Who’s ready to be angry? At me, I mean. Because you’re probably about to be…
I don’t have any tattoos. Not because I have any moral objection to them, but because at the age when I would have been likely to get one I realized there was probably nothing I’d like that much for the rest of my life. Tastes change, people grow. What you loved when you were 20 you probably don’t even think about now. The people who love Donald Trump absolutely love Donald Trump. They will love him forever, and more power to them. Personally, I’d never be blindly loyal to a politician, I view that as insane, and I’d never hang flags with obscenities on them on my house or cover my car in similar stickers. Just like tattoos, they’re not for me but I don’t really care what anyone else does with their bodies. They have to explain the words written across their neck, I don’t.
Dealing with presidential politics, however, does impact me and everyone else. Republicans need to win next year, and the frontrunner doesn’t seem to be working all that hard toward that end. Donald Trump does an event every once in a while, usually rallies for the faithful, and that’s about it. An event per week plus social media posts isn’t much more of a campaign than hiding in the basement was.
But Trump is distracted by a lot of legal issues. A lot. They’re garbage, at least most are. But he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to make them go away. These new charges in DC are a joke, but most people won’t ever hear the punchline so they won’t get it. If Trump wants to win these cases and have a shot at the presidency, he needs to stop trying to delay these them and demand a quick trial.
He's seemingly got every lawyer on the east coast on his payroll, put them to work. There’s no way they couldn’t be ready to go to trial now. Demand it. The government can’t ask for a delay, they’ve brought the charges, take their asses to court and beat them.
Yes, he’ll probably lose in DC, provided his high-priced team can’t get the charges dismissed. But that’s just going to happen anyway with a DC jury, the vindication will come on appeal. But you can’t get to the appeal until you get through the trial. Get moving.
Of course, you’ve got to want this to go away to fight to make it go away….
Trump isn’t paying for his own defense, his campaign donors are. If a significant portion of the money that should be used to run TV ads are diverted to pay lawyers (because they have to be paid or he’d suffer the humiliation of them quitting, thereby calling into question his billionaire status), what chance does a very unpopular candidate have, even against another very unpopular candidate. People don’t seem to realize just how disliked both of these men are. If someone hates both, they’d vote for Biden no matter how bad they view him because they’re even more sick of Trump. It’s not right, it doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
The economy was exponentially better under Trump than Biden, though not nearly as good as Trump would have people believe. Still, anyone with a memory longer than 20 minutes remembers being able to walk into a grocery store and afford things or filling up their gas tank without having to take out a second mortgage. Yet national polls show the race between the two to be neck-and-neck, with Biden edging out Trump more often than not, though admittedly within the margin of error.
If you love a band, I mean really love them, you can’t understand people who have no interest in them. I’ve played songs by The Replacements that absolutely kick ass, that are musical and lyrical masterpieces draped in awards for songwriting…and they fall flat with these people. They’ve never heard them on the radio, they just weren’t ever a popular band, and their tastes are molded by what are “hits” more than what’s actually great. That’s reality for most people, and you’re not going to talk them out of it. And that’s Donald Trump for a huge part of the country, whether you understand it or not and whether you like it or not.
If Donald Trump wants to change that, and he’s really the only person who can, he needs to plow directly into these cases and fight them like hell now, not try to delay them as long as possible.
The first case in New York is garbage, there aren’t even any laws allegedly broken. The charges were filed to test the concept – to see what would happen if a former president was charged, how the people would react. No one really cared all that much. A few people protested, but not many. Trump, however, did raise a fortune between the indictment and the arraignment. He wore his victimhood well and the campaign benefitted. When it came time to be arraigned, it was boring. Trump should have instructed his lawyers to enter the courtroom with motions to dismiss and a sense of outrage unrivaled in judicial history. Instead, they didn’t do much of anything. The judge ordered pretrial motions to be filed within four months. Who needs four months? Why would anyone wait four months without at least arguing to make it sooner? If you want the case dismissed, that is.
A dismissed case with prejudice would be the ultimate victory for Trump, and what I’d instruct my lawyers to be pushing for ASAP. Just think of the PR and fundraising opportunities this would present, in any of these cases – “They’re so desperately trying to get me and they’re failing miserably because I did nothing wrong. They can’t stop us, I won’t let them.”
Instead, it’s “They’re coming after me, give to my campaign” and that money is going to lawyers. You don’t have to keep paying lawyers to work on a case if you get the case dismissed. You also can’t fundraise on the idea that they’re persecuting you if you’ve beaten them. You might have to talk about issues.
I went to Trump’s website to see if he had any issue statements up there and it took quite a while to find it. The website is a one-page fundraiser for his legal defense, which seems a bit odd for a billionaire. I didn’t see a way to skip it at first. Hidden in the text are links to his store, to mail a check, and to volunteer. If you click the volunteer link you get to a place you can get to an issues page – so eventually you will have a chance to see what he wants to do as president this time that he didn’t try to do last time. It’s secondary, at best.
Donald Trump is distracted, as you can imagine. Which is why he needs to run toward these trials to get through them quickly. But he’s not. He won’t. They’re too helpful. His base loves him for these charges, it makes him appear to be a martyr. Beat them and that’s gone. The people rage-donating over what a banana republic we’ve become stop running up their credit cards when the rage subsides.
But if Donald Trump actually wants to win in 2024 he’s going to need to appeal to more than just the people he attracts to his rallies. Huge rallies mean nothing, votes do. Everyone who attended that big rally in Pennsylvania last week voted for Trump in 2020 and he lost the state by 80,000 votes. Preaching to the choir is one thing, expanding the choir is what wins. I see nothing about expanding the choir from the Trump campaign, whereas Democrats expand their choir by making people hate Trump. They don’t need people to like Biden, they need them to hate Trump.
That’s pretty easy to do when the former president spends more of his time, and half of his statements, patting himself on the back so hard that you’d think he was trying to dislodge food from his throat. He’s either in this to win this or he’s in this for ego. I don’t care who the nominee is, I want to win. For that to happen, the nominee has to want to win too. Donald Trump needs to decide if he wants to be president again to avenge his loss last time or to accomplish some things this time. If it’s the latter, he needs to articulate those things and make a case for himself. If it’s the former, he needs to go away and stop sucking money out of the pockets of loyal supporters to pay for his wife’s stylist (has she even appeared on the campaign trail with him at all this cycle?)
Hate me all you want, someone had to say it.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.