went down to Georgia and held a big rally in Dalton, which happens to be the most pro-GOP part of the state. It’s so pro-GOP that the Congressional rep is none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The next day, the GOP won Greene’s Congressional District by a 6-to-1 margin. Meanwhile, Georgia still sent two Democrats to sit in the Senate, the first time this has happened when Democrats held the White House since 1976. So much for the impact of the Trump ‘base.’
I’m seriously thinking of sending a donation to the PAC which Trump claims will be used to support GOP candidates who agree with his ideas. Of course, his ability to finance the outcome of elections depends on how much money he’ll need to spend to avoid ending up in the can.
Whether he’s in a jail cell or his Mar-a-Lago apartment, let’s do everything we can to help Trump run again in 2024.
