With DeSantis out, that’s pretty much it for the primaries. Haley is still in but it is shaping up to be a blowout win by Trump in New Hampshire and I imagine she’ll bow out before she gets humiliated in South Carolina. So, we’ve got Trump. For the third time.
Can he win? As I said the other day: sure he can. Make no mistake about it that this will be a high hill to climb. He has a lot of strikes against him.
Even accounting for fraud, the fact is that he’s been rejected once. It isn’t impossible to get accepted in politics after rejection, but it isn’t easy. The two most famous cases are Cleveland and Nixon. Keep in mind that in both cases, the people felt that the other guy, the initial winners, didn’t measure up and so were primed to flop back the other way. Without a doubt, Biden isn’t living up to expectations, especially since expectations were for peace, prosperity and no political problems here at home. We’ve got war, spreading poverty and more and more people are broaching the subject of civil war these days. Trump can very much say, “I told you so”.
It won’t be hostile press: it is hostile every American – and, indeed, global – institution. Especially after Argentina, the Global Ruling Class will not want Trump to get in. For goodness sake, it is bad enough that Argentina – if it can but stay the course for 3 years or so – is about to prove that the post-WWII Social Democratic order is a failure, if the USA proves it between 2025 and 2029 then that is all she wrote…everywhere in the West people will start to wonder why they have to keep the Progressives around. They will go after Trump with everything they’ve got. They will lie and break every law on the book. There is no cost to them higher than Trump winning. Can Trump survive that? We’d like to say he definitely will, but the purpose of the exercise is to convince moderate voters to stay away from Trump even as they can’t afford gas and groceries. Will it work? Only time will tell.
The Never Trump Right is already going ballistic – showing that they also never really were DeSantis supporters but were using him as a cat’s paw to scratch Trump. DeSantis swallowed his pride and endorsed Trump. Trump then said kind words about DeSantis. Everyone who is interested in defeating Democrats accepts this at face value and prepares to unite for November. You can absolutely rely on it that almost every last person who is still on the Never Trump side would have turned viciously on DeSantis had he got the nomination. They aren’t Never Trump – they are Never Rebels. They are Always Ruling Class. The Ruling Class hates DeSantis, too. But, while the Never Trump Right retains a semblance of being GOPers/Conservatives, they will be able to muddy the waters…and that is their purpose right now. To get moderates to mistrust the GOP before Never Trump announces it is voting for Biden. As for me, DeSantis is my guy for 2028. Obviously that is a long way away and things can change…but all else being equal, it is going to be hard to get me to switch to someone else next time around.
To me, 2024 has always been about GOP No Matter Who. The particular candidates are irrelevant. Sure, we all have our favorites and we all want the perfect person…but any GOPer is better than any Democrat. The objectively evil policies being advanced by Democrats must be stopped by whatever means we can find. Right now, for the Presidency, our only means to the end is Donald Trump. I will be enthusiastically supporting him going forward.
Blogs For Victory 
He has a lot of strikes against him.
Like what?? I am so tired of conservatives buying into the Democrat narrative. This is the what Democrats and the Media want people to think but the fact is … Trump has no strikes against him, as every single one of those strikes belong to Democrats. All the chaos that surrounded Trump was caused by Democrats and the Media and conservatives need to repeat that everyday and not give the Democrats one fucking inch. Trump was the most effective President for the American people in all of our lifetimes, bar none, so I don’t give two shits what the elites, or the media, or any Democrat has to say. Their day is over.
No, Cluster, Trump DOES have a lot of strikes against him. Dems did not give him his obnoxious personality. Dems did not make him an adulterer, and while this is ancient history it is still a weapon used against him. Dems did not make him treat Fauci like a god and turn the country over to him. Dems did not make him erratic, especially in the first years of his term, in his choices of advisors and officials and appointments. You, and other ardent Trump fans, can just dismiss all of this, but the fact is that it IS there, and it fuels the statistic that nearly half of the country sees Trump as the epitome of evil and danger to the nation and would not vote for him no matter what.
You are right in saying that the Left, with its lapdog Agenda Media and professional liars and enablers, all built on the scaffolding of otherwise irrelevant and/or minor missteps, but the fact is that Trump gave them that scaffolding. Admitting that and then going on to point out its lack of relevance to his record as president and view of the future of the country is going to be a lot more productive than pretending he isn’t dealing with problems he created, even if they have been exaggerated by his opponents.
It’s rapidly approaching the tipping point where an articulate voice might make a difference, but if we had ever had one we could have addressed the various attacks on Trump effectively. Just denying them isn’t going to make any difference. AND WE HAVE NO PLAN to deal with them.
Trump is very effective when he sticks to a script. You and his fanbois love him even when (especially when ?) he wings it, but that falls flat with a lot of people who are turned off by his infantile name calling and semi-coherent speaking style. But give him a good solid speech and let him stick to it, and he is a lot more effective.
So give him scripts. Have him say something like “I am attacked for being unfaithful to wives in the past. Yes, I was, and I’m not proud of it. But this country has a history of forgiving sins and mistakes when people repent, and I do repent for the ways I treated good women who trusted me. They deserved honesty and respect and I was wrong when I didn’t give them that. I don’t do that any more. And this country also has a history of overlooking infidelity in its presidents, in both parties. From Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to Jack Kennedy to Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, the nation has accepted men who were unfaithful to their wives. I’m not saying infidelity is right, but it has never disqualified anyone from being president, and we shouldn’t try to make it suddenly more important than it ever has been.”
Don’t let him wing it. Don’t let him wander into the weeds, as he tends to do, with his stream-of-consciousness rambling. Run a disciplined campaign, for a change. Have a series of tightly-focused speeches addressing the claims made against him. Stop with the whining poor-me “witch hunt’ verbiage and focus on the dangers to our society in general when the law is used against the people instead of to protect the people. Take every single accusation and move it from the arena of being just about Trump, personally, to its relevance to the people and the nation in general. How long do we hold a man’s moral failings against him, when he has changed? In a country with so many second and third marriages, many prompted by infidelity, that would resonate with a lot of people. “How many of us would want to be judged by our actions of a decade or more in our past, if they were personal transgressions and not abuses of political power or betrayal of trust in an officer of the nation?”
You are complaining that people aren’t focusing on Donald Trump The President. Well, change that, and stop the focus on Donald Trump The Man, who DOES have a lot of strikes against him, and shift to Donald Trump the President and, hopefully, Donald Trump the Statesman.
Dems did not give him his obnoxious personality. Dems did not make him an adulterer,
Those aren’t strikes, that’s simply called being a human being. And did Trump make some unwise personnel choices, YES, BUT that again is being a human being and being lied to and believing those lies. What Trump has done is learn from those mistakes, which again is being a good human being. I’m tired of purity tests especially when we are up against a divisive, racist, socialist regime, and I do think Trump will surprise a lot of people with this 2024 campaign. Stay tuned.
Well, millions of voters do see them as strikes.
I am staying tuned, but so far just getting static as I’m not seeing coherent and effective pushback against the things that ARE going to influence voters. You can insist all you want that they shouldn’t care about these things, but the fact is, they do. I don’t think a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive “that’s just what human beings do” is going to be very impressive. Actually, that’s the kind of attitude that creates the illusion of cultism.
The only way Trump can “surprise” a lot of people is to start running a disciplined campaign that addresses those issues head-on and points out their defects and lack of relevance. And we NEED “purity tests” not for past behaviors but for current policies, commitments and explanations.
You invent a swooning image of Trump when you assert What Trump has done is learn from those mistakes, which again is being a good human being but he has to PROVE this. If you dismiss this as a mere ‘purity test” then you are in too tight a bubble to see reality. Millions of VOTERS lack the sunshine-and-lollypops filters you run everything to do with Trump through. It’s obviously enough for some of you for him to just BE Trump, but that’s not going to be enough to get him over the finish line.
Trump’s history is not just sordid, it is UGLY. He wasn’t just ‘unfaithful’. He had a wife and three children and he assured them, he promised them, he lied to them repeatedly, when he kept saying no, he was not having an affair with Marla Maples. And then, when he took his wife and children to Aspen for a ski holiday he also took Marla, and established her in the same hotel, where there was an encounter with Ivana and the children. In public. It was brutal, it was humiliating, it was a public spectacle and it became the brand of the kind of man Trump was. It wasn’t just an “oops” as often happens when a mistress and wife run into each other. It was set up, by Trump, and it was cruel and unnecessary and totally freaked the kids out.
Then when he dumped Marla (and their daughter) he didn’t tell her he wanted a divorce. He filed and planted an article about this in a newspaper, which is when she learned she had been kicked to the curb. Classy.
These examples don’t even take into account the many times he very crudely showed disrespect for women, from adult women to the young girls in his beauty pageants.
Now I believe in redemption. I believe in salvation. I believe that even the worst sinners can redeem themselves and I believe that they should be forgiven—if they acknowledge their sins and ask for forgiveness. I also believe that lacking these actions the sinner will be judged harshly for what he did, and it is not going to be enough for Trump to just blithely move along as if he never did these despicable things, or for his adoring fan club to give him a pass for them because he was “just being a human being”.
He needs to unpack his nasty sordid baggage and take responsibility for it, and assure the American public that he is a changed man. It can be done without going into gruesome detail, as I suggested in my example, but it has to be done or it will be part of his permanent brand as a human being. He can say there was a time when he showed disrespect for some women, a time when he betrayed the trust of good women —but that he repents for this and has made a personal commitment to never be that kind of man again.
We know that a lot of the accusations about the way he has handled his business decisions are based in simple ignorance of high finance and how things are done at the many-zeroes level of business. There really isn’t a good way to tell people that their lives are just too small and limited to grasp how the elites live and function. But he CAN say that the only way he could have defrauded a bank would have been to give it forged or incorrect documents, and that his opinion of what a property would be worth on the open market is not fraudulent if it is an opinion. He could, for example, say something like this: “Take a nice three bedroom house with a nice yard, and figure out its market value. Then give that house a beautiful view of mountains or a lake, and that value will go up. Put it on the beach and suddenly it is worth a lot more. Put it on five acres in the path of luxury development and then its market value is not just for the value of the house itself but for the value of the land around it, and that has to be based on the market value of the houses built on similar land surrounding it. These are basic real estate calculations, and even then there is always an element of what the owner thinks the property would be worth on the open market, which might or might not be accurate. This is what people do when they estimate the value of property they are putting up for collateral. They guess, they estimate, and they come up with a figure they think will be supported by data about similar properties. Then this figure is run past experts at the banks, who apply their own criteria, and eventually everyone agrees on some figure that is usually between the highest and lowest figures. The higher figure offered is not fraud. It is an estimate based on the owner’s calculation and no lender is supposed to just accept it at face value unless the lender agrees with it. This is what I did with my property and this is what is now being called a crime. It is what every property owner does when he or she puts up a property for sale or for collateral for a loan.” This can take up two minutes of a speech, it could be clear and concise and something everyone can relate to. But it should be done, in one form or another, with the kind of example Everyman can relate to. We’ve all tried to buy something we thought was overpriced, and we’ve probably had to sell things for less than we thought they were worth.
But don’t just whine that what Trump did was “just being a human being” and shrug it off, because that looks shifty and it pisses people off because people don’t like to be dismissed. There is nothing to be lost by showing respect for what other people think, even when it is blatantly biased and just plain wrong. Start from the concept that the belief is honestly held and address it as such. Those based on pure Trump hatred won’t be swayed, but some will. None will be swayed by the attitude of “screw you, I don’t care what you think”.
A couple of thoughts on this. You’ve got a football team that won the national championship last year, narrowly beating its opponent 31-28. They come back this year with every starter back plus a couple of all-American freshman, and a junior college transfer that is being hyped for the Heisman. They score 48 points in the championship game, but, thanks for blatant cheating by their opponent and numerous questionable bad calls by the refs, they lose 61-48 to a vastly inferior team. That’s what happened to Trump in 2020. In the entire history of the country the only incumbent President who got as big a percentage increase running for a second term AND LOST was Martin Van Buren in 1840.
Second, and this is just my opinion, I think the support for Trump is more than just, “he did a good job before, and we want him back.” I think lot of people who normally don’t pay attention to politics see what the Left and Never-Trumper GOPers did to Trump, and are going to do everything in their power to rectify what happened in 2020. I think the sense of fair play is still alive and well in America. Add to that a lot of Independents and traditional Democrats who are scaping by just to put food on the table, pay their bills, and put gas in their cars, and I think you’ve got the perfect political storm.
I think you’re right in saying that a lot of stated Trump support is based on rejection of the use of federal power to silence or eliminate a political opponent. It’s got such a nasty Soviet odor to it, it offends and/or scares a lot of people old enough to remember what the Soviets did in Russia and East Germany, and seeing a New Stasi in the United States is unnerving. It might not be enough to get people to VOTE for Trump, in spite of verbally ‘supporting’ him in polls, but it might be enough to keep them from voting for the regime acting more and more like the Soviets of the Bad Old Days.
If Biden had turned out to be a good, or even mediocre, president I think a lot of otherwise fair-minded Dems would shrug off the frauds it took to get him into office. But the combination of his corruption and ineptitude and blatant abuses of power have to make it harder to pretend that the nation has not been substantially damaged by those frauds.
Which leads me to the question of why the Right has not mounted a campaign tightly focused on those damages. Why haven’t we seen a series of ads and videos contrasting that the United States in 2023 would have looked like if Trump had retained the presidency, contrasted with what we have now? A booming mineral extraction economy, energy independence plus selling energy to other nations thereby strengthening their positions vis-a-vis their vulnerability to Russia and China, economic sanctions on Russia and China and the likelihood of Russia not being able to finance its war on Ukraine, no government mandates for vaxxing with experimental drugs, a strong border and deportation of illegals, lower taxes, etc.
These are the 5 issues which be solely concerned about, and this is how we should address them ….
https://x.com/ModernityNews/status/1748141062357401997?s=20
That’s all just super-duper hunky-dory and totally relevant in a world devoid of Identity Politics.
But back to reality, which in our case is a world dominated by Identity Politics. So we can plug our ears and chant LALALALALA and pretend that if we ignore or just dismiss the emotional components that drive so many people they simply won’t play a role any more in how they vote. It’s not going to be enough to just say “Here—-look at things through my Trump Goggles and everything will be clear to you’.
It’s kind of funny, in a very annoying way, for my discussions of the need to focus on political structure and the nuts and bolts of governance to be dismissed on the grounds that people just aren’t smart enough to understand this kind of thing, and then to be presented with the assertion that we SHOULD “be solely concerned about” analytical and objective goals. The lanes sure shift around a lot.
BTW, this segment will appeal strongly to people who already get this. I doubt that it would change any Liberal minds, especially as they are locked into the emotional prison of Trump Hatred and impervious to anything else.
OTOH this speaker sounds exactly like the voice we need on the Right. He amazingly articulate and focused and this is the kind of messaging we need, consistently, on all available media.
Reagan chose Bush Sr. as his VP to bring on board the more moderate wing of the Party, which has me thinking, should Trump tab Haley as his VP for the same reason? I am not a Haley fan mainly because of her donor support, but she could be what Trump needs to win this general election, and maybe his tutelage would bring Haley more into the MAGA camp. Trump can only serve 4 years so whoever his VP choice is, they have the inside track for 2028.
Maybe no one in the entire country except Amazona and me care about the natural born citizen issue, but I’ll bet, if Haley is the VP candidate the Dems will suddenly discover the issue and pursue it all the way to the Supreme Court.
There are some who know how serious this is, but so far it’s only been referenced kind of under the radar. Evidently Trump has mentioned something about it, as I recently saw some hysteria about his “birtherism” which of course was also “racist” so he made some comment. Laura Loomis brought it up, calling down the wrath of a UK newspaper in a spittle-flying (if a print medium has spittle) vitriolic hit piece on her, which I cited in an earlier post here.
The topic is out there, and the leaders of the Right know about it. I think they might be a little reluctant to bring it up, or at least make a big deal out of it, right now knowing that Haley isn’t really a serious challenger anyway and wanting to avoid the hyper-emotional firestorm this would generate.
There is a lot of downstream melodrama associated with the natural born citizen topic, because it will quite naturally lead into analysis of the (many believe) incorrect interpretation of the birthright clause of the 14th Amendment and that’s a hornet’s next best avoided until after the election. I have no doubt that the Left is sitting on this, hoping like crazy Haley will be the VP choice, rallying its own voters to push her into the second place position and pushing its lapdog media to promote her chances, because to have Nikki Haley officially named as Trump’s VP candidate would be a gift to the Left that would keep on giving well into Biden’s second term.
Trump has already said, quite some time ago, that as president he will address the 14th Amendment issue. The article in question states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…..
At issue, when it is acknowledged at all, is the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The claim is that people who are not citizens of the United States are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States as long as they are here, and therefore their children born here are automatically citizens. So the question comes down to what “subject to” and “jurisdiction’ mean.
Obviously, anyone in this country, citizen or visitor or even illegal alien, is theoretically subject to the jurisdiction of civil and criminal law. That is, those laws apply to them. But from a citizenship perspective, one is subject to the jurisdiction of the nation in which he is a citizen, no matter where he might be at any given time.
When a United States citizen is visiting another country, he or she obviously is under the legal jurisdiction of that nation’s laws—simplest example might be the legal requirement to drive on the right side of the road in the UK. An American is required to obey that law when in the UK. But if he doesn’t, and gets in legal trouble for it, he goes to the embassy of the country which has jurisdiction over him—the American Embassy.
I knew a man from Peru who had lived in the United States for 9 years and had legal permanent residency here and had applied for naturalization, but when he died the Peruvian Embassy stepped in to handle arrangements for his body and any legal issues that might have arisen over his death. He had always been required to obey American laws, but he always remained under the jurisdiction of Peru and would have until he renounced that allegiance and formally declared allegiance to the United States.
People manage to insert the strangest irrelevant concepts into the whole thing, such as claiming that if the parents were here LEGALLY then their children would be citizens at birth—but the legal status of the parents is irrelevant. The only status that matters is their citizenship status, because that is the single thing that determines the jurisdiction over them.
Another example: An Irish citizen here on a legal work visa and an American citizen work together to commit a crime. They are convicted. At that time, the Irish citizen can be deported to the nation which has jurisdiction over him due to his citizenship. The American is in the country which has jurisdiction over him so can’t be sent to another country.
This article of the 14th Amendment was written with the goal of wording that would allow the children of slaves, who were in the United States and not subject to the legal jurisdiction of any other country, to be acknowledged as U.S. citizens. Slaves had no citizenship identity in any other country, and were not subject to the legal jurisdiction of any other country, so by default they were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and their children would be citizens.
This article is widely misstated, as well as misinterpreted, with most people unaware of the most important element of the article: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
It’s going to be difficult if not impossible to address the meaning of “natural born citizen” if we don’t address the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment because accepting the premise that merely being born on US soil conveys citizenship leads to confusion about the difference between “native born citizen”—which would be someone whose citizenship was based on the nation in which he was born—–and “natural born citizen” which is based on the natural process of being born to citizen parents
Put another way: Naturalization is a legal process conveying citizenship. The 14th Amendment, if the interpretation of it conveying automatic citizenship to anyone born in this country is accepted, is still a legal process assigning citizenship based on a law. Natural born citizenship does not depend on any legal or legislative act but is the historical inheritance of citizenship through birth to citizen parents.
Going into it a little deeper: If a man’s parents are naturalized citizens at the time of his birth, he is then a natural born citizen, inheriting their own citizenship status. This meets the goals of the Founders in having the natural born citizenship clause in the Constitution, as it assures (as much as anything can) that the child will grow up in a family which has its allegiance to the United States and to no other nation. If we accept the citizenship status of someone based solely on place of birth we violate the intent of the Founders as we then have a man whose formative years are spent in a family which has never declared allegiance to the United States but which retains its non-American identity and allegiance to a foreign nation.
While Barack Obama was a natural born citizen, due to having an American citizen mother at the time of his birth, he grew up in families not just lacking allegiance to the United States but often openly hostile to this nation. And we learned what it is like to have a president whose alleged loyalty to this nation was compromised and conflicted at best, often reflecting the anti-American ideologies of influences hostile to the United States. We can look at alleged birthright citizen Rashida Tlaib as an example of someone who may technically be an American citizen by birth but whose entire family and cultural history has been anti-American.
There was a reason the Founders insisted that a United States president have at least one generation of history in a family with loyalty and allegiance to this country, and that is why they used the commonly used and understood phrase “natural born citizen” as a requirement for the office.
One of the aspects of the natural-born citizen issue that no one talks about is the fact that, if you buy into the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment that being born in this country confers citizenship and qualifies one to be eligible to be President or Vice President, then where does that leave people like John McCain who was NOT born in this country? The 14th Amendment doesn’t address those born of citizen parents but not on U.S. soil. You can’t have it both ways.
The 14th Amendment doesn’t address those born of citizen parents but not on U.S. soil No, but I think the Constitution does, and I believe there have been at least one if not more SCOTUS decisions on that. When the Constitution was written, many of the Founders were overseas envoys, and they certainly did not plan to make their children born overseas non-citizens. I don’t think the Amendment affects the acquisition of citizenship by naturalization or heredity, just adds another way, and doesn’t address the natural born citizen requirement.
The problem in deciding the Amendment has been misinterpreted and will no longer convey citizenship based on place of birth is the number of people who are already considered citizens. What to do about that status? Maybe a qualified citizenship, a *citizenship, but one that does not allow the offspring of these people to be considered natural born.
I also think that any such reformation or judicial decision or however it might be handled must make it clear that “birthright” citizenship is the product of a legal process, and therefore, like naturalization, can be rescinded for cause.
It certainly need to be cleaned up and set in stone one way or the other – and not by judges. We, the people, should be figuring out who is a citizen.
It is curious how things developed – like the idea that the 14th grants citizenship to any person who just happens to pop out while in US territory. We’ve all heard the phrase “one person, one vote”…it was used to destroy the State Senates; to make them essentially into another State House rather than representatives of the various interests within a State (just as the US Senate used to represent the varied interests among the States). But such a thing isn’t in our Constitution. While we have specifically said the right to vote can’t be denied on basis of race or sex, we still haven’t said who can vote. It just accepted as axiomatic these days that any adult citizen has a right to vote but the Constitution secures no such thing. The States can decide how their Representatives are chosen – the only Constitutional rule is that it be the same way their State House representatives are chosen. Who gets to choose is left entirely up in the air.
This ten-year-old article covers the matter pretty well. I’m an ardent fan of the Founders, thinking them to be geniuses, but I also think they made some mistakes, and this is one of them. Some of those “mistakes” are really just inadequate definition of terms, such as “jurisdiction” and “natural born citizen” but then when a term is in common use and has been throughout the lifetimes of those involved this is understandable. After all, who would ever think that terms like “marriage” or even “woman” would ever need defining?
It’s all fine and dandy to, in the spirit of state sovereignty, say that states get to make their own rules about voting. Theoretically, if a state wants to let illegals vote on how the state is run, the state can decide to do this—though it’s obvious that by letting illegals vote the illegals will vote to let them run the state. This has serious possible implications—for example, states run by illegal aliens with no allegiance to the United States could end up choosing our president, if presidential election results were to go to the House of Representatives and one or two states governed by illegal aliens had the power to choose the next president.
This would make the determination to only allow citizens from citizen families be eligible for the presidency, a decision based on concerns for allowing the governance of this country to fall into the hands of people without allegiance to it, threatened if not meaningless. I haven’t studied the entire Constitution extensively, but this seems to me to be its only serious lack of consistency. And the only legislative solution is to impinge on state sovereignty in the area of who can vote.
We could, theoretically, have Congress pass a law that only US citizens can vote in a presidential election, and then just roll the dice and hope the scenario I mentioned, above, never happens and there is never a situation in which foreign nationals can choose our president because they control enough state legislatures. We could put the issue of citizenship as a requirement for the ability to vote into a proposed amendment, which would require citizenship to vote in any election in any state which chooses the governing officials of that state. We can always pressure the legislatures of each state to pass their own laws requiring citizenship.
According to Wikipedia:
As of October 10, 2023, seven state constitutions explicitly require citizenship for voting:
Alabama, approved by referendum in 2020[
Arizona]
Colorado, approved by referendum in 2020
Florida, approved by referendum in 2020]
Louisiana, approved by referendum in 2022
North Dakota, approved by referendum in 2018
Ohio, approved by referendum in 2022
There are some who know how serious this is, but so far it’s only been referenced kind of under the radar. Evidently Trump has mentioned something about it, as I recently saw some hysteria about his “birtherism” which of course was also “racist” so he made some comment.
Another reason Trump isn’t likely to pick Haley as VP.
(1) Haley’s main support has been from Democrats who have voted for her in open primaries. It was Democrats, the most rabid of them in fact, who rushed to defend her when Laura Loomis pointed out that she isn’t even legally eligible to be president. We should be asking “why?” Has it been mostly to get in the way of DeSantis, or is it to get her established in the White House for reasons important to the Left? Even if her support from the Left WOULD mean crossover votes in the election itself as well as in the primaries, she is still loathed by too many on the Right, including Don Jr.
(2) It’s hard to believe that Trump’s “tutelage” would make any difference in what has been her consistent political belief system
(3) Her nomination would throw the entire election into even more chaos than a Trump campaign usually has. Back to the question of why the Dems want her to be on the ticket—-could it be because this would provide them with a way to generate so much confusion and anger and conflict that it would help derail a Trump victory? Because SHE IS NOT A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN and they know it. Everyone who has bothered to seriously study the issue knows it. Having someone who is not a natural born citizen on the ticket would be a true Constitutional Crisis.
The information is out there. Laura Loomis brought it up. Evidently Trump has alluded to it, though in his strange inarticulate roundabout way I don’t think he has been specific about it.
And what the hell IS “the more moderate wing of the (GOP) Party” anyway? Because a “moderate” conservative is just someone who believes we have to govern according to the Constitution, kind of, usually, but not be too “extreme” about it. I suggest than any who might be considered the “more moderate wing of the Party” are there because of Identity Politics, making political decisions based on emotional attraction to or against various people and not on true political ideals of the best blueprint for governing the nation.
There are serious reasons to not find Haley acceptable, not just fretting about her donor base. And there are good, qualified, candidates who ARE legally and Constitutionally eligible, who ARE conservatives, and who don’t generate a lot of angst among those “moderate” Republicans, whoever they are.
And finally, Conservatives HAVE TO STOP PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS.
Haley would be a poor choice for multiple reasons, especially for Trump. For one, from what I’ve read she denies the 2020 election fraud, or at least to the extent that it impacted the results. She also has stated that Trump “will have to answer for” the 2021 attacks on the US capital. She also attributes the division in the US as Trump’s fault, while admitting it continues under Bidum. Here positions and comments make it clear she is self-serving, picking whatever positions she thinks will garner her the most traction. That to me, makes a person nothing more than an attention whore with a weak spine.
Fortunately, Trump has already comment alluding that she is not a consideration. Any suggestion that he “must” pick a female as his running mate is foolish. Using this as a criterion is no better than what Bidum did for his horrendous VP and Supreme Court selections. Both are disasters. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t any solid female picks or that he won’t ultimately pick one.
His VP pick will be crucial and be a strong indication of his ability to pick top qualified cabinet members, or if he will resume with less than stellar picks as he did during his first stint in the white house. This to me will be one of the biggest indicators of learning from past mistakes
We can be comforted with the knowledge that even if Trump hasn’t learned a thing and makes the same kinds of mistakes, he will still be one of the best presidents in our history, and will leave office with the nation in far better shape than it is now.
I don’t think Trump “must” choose a woman, but I do think it would be a good decision. VP choices are almost always based on who would bring in the most votes. Kennedy hated LBJ but needed Texas. If the choice of a woman were to overlook equally qualified men and also come up with an unqualified woman chosen purely by gender, I would agree with you. But all other things being equal, I think a qualified woman candidate would be a good thing.
Well, Trump won New Hampshire by 11 points; I expected it to be more, so I’m guessing Halley will hang on till her home state of South Carolina. Trump’s actual margin of victory was probably substantially higher depending on how many Democrats crossed over to vote for Haley, people who would NEVER vote for her in the general election
I’m reminded of a lady I met at the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally in D.C. in 2010 who was from New Hampshire. I asked her to explain the weird political atmosphere in New Hampshire. She said, “make a list of the top 100 issues that you think could affect people’s lives in some way, and you’ll find someone in New Hampshire for whom each of those issues is the most important thing in his or her life. Add that to the fact that you’ve got lots of mentally ill and drug addicts, and THAT’S New Hampshire.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty close.
According to Twitter’s A.I. 70% of the votes for Haley in the New Hampshire primary were from Democrats.
Do you remember how many of them said they would vote for Biden if Haley didn’t make the cut? I think I remember something like 53%.
What I’ve read is that Trump received more votes for a Primary candidate than anyone in New Hampshire history, Republican or Democrat. If NH had been a closed primary, Trump would have won by 25+. It is time for Haley to back out…but she says she’s hanging on. To get humiliated in South Carolina? Perhaps. But it might be that there’s campaign cash to spend and so she’s going to stay in until everyone gets paid. She can’t possibly think she has a path to the nomination. For better or worse, the GOP is clearly behind Trump for another try.
Side note on that: I paid $7.95 for a pound of hamburger today.
Hamburger.
No, not some fancy Angus beef hamburger or low fat stuff…just your basic 80/20 hamburger.
Make no mistake about it, Trump can win this.
“And finally, Conservatives HAVE TO STOP PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS.“
And yet just yesterday
“But back to reality, which in our case is a world dominated by Identity Politics. So we can plug our ears and chant LALALALALA and pretend that if we ignore or just dismiss the emotional components that drive so many people they simply won’t play a role any more in how they vote.”
You just quoted a statement by me that merely points out the existence of many who make decisions based on emotional components. I’m not sure what point you think you are making.
You cited a video which laid out good, solid, objective political issues and goals, and I responded with the accurate observation that in a world dominated by identity Politics it won’t work to just pretend this is not a major factor. I pointed out the foolishness of pretending that if we just “dismiss the emotional components that drive so many people they simply won’t play a role any more in how they vote.” Which is another way of saying that we have to acknowledge the role of emotional decisions in many voters. We can’ t just pretend that many voters are not driven by emotion and expect them to have objective analytical and ideological foundations for their votes, to put it another way.
And yes, many “conservatives” are swayed by emotional attraction to or dislike for different candidates, though I believe not to the extent that Democrats are.
The point is … we HAVE to play identity politics to win, and then after winning, we can maybe change the focus. And we can do two things at once … play the identity politics for those more emotional voters, while at the same time, taking a more cerebral approach with conservative voters. That being said, Trump has to pick a woman for his VP, and someone who can articulate the abortion message well …. Nikki does that.
I understand that is a common rationalization. I not only disagree, I think it is an insult to millions of people, a message that they just can’t grasp the complexities of understanding how important it is to have a specific set of rules for governing the nation and are just so shallow they have to make their decisions based on personalities.
That’s not to say it doesn’t help to have a likable candidate, but basing the decision of who should be in the office of the most powerful person in the world, or the office next to it (so to speak) based on superficialities and how these people make us FEEL is not only foolish, it is dangerous.
And if the goal is to have a woman candidate, which I accept as a political reality, there are women with actual conservative credentials, who could competently step into the role of the presidency if something were to happen to Trump (and let’s face it, people in that age range shouldn’t even be buying green bananas) who don’t have Nikki’s defects.
And who, by the way, are actually legally and Constitutionally eligible for the office, whose nomination and election would not prompt a firestorm of hysteria and conflict as well as a constitutional crisis.