Continuing To Confound His Critics

We are two days beyond the Iowa GOP Caucus and five days from the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday.

What have we learned about the Republican Presidential race since my last blog post?

Two of the five remaining candidates that were on the Iowa ballot have dropped out---Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson.

Vivek quickly endorsed Trump after suspending his campaign.

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4047227-vivek-ramaswamy-2024-race-donald-trump-iowa-caucuses/

Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus as expected. However, even more importantly, he met the high expectations that had been set for him in recent polling. 

I wrote this in that blog post the morning of the votes in Iowa.

Trump's biggest problem tonight is that the polls have established high expectations for him. If he does not win by 30 points it is going to feel like a loss.

 Trump won by 30 points.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/15/us/elections/results-iowa-caucus.html

DeSantis exceeded the expectations that had been suggested in recent polling by five points or so but I wrote that I believed he needed to take 25% of the vote to gain some momentum heading to New Hampshire.

I mentioned in my previous blog post that the DeSantis team said before the caucus that they had 60,000 signed commitment cards for their candidate. If that was true, only a little more than 1/3 of them showed up to vote.

Of course, the weather clearly affected turnout and it did not help DeSantis that the networks called Trump the winner 15 minutes after voting started.

In the end, only 110,000 total votes were cast in Iowa compared to 185,000 in 2016.

Nikki Haley had registered 20% support in the last poll done before the caucus and her 19% vote percent had to be disappointing to her team.

Of course, that did not stop Haley from claiming after the Iowa vote that it was now a two person race despite finishing third in Iowa.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iowa-caucus-republican-primary-2024/card/haley-after-finishing-third-in-iowa-calls-it-a-two-person-race-F7Ssqi0bS2EwcBV4nvpu

 

It is true that Haley could not be better positioned to challenge Trump than in the next two primaries on the calendar--New Hampshire and South Carolina.

New Hampshire tends to be a blue state. It twice voted against Trump in the general election. The primary is also an open primary allowing unaffiliated voters to vote in the election. Since there is no Democrat primary this means that you could have many Independents voting in the Republican election who do not like Trump and want to send a message. Both of these factors favor Haley.

Haley also has the opportunity to make a splash in her home state of South Carolina that follows New Hampshire later in February (February 24). However, it is a two-edged sword for her. If Haley cannot defeat Trump in her own state how can she be expected to beat him nationwide?

What continues to be interesting to me are the mainstream media personalities and political pundits who cannot understand how Trump is dominating the Republican field.

Jake Tapper on CNN seemed shocked at Trump's margin of victory and suggested his supporters voted for him based on "lies".  One of the "lies" supposedly is that Trump was cheated in the 2020 election.

Tapper and others suggest that this is a "fringe" position.

However, a Rasmussen poll done in May, 2023 found that 62% of all voters believed it was very or somewhat likely that cheating affected the results of the 2020 election.

That view was held by 80% of Republicans, 64% of Independents and 45% of Democrats.

53% of Republicans, 46% of Independents and even 32% of Democrats believed it was VERY LIKELY.

Source: https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1742170916090474727/photo/1

Does that look like a "fringe" idea?

CNN cut off Trump's victory speech claiming they were not going to televise his anti-immigrant views.

Did Tapper forget that Trump married an immigrant and his mother was also an immigrant?

Is there no difference any more between a legal and illegal immigrant?

Source: https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1747108634797228153

An excerpt from CNN at the time that they cut away from Trump's speech.

Source: https://www.mediaite.com/news/cnns-jake-tapper-dumps-out-of-trump-victory-speech-just-as-he-starts-to-rant-about-immigrant-invasion/

MSNBC, NBC and other mainstream news outlets did not televise the speech at all.

They say they have a responsibility to not spread his "lies".

Isn't it interesting that was the same reason they did not report the Hunter Biden laptop story in October, 2020.

What was truth and what was the lie?

Source: https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1747769799013528013

They call themselves "news" networks?

The mainstream news experts don't seem to understand how it is that Trump is dominating the vote and the polls .

Let's consider a couple of reasons why Trump is dominating right now.

1. Voters do not trust the establishment and think that Trump has been unfairly treated from the moment he first ran for President. That continues to this day. He has been ruthlessly targeted every step of the way. (Russian collusion, two impeachments, a questionable election, selective prosecutions).

It is more apparent every day that there are two systems of justice in place in Washington. One for Trump and another for the Democrats who control the D.C. bureaucracy. (Trump got 4% of the vote in D.C. in 2016 and 5% in 2020. Putin's opponent did better than that in Russia!)

A good example was revealed this week. The Department of Justice disclosed in a filing in federal court that it had obtained Hunter Biden's iCloud contents back in 2018 pursuant to a search warrant related to the tax evasion investigation of Hunter by the IRS. This is the same tax fraud case that was going to be swept under the rug until two IRS whistleblowers came forward last year and called out the special treatment Biden was getting from the DOJ.

That filing reveals that the iCloud contents confirmed that Hunter's laptop that they got in 2019 was genuine. Despite knowing this for over one year, the IRS stayed silent when The New York Post broke the story about the laptop several weeks before the 2020 election. In fact, the FBI had previously told media and social media outlets to be aware of possible Russian disinformation in the campaign. On cue, 51 supposed "national security experts" stated that the laptop story had all the earmarks of a Russian plot and the story was censored by all the large media outlets in the lead up to the election. The FBI said nothing even though it had known the contents on the laptop were genuine back in 2019. 

Is this even handed justice? Election interference?

That filing also indicated that traces of cocaine were found in the gun pouch of the handgun that Hunter illegally obtained by lying on his federal firearm application. However, the DOJ was originally going to give Biden a plea deal that would have required no jail time for a charge that carries up to a 5-year prison sentence. That plea deal was blown up when a federal judge started asking some questions when it was brought to her for approval.

It seems that there have been a lot of lies told to the American people over the last few years.

Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow and the rest seem to be selective in considering what they consider to be lies and truth.

People know that there is something seriously wrong with the D.C. establishment. They also know that putting another Washington insider is not going to make anything better.

Despite his flaws, they know there is no better person than Trump to take on that establishment.

 

2. The other big thing voters are paying attention to is the state of the nation.

Trump has tons of detractors. They don't like his bombast, they call him a buffoon or don't like his mean tweets. However, the big thing he has going for him is that people can easily assess how things were going for them and the country when he was President versus how they have been going the last three years.

It is an easy, binary choice for voters.

Were things better when Trump was President or are they better now?

I wrote the following in July, 2021 when most political observers were writing off any hope of Trump being relevant in 2024 as to what could bring voters back to Trump.

An implosion of the country under the Democrats and Biden/Harris. Trump has many critics but hard times have a way of focusing people on what is most important. Trump's personality is the most cited reason why many did not like him. When people are in trouble they are less concerned with personality and more concerned about performance. A deteriorating situation in the country will make Trump a lot more attractive to more people than you can imagine. 

The British also wrote off Winston Churchill in the 1930's as being coarse, intemperate and of unreliable judgment. That view changed when Great Britain had their backs against the wall in World War II. Hard times have a way of getting people to focus on ability compared to appearances.

Consider as well the comments that JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in Davos, Switzerland yesterday about Trump while at the World Economic Forum meeting.

Dimon is hardly a right wing Republican. Most of his political donations have been to the Democrat party.

He made it clear he believes Biden is making a big mistake by trying to paint 70 million plus voters from the last election as extremists because they supported Trump.

He also stated that Trump was "kind of right" about most of the big issues.

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said that former President Donald Trump was "kind of right" about NATO and immigration and urged Democrats to "be a little more respectful" of voters who are backing the ex-president's 2024 campaign.

During a CNBC "Squawk Box" interview conducted in Davos, the site of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, Dimon on Wednesday said that Americans who adhere to the Make America Great Again movement were fond of Trump's policies and not necessarily backing the former president's personal conduct as they head into ballot booths.

"When people say MAGA, they're actually looking at people voting for Trump, and they think they're voting — they're basically scapegoating them, that you are like him. But I don't think they're voting for Trump because of his family values," Dimon said.

"He's kind of right about NATO. Kind of right about immigration," the chief executive continued. "He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China."

In the meantime, it appears that Biden's campaign strategy is nothing more than claiming Trump supporters are extremists.

I have yet to hear one concrete proposal from Biden as to what he will do differently in a second term other than he is going to save "democracy." I guess that involves maligning voters who don't like your policies, using the media to censor Trump and using your DOJ to try to throw your opponent in jail.

I have previously written that I prefer Ron DeSantis as the 2024 Republican candidate.

I believe he is the superior candidate to face Biden or someone else that the Democrats may substitute for him on the general election ballot in 2024.

However, I am smart enough to understand why Donald Trump has the support he does.

How come the supposed media experts have so much trouble seeing it?

The one thing that can be said to be absolutely true is that Trump continues to confound his critics.

That is no lie.