Trump’s mythical stolen election
As I have previously written, I would like to see both Joe Biden and Donald Trump go away from the political scene.
In brief, they are both unfit for office, any office, they mostly have terrible ideas and they bring with them enough baggage to polarize everyone. Biden is also clearly too old; when I say too old, I don’t mean he’s been alive on Earth too many years, I mean he’s exhibiting far too many of the signs of decline associated with aging.
With that preamble out of the way, I have to revisit Donald Trump, mainly because of his enduring influence over the Republican Party and the likelihood he’ll be running for president again.
Clearly, Trump remains popular. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that he’s either tied or within one or two points of hypothetical 2024 match-ups with Biden, Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. Reading most of the standard mainstream press, you’d think he’s perceived as basically, literally, Hitler. But that’s obviously not true. A vast proportion of the American public would prefer to see him back in the White House than see a Democratic president, flaws and all.
To some extent, that’s obviously because a large segment of the population will always prefer a Republican over a Democrat. And with the Democrats incapable
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On the other hand, Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis polled fairly well in those hypothetical matchups, too, getting within three to four points of the Democratic names tested, with many undecided because DeSantis doesn’t have the same national recognition as the others. Perhaps DeSantis is a stronger governor than he would be a presidential candidate. We’ve seen Republican governors with conservative cred like Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry implode under the national spotlight.
But there’s good reason to encourage someone-other-thanTrump to carry the Republican mantle. And that reason is simple: Trump’s promotion of the idea he won the 2020 election shows he is incapable of engaging with reality.
A recent report from a group of conservative legal luminaries including former Sen. John Danforth and former federal judges Michael Luttig and Michael McConnell, “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” is worth a read. It goes through, point-bypoint, state-by-state, argumentby-argument, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and logically
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dispatches with such ideas.
“In all fifty states and at the national level there are transparent recount and election contest procedures designed to allow candidates to investigate and litigate claims of voter fraud and corruption,” the report notes. “The Trump campaign and its supporters had full access to these remedies and used them in 64 proceedings in the states we examine, and in each instance, their claims of fraud and miscount failed.”
Read it for yourself, then compare it against the conduct and words of Trump. He tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find the votes.” With that alone, Trump did more than anyone try to fraudulently influence the outcome of the election. Those are just the facts.
It is a sad reflection on American politics that those with the strongest commitments to limited government, defense of the original meaning of the Constitution, free markets and the rule of law have really nowhere else to go but a GOP with a loon like Trump as the figurehead.
But, again, the Democrats are perpetually hellbent on beclowning themselves with their wokeisms, alienating many Americans who otherwise might agree with their policy objectives.
All of this is to say: Yeah, American politics are a mess.
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