Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece out today on the re-election of Donald Trump and the two things that can stop Trump from winning.
First, Hason defines the situation:
The Biden news cycle is disastrous—and unending: a perfect storm of his failures abroad, disaster at the border, and reasons why sky-high prices nullify the Bidenomics hype.
The bad news is interspersed with fallout from the Special Counsel’s damning report. Panicked Democrat grandees worry not over whether, but how, to remove Biden.
Then there are, of course, Biden’s daily flubs, confusions, spaciness, and creepy outbursts that grow at a geometric rate.
So there are only two things that can likely stop the reelection of Donald Trump.
Coordinated legal effort…
One is the obviously coordinated effort of four prosecutors—Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis to rush to judgement and keep Trump in a courtroom all spring and summer, convict him, and put him in jail before the November election.
But that gambit is starting to unravel.
Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis will be taken off the case, if not disbarred or indicted herself. With her demise, her inflated indictment will likely not be taken up by surrogate partisans.
Jack Smith’s federal suit had been damaged by his obsessions with accelerating the trial for patently political purposes. Now there is a growing asymmetry in the two special counsels’ antithetical applications of the same law.
Joe Biden’s got a pass for taking out classified documents for a longer time, knowingly not reporting it, and putting them in less secure places than Mar-a-Lago, without an option to declassify them, as accorded to a president.
Letitia James’s case has received the most legal rebuke, given no other person has ever been so charged in New York for supposedly overstating real estate assets where there no injured party.
In Trump’s case no bank came forward to complain about the collateral Trump put up to secure loans—given he paid the loans back, in timely fashion and with profitable interests to the banks.
Alvin Bragg dragged up a 2005 tryst and a 2016 nondisclosure agreement to claim a campaign finance violation, in a fashion unimaginable for any candidate other than Trump.
All the prosecutors are either registered Democrats or liberals or both. There are clear ethics violations that range from prosecutors running for office on promises to get Trump, to coordinating their suits with the White House counsel or the January 6th committee.
So Trump may well find a way to be able to beat these patently weaponized indictments.
Trump himself…
The other only way Trump might lose is—Trump himself.
He is being handed a rare gift with the Biden mental meltdown that will lead to even more damaging news cycles.
The Democratic donor class and political elite are desperate to find some bizarre way to dump Biden and appoint a replacement either before, during, or after the convention.
So all Trump must do is three simple things:
1) Enjoy the Biden doom loop and do not interrupt it.
2) Do not say something weird or crazy enough to feed the left-wing media machine that is desperately searching for a way to stop the news of the Biden hemorrhaging.
3) Do not appear unpalatable or toxic to independents and moderates whose support could give Trump an extra 3-5 percent margin—and with it some insurance over the inevitable Democratic “edge” in non-Election-Day, and thus less verifiable, voting.
Instead, in a 24-hour cycle Trump violated all three cannons.
One, in lose/lose fashion he asked rhetorically where was Hayley’s husband (an attempt to fuel rumors of adultery surrounding her years in South Carolina governance?)
That only set him up for her answer: patriotically serving his country abroad as a soldier.
Next, he trolled his critics by claiming that he had once told a NATO ally that if any still persisted in refusing to meet its military spending obligations, and still expected the U.S. to defend them, then he would tell the Russians to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any financially wayward NATO nation.
Trump likely was trying to boast in art-of-the-deal, hard-ball fashion how he got NATO countries to up their defense spending, or said it in trolling fashion to irk his perennial NATO/Putin critics.
But no matter: the media went crazy and for a day the country forgot Biden’s news noose.
Such trolling disrupted the Biden free fall. It gave the media another shot at their hysterical mongering of “how dare Trump say that”.
Sure, Hayley is accusing Trump of being near senile, crazy, and dangerous, but he has to get even not mad—by ignoring her since she is going nowhere in the primaries.
Trump thinks his prior performance-art, rhetorical threats to NATO forced many of them to act in their self-interest and spend more on defense. And that may be true. But postfacto bragging of the threats he used only fuels the media’s old saw that Trump will destroy NATO and is Putin’s puppet.
Trump is sending a life-raft to a drowning Biden, while alienating millions of disenchanted and frightened Biden voters, especially independents, RINOS, and old Blue-Dog Democrats who are all considering a Trump vote. Again, he may need them.
Trump so far is doing his best to counter the lawfare of his enemies.
But only he can stop himself from gifting Biden and hurting himself—as he interrupts his enemies even as they dig their holes ever deeper.