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.”