March 19th.
What Trump Will Do That Day
That’s the day on which, mathematically, it will be impossible for another candidate to defeat Donald Trump in the Republican primary.
I mean, the actual day the primary was decided was at the moment Trump declared, given his absolute deathgrip on the MAGA base of what was once the GOP and is now his personal and eternal political fiefdom.
So mark it down. March 19th.
Two months, four weeks, 10 hours from the time I write this.
Not that there will be another candidate in the field after that day, at least not one who matters a whit.
Chris Christie’s (R-Green Room) all-in bet in New Hampshire will sputter and die, doomed but valiant.
Current It Girl Nikki Haley will lose in her home state, and crush the latest and last dreams of the old GOP donor class, the tech folks, and the private equity bros swooning over her as the Last Best Hope. She’ll lay a lick on Trump and madden him like a bull charging at a red cloak, but here’s no path.
If the hapless, graceless, feckless, and soulless Ron DeSantis makes it to Florida on March 12th, he’ll face a 50+ point electoral ass-kicking that will stain his and Evita DeSantis’s political career forever.
Enjoy being President of Yeehaw Junction Junior College, Ron!
The Trump team is racing for that date and that number because the second he has 50% of the delegates plus one vote, he’s going all-in on three major assertions.
He’s the nominee.
Duh. For once, he’s telling the truth. The rest of the time and money dedicated to the irritations of the primary can be cancelled at once, and he’ll have the RNC and the state parties ratify his position well before the convention.
It also opens the floodgates for Trump and his cronies to grift at scale; the tidal wave of fundraising largess from major donors will shock you. All the men and women of the monied class who fiercely hate him will be wiring money so fast the banking system will groan under the strain. And Donnie needs the cash.He started the general election framing — poisoned blood, border fear porn, Biden is both a corrupt political mastermind AND a senile codger, and the economy is is a hellscape — weeks ago.
All the legal cases must stop.
Trump is above the law, clearly. I’m not an attorney, but I’m betting they’ll convince a critical mass of the media and the political class they’ve got a point. I’ve said for months that the DOJ is on a clock. Count on its alarm bells to ring sooner than later.
Just look at the reaction in elite political and media circles over the Colorado decision; they swallowed the Trump team gaslighting lock, stock, and barrel.Relying on any legal case, or any imagined prison sentence, to knock him off board was always a fool’s errand. Expect this message to become the central talking point for the spring from the Trump team.
“I’m winning.”
Do you know why they love this one so much? Because it’s almost perfect overlap of Trump‘s utter superficiality, and the obsessions of the horse race industrial complex media. He spent many rallies and events in 2016 and 2020 reading polls to his rally cattle.
The Republicans will flood the zone with garbage polling meant to alter the polling averages and to assert, assert, assert at every moment the condition and position of the campaign is a sure path to victory. This is to depress and dishearten Democrats and it worked well in 2020.
It’s why so many people were shocked when Trump actually lost in 2020, because so much of their messaging was that he was the inevitable winner.
The dissonance between relative positions of the campaign among the elite media, and those among us were actually studying the more professional polling was dramatic and remains today. See Simon Rosenberg much deeper dive than I have in this article.
I want you to keep this date in your mind. I want you to focus on it.
The campaign has been on in earnest for months, but at that point, it is the day where all the denial, all the fantasy, all the wishcasting will be washed away by brutal tide of cold reality.
The outcome is certain. There is no scenario a rational person should entertain that ends differently.
The Biden campaign has more money than Trump and his allies. They must start spending it to define what’s at stake: a return to a past that destroys the future.
Just four years ago we saw it all, but memory is short and passions fade. America must know what’s at stake.
The Biden team has been communicating for months they plan to wait until the late spring to begin campaign with full ferocity.
This is a mistake.
March 19 is coming. Get in the fight.
Please pardon typos…writing this on my phone with my notoriously clumsy thumbs. Will correct later.
I'm so very sick and tired of the media's CONSTANT drumbeat of "bIDeN iS oLd!" and "bIDeN's pOlL nUMbErS aRe SO bAd!" it makes me want to gouge out my own eyeballs with a golf pencil.
Why do they do this? WHY? It's the "bUt HeR eMaiLs!" of 2023-24.
Yes, Dems should be fighting harder. Perhaps not Biden himself but his surrogates. I would give a big shove in the back to Pete Buttigieg.