Axios: Yes, Democrats Want Trump as the GOP Nominee

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

 

In case you were wondering why people keep saying that a lot of Democrats desperately want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee for president, here’s Axios to explain it for you:

 

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Donald Trump wants a big win in New Hampshire on Tuesday to effectively end the GOP presidential primary. Many Democrats are rooting for the same thing.

 

Why it matters: President Biden‘s team believes that Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for president would give a much-needed jolt of energy to voters and grassroots donors who don’t want to see Trump back in the White House.

 

Here’s more:

 

·  “This is counterintuitive…. Normally, you want the Republicans to fight it out and spend money,” former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, who now has a show on MSNBC, said on “Meet the Press” this weekend.

 

·  But now, “they want to run against Trump because they feel that is the best contrast to be drawn.”

 

Because:

 

Between the lines: Democratic strategists close to the Biden campaign say that as good as Trump is at mobilizing his MAGA movement, he’s also one of the best motivators of Democrats that the strategists have ever seen.

 

In 2022, this approach worked out for the Democrats. In 2016, it did not. I suspect that 2024 will be more like 2022 than like 2016, but, either way, it is extremely annoying for those of us who really have been trying to stop Trump from becoming the nominee to see so many people within the Democratic firmament speaking out of both sides of their mouth.

 

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot. There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning. The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do. Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.

 

It is not the Democrats’ fault that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. That honor goes to the party’s primary electorate, which, of its own free will, has made this call. It is the Democrats’ fault that so many within their party are asking the public to accept two contradictory messages at the same time. One cannot expect the electorate to believe both that the Republican candidate for president ought to be disqualified from consideration because he is an insurrectionist and that you hope he is the nominee because it helps energize your donors, voters, and volunteers. That’s not “counterintuitive”; it’s deceitful. How many times, I wonder, does the party expect to play this game and get away with it?