Halfway there
Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus. But is America really behind him?
The news out of Iowa was that Donald Trump exceeded 50% in the Iowa Caucus, winning with a margin of victory unsurpassed in a contested race.
Yet what wasn’t said in the news is the fact that 49% of Republicans who bothered to venture out in subzero temperatures voted for some other nominee, whether it be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, or a host of other lesser lights. Given the fact that Trump has been declared the prohibitive GOP nominee since he “lost” the election in 2020, that should be a cause for concern.
Certainly the vast majority of that 49% will come around to vote for Trump once he wins the nomination. But it points out the problem with an opposition that’s scattered, just like it was in 2016 when neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich would back down until it was too late to stop the Trump train. There’s always been a part of me that realizes that Donald Trump was also the media-backed candidate for the GOP nomination in 2016 - they just overestimated their influence on the race as a whole and failed to realize that they couldn’t polish the turd of the Hillary Clinton campaign enough to pull her through. She was a historically bad candidate.
[Come to think of it, so was Joe Biden, but circumstances favored his “front porch” candidacy - along with thousands of suspect mail-in votes that would never have appeared had it not been for a ruinous pandemic (read: biological attack. You know what I say about absolute power.) The powers-that-be knew Biden had no prayer in 2016 - that’s why they declared it Hillary’s turn to bring back some of that Clinton magic, even after 16 years away.]
Regardless, $5 billion or so in free media later, Donald John Trump took the Oath of Office on January 20, 2017, and minutes later the Washington Post was looking to impeach him. Rush Limbaugh used to brag that he had half his brain tied behind his back just to make things fair; well, the media tied half of Trump’s presidency behind his back just to make him powerless. Yet Trump was surprisingly successful with his policies and deregulation (much of which didn’t need to go through Congress), and the resulting economic boom meant he was likely on a glide path to a second term before a lab leak changed history.
Yet there’s a big problem with Trump. There is a large part of America who would gladly eat bugs and be landless serfs if it meant getting rid of him and his mean Tweets once and for all. On the flip side, another vast group of Americans could have Xi Jinping pointing a gun to their head and screaming in their ear, “You must vote for Comrade Biden!” and they would still gladly take the bullet to vote for Trump. It’s their middle finger to the “establishment.”
The way I look at it is like this: yes, the 2020 election was stolen - not necessarily directly, but through a combination of Rahm Emanuel crises that didn’t go to waste for those who were looking to re-consolidate power. Maybe the better way to put it is: if they didn’t steal the 2020 election, why are they trying to take Donald Trump off the ballot? If they wanted to be honest, they know the do-over may likely go the other way given the incompetence (in more ways than one) of Joe Biden and his regime compared to how things were going under Trump pre-pandemic. That’s what we remember, the halcyon “good old days” of 2019.
Yet I’m not sure that trying to play tit-for-tat is the right way to go to move forward toward a restoration of liberty. Of course, we need a President who’s not a Marxist, but the Donald Trump Revenge Tour would only last four years, and quite frankly wouldn’t necessarily advance the ball down the field all that much. All it would do is give issues to the opposition that their electorate would lap up like an ice cream cone.
The Iowa results suggest to me that almost half of the GOP electorate has some of the same questions and thoughts I do - they just couldn’t agree on a replacement, and it’s likely we’ll have a rerun of the 2016 GOP campaign as the sole challenger survivor emerges too late (if at all.)
In this respect, New Hampshire will be the tell: if Trump can consolidate more than 60-65% of the vote, the rest of the primaries will pretty much be a formality. But if he sinks under 50%, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for something like the Democrats did last time, when most of the potential challengers for Joe Biden dropped out (as if by magic) at just about the same time. (Of course, in that case they were trying to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination and consolidated efforts behind Biden.) It would be my preference if Nikki Haley withdrew and supported Ron DeSantis, but my suspicion is that she’ll stay in the race just to deny DeSantis any traction.
People really aren’t excited about Biden/Trump version 2.0 but that may be what we get. Then watch for the Republicans trying to run the Libertarians off the ballot and the Democrats looking to kick out the Green Party and No Labels - which, by the way is now ballot-qualified for Delaware, so the Democrat in charge of elections is indeed trying to boot them from the ballot.
I guess I’ll have to hope the Constitution Party doesn’t run a grifter again. As snowed as people in this state are about Joe Biden (hell, even the “welcome to” signs say “Home of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”), it’s pretty much a free vote. But there’s always hope we come to our collective senses and the GOP stops being the “stupid party” for once.
Until next time, also remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.
Now that it's a Trump vs. Haley race, he should be able to get that 60%.
We are in strange and dangerous times. The left insanity about Trump grows exponentially every day. They were even openly dreading him at Davos. If he wins, they'll go nuclear with mass riots.
It appears that Haley is the skirt wearing version of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, etc., and is being pushed by the rhino Republicans. If she somehow got the nomination, I am torn between the left having no problem with her winning or destroy her like they did McCain and Romney.