Why the Democrats are so scared of Trump
Donald J. Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024, according to the New York Times.
After interviewing “nearly 50 Democratic officials, from county leaders to members of Congress,” as well as “disappointed voters” who backed Joe
Biden in 2020, the
Times reported last weekend that Democrats “from coast to coast are quietly worrying about Mr. Biden's leadership, his age and his capability to take the fight to former President Donald J. Trump a second time.”
It's an apparent concession to the inevitability of a second Trump candidacy. You have to read all the way down to paragraph 31 before the story even mentions another Republican hopeful.
The Times quotes terrifiedsounding Democrats around the country: terrified that Joe Biden will run for re-election, terrified that there's no consensus for anybody else, and most of all, terrified that if given the option, the American people will reelect Donald Trump.
The current series of Congressional hearings about the events of Jan. 6, scheduled to conclude just before the ballots mail out for the November elections, is “perhaps the last, best chance before the midterms [for Democrats] to break through with persuadable swing voters who have been more focused on inflation and gas prices,” the Times reported. “If the party cannot, it may miss its final opportunity to hold Mr. Trump accountable as Mr. Biden faces a tumultuous two years of a Republican-led House obstructing and investigating him.”
It's generous of the Times to invite all of us into the Democratic Party's strategy sessions. Now we know, not that we didn't, that the one-sided “investigation” into the former president's thoughts, words and actions on Jan. 6 is just a desperate attempt to do what every investigation so far has utterly failed to do, which is find Donald Trump guilty of something, anything, in order to prevent the American people from having the opportunity to put him back in office.
“People are really, really down,” Biden told the Associated Press on Thursday. “They're really down. The need for mental health in America, it has skyrocketed, because people have seen everything upset. Everything they've counted on, upset.”
That sounds a lot like President Jimmy Carter's July 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, better known by its informal title, the “malaise speech.”
On live television, Carter told the American people, “I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.”
It's as if the speech got stuck in the Democrats' teleprompter.
Carter spoke about “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and “the erosion of our confidence in the future threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Then he blamed OPEC for “the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours
waiting for gasoline” as well as “the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face,” called for more sacrifices, and asked Congress to give him “authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing.”
Yeah, no, said the American people, as they voted Jimmy Carter out of office the next year. No matter how hard the Democrats tried to demonize and ridicule the Warner Bros. movie star who had gone on to become governor of California—and they did try—Ronald Reagan was elected and re-elected. It worked out fine. The same scare tactics were tried in 2016, from both parties, when a real estate tycoon and reality TV star vowed to secure the border, drain the
swamp and put America first. Critics don't like to hear it, but the country enjoyed four years of peace and prosperity while Trump was president, and it's not all that easy, as we have now seen.
Under President Joe Biden, “Democrats are like, `What the hell is going on?'” Texas Democratic congressional candidate Jasmine Crockett told the Times, “Our country is completely falling apart.”
It's pretty clear what's going on in Texas. This week in a special election for a vacant congressional seat in a South Texas district where 84% of voters are Hispanic, Republican Mayra Flores defeated Democrat Dan Sanchez by a margin of 51% to 43% and flipped the seat red.
Flores and Sanchez will
face each other again in November in the newly redrawn district, where voters went for Joe Biden in 2020 by a 15-point margin, higher than Biden's 4-point margin among voters in the special-election district. The Democrats may ultimately win back that seat, but the trend away from automatic-blue voting among Hispanics is undeniable.
Between 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump picked up 10 points in Hispanic support, according to a post-election survey by Pew Research, especially notable given the relentless repetition in campaigns and in the media accusing Trump of “racist” border and immigration policies.
That supposedly surefire political messaging weapon has failed against Trump, and now panicked