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Talk Me into Supporting Trump Again
This came up today.
As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.
By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.
Let’s have a discussion. Should we, or should we not, encourage Mr. Trump to run again?
If he runs again, should we support him in the primaries over Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Cruz, Ms. Noem, others?
I take it as a given that all but one of us would support him in the general, if we are unfortunate enough to have him win the nomination.
My opinion (as someone who loves the man for his outspoken love of country and for all the good he did despite the array of forces stacked against him) is that we should not encourage him, not support him against other Republicans, but fall in line if he does get the nomination. My logic is that his history makes him toxic. He is likely the only candidate whom Mr. Biden could defeat. If elected, he would be even more ineffective than he was in 2017, when he used a historic alignment of forces to accomplish no major legislation, to appoint three sterling justices, to move an embassy, and to otherwise do nothing of lasting importance. Also, if re-elected, he could not stand for a third term of office.
Talk me out of it.
Published in General
If he runs, I’ll most likely vote for him in the Primary.
I rather like DeSantis where he is.
No, they fear what he represents. The citizen politicians. Ones that did not come up through the system and sell their souls and morals along the way.
He would have been a “lame duck” if he’d been re-elected in 2020. Why is it different if his terms are non-consecutive?
I agree. One thing is that he totally got played by Big Pharma and the NIH (and CDC). But really, he knew the job was bad when he took it, but he didn’t know just how very bad. When he first got into office he actually said (paraphrased) Can’t we all just get along? to the CIA.
NO idealistic patriotic politician would do any differently. Trump didn’t get it until after he actually left office. Up to the very end he still figured they would fight at least half fair, at least half follow the law. He was half right. And he’s had nearly two years to think about it.
I’m not one of those guys who says he was a bad man who did well. I think he was a good man labelled a bad man who did great. He did make mistakes — blowing out the budget was a mistake — but he’s still (I think) the only one who knows what’s going on, knows what’s right, and can’t be bought or threatened off.
I would almost say that I’d be pleased if he didn’t run and saved is own life. But if he runs, I’d support him.
Yeah, I hear that, but this is too personal to be symbolic, as far as I can see.
Because he’s not incumbent, there is no presumption of candidacy, no sense of propriety (and common sense) to dance with the one what brung ya.
Watch out. You’re going to get people saying the 4-year break broke his stride.
Agree with all of the above.
As things stand now, if Trump runs I lean towards supporting him all the way. I would have an expectation that he would have a much greater effect in reducing the unconscionable size and inappropriate actions of the federal government since this would be a large measure of why he would win the 2024 election.
In the meantime, there is a need to understand why some voters who say they are conservative but have adhered to the establishment Republican dynasties have acted so and what does it take to persuade them that has been the wrong path. There is work to be done demonstrating the rightness of the path set for us by the Founders in the Constitution. The delusion that individual freedom can exist in a pure democracy has taken hold in much of our population and it is heavily and falsely promoted by Leftists leaders through established institutions operated corruptly in defiance of the will of the people.
Or it made him much wiser.
Those sound like reasons he might lose an election, rather than differences between being a consecutive lame-duck and a non-consecutive lame-duck.
He did figure out a way: by an EO, he created a fourth level of bureaucrats across the executive agencies, and those in such classification could be fired without regard to civil service rules. But only one agency (OMB, I think it was) had completed its census by the time of the election, and the project lapsed till Biden reversed it. The one agency census showed that some 80% of its employees fit the new category, so had Trump been reelected and followed through on this project, thousands of bureaucrats would have been “relieved of their duties.” Elections have consequences.
Could Trump re-brand himself as the point-man in a generational struggle? Embrace his “lame-duck” status and make it a positive that he won’t be concerned about 2028 for himself, but rather for his VP DeSantis?
Yes.
He’s not a lame duck — He’d be a free bird. Like obama was for his second term. Wouldn’t have to care about running for election again. OTOH if he’s running blocking for a DeSantis type to follow, he’d NOT be a lame duck anymore, and his hand would be tied.
But the political side of his reelection in 2028 is the least and last worry. The real issue would be surviving for 4 years. He’d have a choice: do nothing for 4 years, or enrage the PTB for 4 years. Which do you think he’d choose? Could he neuter the Intelligence Branch and reverse the Deep State?
Every candidate says whatever his or her constituents want to hear during the campaigns, but in reality, they can do very little once they get to Washington because that is where deals are made and souls are sold. :) In Washington, decisions are made, and those are made on the basis of the elected officials and legislators casting public votes. They have to (a) adhere to the law and (b) vote publicly.
Trump had to pick his battles, and he picked the ones I would have picked. And in those battles–against the CCP’s attempt to create a global surveillance state with their 5G network, for example–Trump was an undefeatable force. He won. He spurred the U.S. tech companies to up their game in the technological race to develop our own 5G network, he talked Europe out of buying into the CCP’s 5G network, and he won. He won that war.
On Ricochet for several years before the 2016 election, we had a member write a couple of disturbing posts about our country’s vulnerability to an EMP attack. The writer said that it was ridiculous to not address this, that it would cost only pennies per taxpayer to shield our systems from an EMP attack, but the Obama administration kept rejecting it. In 2019 Trump signed an executive order to make sure this protection was put in place. In the flurry of executive-order overturning that the Biden administration did the first couple of months, I watched to see if this had been rescinded, and it was not. I can’t say if they have since done so because I stopped following it.
Trump did a million little things that didn’t get the press’s attention but that needed to be done. I would take four more years of his being president over anyone else. Where he acted mattered enormously.
And it took Biden eighteen months to destroy Trump’s V-shaped recovery. I believe money is the most important thing in protecting human life generally and America specifically. In the highly specialized beehive we have built, money is like water and air and food at this point. Trump has a unique talent when it comes to our economy, and we need that talent desperately.
I would take a day of Trump being back in office over anyone else on the roster of Republican candidates. His mind works very fast, and he would fix more things in a day than most of the others would even suspect was a problem.
All that said, there are some things I like about DeSantis, and I would certainly vote for him.
Another term for Trump would be rocky. He’d be a one-term president so he would have trouble getting top talent, and he’d have trouble anyway because of the viciousness with which the Democrats wage political war. Notwithstanding all of that, I believe the world would be better off with a Trump second term.
There is that age factor. Especially after watching how Biden’s age is doing to him.
It’s not his age, so much as his illness. The guy really has a degenerative disease. I’m pretty sure of it.
He will be too old. Way too many people are negatively disposed to him.
We have better choices.
I would love to see a national election between Florida and California.
Take it as you like — you asked what the difference is. Do you propose that every President be rejected as a lame duck after a single term?
But, but… if he can’t be elected as a lame duck, that would make every president a lame duck the first day of his first term. Which means they could never be elected in the first place. Oh, my head aches.
I don’t. The 67% of Congress and 75% of the States who approved the 22nd Amendment do. I had expected better Constitutional knowledge in this crowd!
Twenty-Second Amendment
Section 1
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once…
Trump IS a figurehead, but he is the ONLY figurehead. DeSantis could be if he runs, but his claiming of not running in 2024 makes him a non existent threat right now.
The problem for the groundswell on the right is that there really isn’t anyone else available to run right now other than Trump. The movement won’t go away, but they will be stymied for a couple election cycles if he is taken out.
I think the lame duck concept has been weakened by the divide in the population that has made the policy extremes between the Left (individual slavery) and the Constitutionalists (individual freedom or agency) the condition faced rather than bouncing between Center-left and Center-Right. Now it is imperative to get it right and keep it right.
Who’s talking about a third term?
Some of it is a desire to preserve institutions. For some portion of those, they are even willing to tolerate corruption if it means preserving them.
While I think the “Trump” right would rather burn down a corrupt institution than keep it corrupted, there could be room for messaging on fighting to save our institutions from the political corruption that is destroying our country.
No, and I don’t know how you reached that point. Originally, I was simply asking why, if lame-duck status occurs automatically in a second term, it matters if the terms are consecutive or non-consecutive. It’s a second term either way.
Then I suppose that you reject the whole concept of lame duck. We’ve now been through all three combinations, so you tell me what you think instead of asking.
As things stand, I would support DeSantis over Trump, were DeSantis to run.
That said, I would happily vote for Trump again if he were the nominee, and I’d be ecstatic for a Trump/DeSantis ticket. Four years to break things, and eight to remake them.
Reason for the ranking: In spite of ‘the very best people’, Trump’s greatest weakness was in recruiting and qualifying staff members and agency heads. This left him vulnerable to being played and/or undermined in areas beyond the view or competence of himself, his family, or his closest allies. To be sure, this was as much a fault of the GOP establishment’s giving him the cold shoulder as it was his, but that was part of the environment and his task to overcome. I rate Trump as a D on overall personnel.
What would change my mind is some evidence that Trump recognizes this limit and has a plan to overcome it. Perhaps a collection of gray hairs near the end of their careers, who has no illusions left and are willing to spend four years of agony to save the country from the unelected elites before they drive us to civil war.
ETA: Under no circumstances would I vote for a Dem nominee.