Sooner or later, you just knew it was going to happen. One of the 2024 GOP hopefuls would start sayi9ng out loud what they are all saying to themselves, which is – when is Trump going to go away?
But of course, you don’t come right out and tell him to quit. You begin by raising some ‘concerns’ about his presence in the 2024 race. And then when the volume of concerns starts to approach a real loud pitch, then the knives start to come out, the head is severed from the body so to speak, and to all intents and purposes politically speaking, Trump is as good as dead.
First we had Chris Christie last week on CNN, who said that Trump’s behavior was ‘inexcusable.’ Then yesterday, Mike Pence told the Wall Street Journal that he wouldn’t defend the ‘very serious allegations’ made against Trump.
And last night, when Trump showed up at his Bedminster club and made an angry, defiant public statement about the indictment, the only network which carried the speech live was Fox. And the bottom line is that Trump may still get nominated with support from Fox viewers, but that population isn’t enough to get him across the national finish line on November 5th of next year.
Trump’s biggest problem is not the fact that he took secret documents home when he left D.C. in 2021. It was that such documents may contain information that would put the lives of government agents and employees at risk. This point was made again and again by various anti-Trump pundits who no doubt were fed this narrative by DOJ staff working on the case. If anything, it sounds exactly like what will be said to the jury in the government’s opening remarks.
Remember Scooter Libby? He was Vice President Cheney’s staff chief who was convicted in 2007 of leaking the name of a CIA agent – Valerie Plame -to a reporter from The New York Times. The agent was operating under standard CIA rules which prohibited anyone from disclosing her government status or her name.
Libby was convicted of lying about the leakage and while he never served jail time, he paid a $250,000 fine and lost his law license because he was a convicted felon.
Who pardoned Libby which allowed him to return to the practice of law? Donald Trump – who else, right?
But the bottom line is that creating a situation in which a clandestine operative of one of our intelligence services is publicly identified is just something you don’t do. And the fact that members of Trump’s GOP cheering squad are beginning to talk about this out loud tells me that the spigot has now been turned on slightly and the dripping is beginning to occur.
By the way, for all the talk about how Trump has this massive, MAGA army just waiting to march down the street with their AR-15’s, when Trump’s motorcade pulled out of the front gate at Doral yesterday there were maybe a hundred supporters standing there waving flags and cheering him on. The size of the crowd at the courthouse in downtown Miami was just as ‘large.’
Now if Trump can’t pull out a decent crowd in Florida, he really is on his way to becoming a dead duck which is a concern to me because I have said many times that I want him to run against Joe in 2024.
Lose the national popular vote for the third time? Please dear God, please give Trump the chance to pull that one off.
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