By Dan
McLaughlin
Monday,
July 31, 2023
It often
feels pointless even to argue with defenses of Donald Trump at this point,
given the generally poor quality of the pro-Trump commentariat, most of which
boils down to “Trump has a following so we should cater to it.” The rest is
typically just reasoning backwards, rather than attempting to follow some line
of thinking that the commentator actually believed before 2015. That said,
Trump continues to have a following, so it is occasionally worth reviewing the
arguments made in favor of following Trump. These aren’t straw men; they’re the
actual arguments. Yossi Gestetner is a vocal Trump supporter on Twitter who has
penned some of them in a Substack
newsletter. Let us
consider Gestetner’s case for why, in his view, the various criminal
indictments of Trump are neither (1) a negative reflection on Trump, (2) a
reason to be concerned about Trump’s capacity to win an election, nor (3) a
sign that Joe Biden and the Democrats would very much prefer to run against
Trump.
The most popular line these days by anti-Trump conservatives and
Republicans is that the DOJ is indicting former President Donald Trump to help
him win the 2024 GOP nomination to make it easier for Democrats to beat
Republicans in the fall. Those conservatives also claim that Trump brought his
legal troubles on himself. . . . If Trump is indicted for politics, how can one
also claim he brought it upon himself? It’s either or. It makes no sense to be
both.
It is
not remotely inconsistent to believe both that Trump’s political enemies have
political reasons to pursue him, and that Trump has actually made their job a
lot easier by committing crimes and by doing unethical and/or stupid things. No
less an authority on presidential self-destruction than Richard Nixon
famously said as much in 1977 about his own
downfall: “I brought myself down. I gave ’em a sword. And they stuck it in, and
they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position, I’d a
done the same thing.” In other words, Nixon had enemies and he
made it easier for them.
Think of
the old detective question: Does a suspect have motive, opportunity, and means?
Democrats have a motive to destroy Trump in the 2024 general election. They
have the means, via the Justice Department and the Manhattan County and Fulton
County (Georgia) district attorneys’ offices and the New York attorney general
and E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit, to do so. But they have had these things before,
with regard to Trump and prior Republican leaders. They still have it with other
Republican contenders they hate, such as Ron DeSantis. Why have the rest not
been indicted, or (in the Carroll case) found liable for sexual battery? Why
was Trump himself not indicted in 2016? Lack of opportunity.
You can
make the case, quite properly (as I and others have) that the Manhattan DA’s
indictment is legally bogus in half a dozen ways, that the Mar-a-Lago boxes
indictment applies a different standard of justice than what was used to
justify not indicting Hillary Clinton, and that the Fulton County DA appears to
be contemplating what may be a radical expansion of Georgia racketeering law.
But none of that means that these prosecutors were inventing cases out of whole
cloth, or (at least in the boxes case) that Trump is not actually guilty of
serious federal crimes. The Manhattan DA’s case would not exist if Trump had
not paid off a porn actress to cover up an affair, which he did.
The Georgia investigation would not exist if Trump had not led a monthslong
effort to overturn an election he lost and put improper pressure on the Georgia
secretary of state, which he did. The boxes case would not
exist if Trump had not deliberately chosen to take with him out of office
documents with sensitive national-defense information that had not been
declassified, which he did. Over and over again, like Nixon,
he has given his enemies a sword.
The DOJ inserted itself in the politics of . . .
2012 by arresting the anti-Muslim filmmaker to fuel the Benghazi video
talking point and by giving the IRS a pass on its anti-Tea Party abuses.
2016 by weaponizing what they knew all along was a Dem-funded Russia
Hoax.
2020 by giving the Bidens a pass and discrediting the laptop.
It is essentially the opinion of anti-Trump Cons that this
increasingly-political DOJ would suddenly be out of ideas if only Trump behaved
differently or if someone else was the GOP nominee. Weird. Third, how do
those Cons plan on defeating a DOJ that they claim is so corrupt? By insulting
GOP voters that they are “too stupid” to “get” what’s going on here?
Again:
Democrats and their allies in the press will try whatever they
think they can get away with. But the simple reality is, sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn’t. It didn’t work against Reagan. It didn’t
work against George W. Bush until after he’d won two national elections. More
recently, there are scores of examples of hotly contested statewide campaigns
for the Senate and governorships over the past decade in which it hasn’t worked
(such as against Ron DeSantis in Florida and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia). The
plan to win in spite of this is to pick candidates who don’t hand their
enemies the sword.
Elections
are decided at the margins. Voters who are on the fence are accustomed to
hearing what both sides say, and they discount a certain amount of it. If you
want to persuade those voters not to reelect a guy who is old, chronically
dishonest, and surrounded by a stinking pile of corruption, you will have a
better chance if you don’t pick a nominee who is all of those things himself —
a nominee many of those people already voted out of office four years ago.
In
analyzing whether the indictments are political in terms of helping Trump within
the primary, by causing Republicans angry at the politicization of justice
and the targeting of Trump to rally around Trump, Gestetner —
characteristically of Trump supporters — ignores the evidence entirely.
Democrats spent tens of
millions of dollars in 2022 boosting Trump-endorsed and/or “stop the steal” candidates in
Republican primaries. Those candidates mostly won their primary races, and
every single one of them who did lost in the general election. It has been too
extensively reported and openly stated from too many places to deny that
Democrats not only believe that
they overperformed in 2022 by running against Trump but prefer to do so again in 2024.
And thus
far, it has worked like a charm. Look at the RealClearPolitics national poll
average:
Trump’s
commanding lead over DeSantis in October 2022 was cut significantly after the
election, as people evaluated the great success of DeSantis and the
across-the-board failure of so many Trump-backed candidates. DeSantis remained
around 30 percent in the polls, and Trump below 50 percent — until Alvin Bragg
indicted Trump near the end of March, which was swiftly followed by Trump
pulling away and continuing to do so through this writing, four months and two
indictments later. Occam’s razor suggests that Democrats getting exactly what
they want, following actions by Democratic prosecutors, is a sign that Trump’s
voters are the ones being played for the marks here.
Gestetner’s
only response, after assiduously avoiding the specifics of
2022:
The loss by Trump in a few states and the loss by some of “his”
candidates in 2022 was narrower than the impact that anti-Trump Cons have on
politics. If not for GOP saboteurs and self-righteous cons criticizing Trump .
. . and then sitting out elections in the name of country over party, many
states would have gone differently. In other words, Dems “want” Trump to be the
face of the GOP because of the expectation that GOP Saboteurs and Self
Righteous Cons (the ones who claim that Dems want Trump . . .) will again lead
to more GOP losses. Those Cons don’t notice that they are the mark!
There
are so many things wrong with this. First, notice the double standard: “Some
voters won’t vote for Trump or his candidates” is the voters’ fault, but the
behavior of Trump’s voters is never their fault, and the actual reality
of Trump’s political problems is a thing to be solved just by yelling at people
to get in line. Second, it ignores reality. Consider Georgia. Donald
Trump’s acid
criticisms of Brian Kemp were far more public and went far beyond what any leading
Republican said during the election about Herschel Walker. Kemp rolled to
victory, while Walker lost — yet we’re supposed to believe that Walker’s problem
was being sabotaged? Kari Lake told McCain voters not to support her —
in the face of the simple math that a large majority of Arizona Republican
voters had backed McCain in past elections — and somehow it’s other
people who drove those voters away?
It’s
always somebody else’s fault that, since 2017, Republicans have lost the White
House, the House, the Senate, and crucial elections in state government in
Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Massachusetts,
and Kansas. They got back only the House, only narrowly, and no thanks to Trump
ousting Republican incumbents in favor of primary challengers who lost their
general elections. All of this operates on the assumption that the reader has
somehow failed to notice anything Donald Trump says or does, or anything his
allies say or do.
I’m sorry, I live in a world where reality actually matters, and if you are losing, you don’t just keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. In 2016, Trump was something different. But it’s not 2016 anymore. Trotting out the same guy at age 78 and expecting him to win back people he’s alienated is not realism, it’s just a refusal to accept that the world has moved on.
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