The first shots were fired in the Republican fight for the Presidential nomination on January 14th. The battleground was Iowa, and as predicted by all, Trump won by a very bigly 30 points. The big question right now is, what does this all mean? Does it signal a fascist takeover of America? Many on the Left would have you believe this, like Top Democrat Pundit Rachel Maddow, who moaned about “the rise of fascism in this country” on Monday’s election night TV. Or is it merely a return to the brighter days of say 2017?
First item of note is that, unlike the last two elections in which Trump was involved, no-one questioned the result; neither Democrats, as in 2016, nor Republicans as in 2020. Well played Iowa, which chooses presidential candidates through neighborhood meetings or ‘caucuses’. In a delightful throwback to a simpler America, folks have to actually show up in person, discuss and then vote face to face. You get the result quickly (TV was forecasting the race 30 minutes after caucuses opened) and it is never challenged. A refreshing change from many election results of the last four years which have been tainted by widespread use of public non-supervised ballot boxes, massive voting by mail and lack of voter ID checks. All compliments of mostly Democrat state legislatures rocking the Covid narrative. If we want election integrity in 2024’s presidential election there is a lesson here.
The result was never in question for at least the last year. Trump was always going to win, and indeed will almost certainly win every other contest until his fellow Republican candidates drop out. First up was whizz-kid Vivek Ramaswamy, who masterfully pulled off the Ben Carson manoeuvre by dropping out immediately and endorsing Trump. A cabinet post will be forthcoming if Trump wins the election later this year. Also, taxi for Asa Hutchinson (who?) on Tuesday morning as well.
Which left only Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley as realistic candidates in the race. Even before DeSantis dropped out last night, prospects looked bleak for these two. DeSantis is often viewed wrongly by Republicans as a Trump mini-me. DeSantis is an unabashed conservative, as opposed to Trump who mostly plays one on TV. But unfortunately, Ron needs a charisma transplant. He was also running mostly in Trump’s lane and there is only ever room for one there.
Nikki Haley has become the candidate of never-Trump factions of the Republican Party, for example some suburban women who have a visceral dislike of Trump. This means she has had to pay homage to much of the Democrat nonsense of the last few years that has infected the never-Trumpers in the mistaken belief this will make her acceptable to them as well as the mainstream media (MSM) and so maybe all Americans in November. All this has achieved is make most Republicans look askance at her views and question why the MSM is bigging her up as the “reasonable Republican candidate”. Haley has yet to understand that whatever she does she will be vilified along the lines of “worse than Hitler” Trump if she were to become the Republican nominee. Haley is a woman of Indian heritage and one thing the MSM abhor as much as Trump in presidential races is a Republican female politician (cf. Sarah Palin) or a Republican Politician of Color, (cf. Ben Carson).
Trump did not spend much time hanging about in Iowa. The next day he was off to court in New York City for one of his many show trials. Unlike pretty much all other politicians, Trump does not seek to hide his time in court but flaunts it as a badge of honor. And this is the primary reason he is now guaranteed to win the Republican nomination. Ever since Trump left office he has faced an enormous amount of prosecutions brought by Democrat politicians and Attorney Generals that are designed to ensure that he can never again be President and so save the nation from… bombast and mean tweets.
This campaign started with the Democrats in House and Senate seeking to impeach him again before he left office and continued with a show trial in Congress in 2022 of a Trump-led “insurrection”, a.k.a. the not entirely peaceful protest of January 6th 2021, when a lot of folks trespassed in the Capitol Building to protest the election result. Then the action moved out to local jurisdictions with six major trials from New York to Georgia, as well as Democrats in various states seeking to throw Trump off the state ballot in November’s election.
None of this really passes the smell test. Take the New York City cases for example (Trump’s trials are all in legal jurisdictions hostile to him). The one Trump hot-footed over to in NYC was to do with E. Jean Carroll, a woman who sued Trump for sexual molestation and won despite the fact that she had no witnesses, could not remember the year the “traumatic” event happened (sometime in the 1990s) and only mentioned it first in 2019 when flogging a memoir. Now she’s suing again for defamation. The other one currently going on in New York City labels Trump’s valuations of his properties when seeking loans as overblown and hence fraudulent. Finance companies do their own evaluations of collateral properties and these companies made great money on their loans to Trump, so where is the fraud?
The biggest issue, however, is the increasingly obvious view that these trials etc. seem very much linked at the head by collusion between the Department of Justice, the Biden Administration in general and the attorneys and prosecutors (all Democrat) bringing these cases. The goal is quite simply to bankrupt Trump, imprison him for about 20 years or so and ensure he does not run in 2024. Just last week, for example, details of meetings emerged between White House Counsel and an attorney working for Fani Willis, a Georgia County DA who is bringing a case against Trump for trying to subvert the election results there. Even worse for Ms. Willis, the attorney in question is an alleged friend with benefits to whom she has given serious amounts of taxpayer money so they can go on fantabulous vacations together, as well as prosecuting Trump in their spare time.
There is something very distasteful about any and all legal and legislative measures being harnessed by one political party to try and ensure that a former leader from another party can never be President again. This has become a trend in the last 20 years, mostly in South America and Africa. But no-one would have predicted five years ago this would happen on our fruited plain. Americans have usually been content with the constitutional tools they have to investigate any supposed wrongdoing by Presidents (cf. Nixon and Clinton). Wholesale mindless seeking of cataclysmic revenge is a new one on us.
The fury at this wholesale descent of our country into undemocratic and unconstitutional ways has been gradually penetrating America’s consciousness, especially Republicans. More and more Republicans in the last year have jumped on the Trump train as each indictment has unfolded until now he has support of 69% of likely Republican voters, the highest figure since he announced his candidacy.
The second major reason Trump is going to win the Republican nomination is captured in the surprising words of Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, this week at the annual Davos globalist bacchanal. Dimon is not a fan of Trump’s by any means. He is a Democrat donor and has fulminated about Trump’s character on various occasions. However, he was quoted as saying that Trump was right on many policies in his Presidency: “Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.”
Dimon is not alone in his view. The last three years have been just awful for the U.S. under the Biden Administration. And the worse it gets the more folks are looking back to 2017-21 and a growing economy, declining amounts of illegal immigration at the southern border, decreased regulation, low energy prices, no DEI or general wokeness, a strong but peaceful foreign policy and yes, displays of narcissism and a whole lot of mean tweets. And the more they look the better these four years appear.
Dimon is in tune with Iowa’s voters. According to exit polls the biggest issues that dictated the vote for Trump are the economy at 38% and immigration (or rather the dystopian nightmare on our southern border) at 34%. Iowa voters see Trump as the guy to tackle these two issues, and it is hard to see anything capable of changing Republicans minds between now and November.
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