The 2024 campaign really doesn’t get started until after Labor Day later this year. But if things continue to happen the way they have recently been happening, we may find ourselves shortly facing a 2024 Presidential election in which our side (read: Joe and the Dems) will find themselves equally matched.
And the possibility that the GOP will reclaim the Oval Office is not because Trump will win the GOP primaries and go on to win the whole shebang. It’s the possibility that Trump won’t win the primaries in enough states to be the GOP candidate, which means he won’t headline the GOP slate in 2024.
And what this means is that Joe may find himself not just in a very tight race, but in a contest that maybe he won’t win, for the simple reason that he’s guaranteed re-election if his 2024 opponent, or one of his 2024 opponents is a guy named Donald Trump.
If Trump is the GOP nominee next year, he will be the only person in the entire history of our country to lose the popular vote for President three different times. And the reason that Trump will find himself in this unique category is because he never had the slightest intention of winning a Presidential election, or better yet, the idea of winning was at best, a very secondary thought.
What isn’t understood about Trump is that by the time he became a real player in the New York real estate market, the whole real estate thing had become, for him, a big bore. I say this because he’s the only real estate developer in a market comprised of mega-developers who put real estate behind him and jumped into other money-making endeavors as fast as he could.
Clothing stores never sold items called Zeckendorf shirts or Helmsley ties. But it was Trump’s move into media which marked a complete departure from the usual business activities associated with real estate, as well as giving him a degree of public impact that would make it easier for him to move into political life.
One other thing Trump had going for him when he decided to become a political player is that, in a business sector (real estate development) where avoiding risk is the single, most important consideration, Trump was uniquely not risk averse. He couldn’t care less if a project went bust, he would just make up some story and go on to the next project, bank financing or not.
Which meant that Trump had it way over all the competition in the 2016 GOP primaries, because he could say the craziest and most far-out things because he didn’t care whether he won or lost. And remember that Trump was the very first national candidate in either party who built a whole campaign around a slogan – Make America Great Again – which he owned!
In other words, Trump did in politics what he has done his whole professional life – build a brand. And even if the MAGA vote doesn’t win a national election, what’s wrong with having 15 million people buying whatever products you sell them from a baseball cap to an overpriced book containing a bunch of letters that maybe you did and maybe you didn’t receive?
I suspect that the reason that all of a sudden, the GOP primary field is getting crowded with dip shits like Asa Hutchinson, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum (who??), Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, et. al., is because everyone’s smelling Trump’s blood in the water and that other dip shit, Ron DeSantis, seems to have sputtered out.
But even if Trump becomes the second Presidential candidate to run a national campaign from a jail cell, there’s nothing which prevents him from promoting his MAGA brand from Butner or Otisville and cashing in.
Which is why I’m hoping that Trump remains a 2024 candidate running against Joe, even if he runs on a third-party line which will guarantee that Joe will remain behind the Resolute desk for four more years beginning on January 20, 2025.
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