Campaign 2024

Open Thread

Mark Noonan82 Comments

Trump announces for 2024, McConnell gets re-elected as Senate GOP leader, the GOP takes the House.

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about what this means and making their stout assertions of what will happen. Spoiler: nobody has the first clue. If the election we just had didn’t tell you that you can’t predict things, then nothing will. As for me, I predict nothing. I will pay no attention to any poll. I will pay no heed to the Experts telling us how it will go. It will be as it will be and we’ll find out after it is over how it went.

That said, there is still much we can say. And of course I’ll say it!

Trump’s speech last night was rather low key, wasn’t it? I’ve never subscribed to the view that Trump is unscripted: I’m pretty confident that he plans everything out to the last detail. So, that was the effect he wanted to present. Why? Could be because after last week’s disaster, being too rah rah would look ridiculous. Could also be that he’s trying to overall strike a new tone: “look, guys, it is bad: we can fix it, here’s how”. Could also be influenced by the potential GOP field…you know, look weak and see who strikes first and then your response is a counter-attack which, no matter how blistering it is, always seems fair turnabout by regular folks.

As for myself, I have decided not to commit myself to anyone this early on. I’m going to see how it plays out. As we get to the end of 2023 I’ll probably decide who my candidate is but even that is subject to change based on circumstances. I really don’t think anyone is wise to commit this early. Once you start getting invested in a thing, you start to blind yourself to possible alternatives. I’m keeping my powder dry.

A lot of Never Trump is now gleeful thinking that the Bad Orange Man is done. He may be! But don’t count on anything. Certainly don’t count Trump out given what we’re getting in the Senate. The bottom line is that a huge portion of the GOP base despises the GOP leadership – and the Senate GOP leadership in particular. I have had a lot of respect for McConnell but I do believe his time is done and he’s making a mistake by hanging on – and if it starts to look like he only hung on thwart Trump, then Trump’s stock with the GOP base will only grow and solidify. McConnell is very much the past presiding over the councils of the present – and his post election statement about finding ways to work with Biden caused immediate outrage. We didn’t send GOPers to Congress to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire! McCarthy, set to be Speaker, seems to at least understand this a bit. He’s a squish, but he also doesn’t hold the base in contempt the way McConnell does. With Mitch there making deals with Biden, Trump will have the perfect foil for a GOP primary – and his opponents will be faced with the stark choice of denouncing McConnell or being seen as Establishment tools.

I make no predictions but I’m working on the assumption that we’re going to lose 2024. Always hard to pry the incumbent Party out of the White House, no matter. Absent a complete economic meltdown (a 50/50 prospect at the moment), let’s just say we’re gonna lose. This, first off, will make any defeat feel less bad – and it can also impel us to try things. Zeldin is pushing to be RNC chair and he has it right: you fight in every precinct. You don’t resign any of the board to the enemy. I think that if we discard the worn out notions of the past and simply try new things we might get some remarkable results. As we can’t change the early voting laws in Blue/Purple States, use them (it is already being done to great effect in NY and CA – and Newsom, the Democrat’s rising star, is way underperforming what was expected because of it). Find a guy or gal to run in the Deep Blue. Mike Garcia is apparently the Giga-Chad: I guess he won a Biden +8 district in 2020 so the Democrats decided to get rid of him by making his district Biden +12..and he still won easily. While voting in the House like he represents Alabama! One jokester said “its 2032, Democrats redistrict Garcia into downtown Los Angeles and swear they’ll get him this time!”. Mostly what it shows is that if you try and find the right message and messenger, no place is really off the table.

That is the attitude I want us to carry into 2024: lets just fight. Do our best. Try something new. It can’t possibly go any worse than it just did!

What I’m also thinking is that DeSantis should think carefully here. I don’t go with the Trumpsters who think he’s just a GOPe mole. He came out of the GOPe, but his fights against woke Corporations show that he’s learned the lesson. Mitch and Co might think that RDS is their ticket back…but they may find that, as the GOPe did with TR, that they just made that damned cowboy President. My concern is that if 2024 is a loser, then we don’t want to expend RDS in a bruising fight to beat Trump and then have him lose the White House. If I were an RDS advisor, I’d be thinking long and hard about telling my guy to back away from 2024. Or make only a token run and then get behind Trump. It works like this:

If you get behind Trump and work your tail off for him, you’ll build up huge goodwill with the Trumpsters. They won’t forget: they’ll be in your pocket for 2028. This works out even if Trump loses. If, however, Trump were to win then its still just 4 years, Trump can’t run again and you’ve not only got the Trumpsters in your pocket, you’ve got the President clearing your path in the primaries in 2028. Plus if we do win in 2024, we’ll almost certainly be coming in during a time of severe economic pain that will take years to dig out of. Might be better to let Trump tackle that: he’ll be free to piss people off, after all.

Anyways, that is mostly where my thinking is right now. I will add one last thing: the only people I’ll pay no attention to at all are those who say they won’t back the GOP nominee unless it is their choice. Such people – and there are Trumpist and Never-Trump people like this – are not only useless, they are destructive. I’ll vote in 2024 for whomever is on the GOP ticket because that person will always be the moral and intellectual superior of the Democrat. If a person can’t commit to that, then get out: we got better things to do.

Only Super Trump Can Beat Trump

Mark Noonan23 Comments

There is much talk about Trump. This is in itself astonishing – never has the guy who allegedly lost a Presidential election commanded this much attention a year later. That he’s still a massive topic of discussion shows the historic nature of his Presidency.

A lot of the talk is a bit of whistling past the graveyard. Especially a lot of Never Trump who didn’t go Full Democrat are certain that Trump is a fading commodity and we can all just move on from him. For the moment, their eyes are fixed firmly on Ron DeSantis…whom I think we all agree would be a fine President, but we also have our doubts about him. Not on basic policy, but on attitude. And that, I think, is why Trump stubbornly won’t fade away.

We on the right do want a good policy President. And we’d like a President who is much better at picking staff than Trump proved. And we don’t need daily drama. OTOH, we also know that more than ever, we need a fighter. Someone who will, day in and day out, go toe to toe with our opponents and never let up for a minute. Is DeSantis that guy? He does fight pretty well…but are we sure that when push comes to shove he’ll choose us rather than the Ruling Class? I think for DeSantis, or anyone other than Trump, they are going to have to really prove it to us.

Now, if Trump decides not to run – he will be 78, after all – then all bets are off. The race will be anyone’s for the taking. But even there, the person who gets the nod will be the person who most firmly convinces us that they are unafraid of a four year long slog of fighting. Because we have to have a fight. We can’t afford to compromise even a bit. We win, they lose: that has to be our goal.

The best and easiest way for any putative standard-bearer to make their mark is to simply defend the 1/6 defendants. Even Trump hasn’t been out front on that – and if he runs, the only way anyone will be able to attack Trump successfully will be from the right. As I said in 2016 when Trump was the front runner, the only way to beat Trump is to out-Trump him. Cruz tried, but I think he tried too late. But if you want to be the man, you have to beat the man…and nobody is going to beat Trump by going softer than Trump.

The crucial thing to know is that the old rules don’t apply. They really haven’t applied since the Democrats cooked up Watergate into a Presidency-destroying scandal. I mean, what is Watergate compared to Gore taking sacks of cash from monks pledged to poverty? You get the picture: whatever was wrong about Watergate, it wasn’t anything to get too worked up about. But that is when the Democrats, using their cat’s paws in the MSM, started making all political battles scorched Earth battles. But from Watergate to Trump, the GOP never engaged. We worked on the assumption that Democrats, like us, want what is best for America. Uh, no: what Democrats want is what is best for Democrats. All other considerations come in a distant second. They do this because they sincerely believe that basic human decency requires Democrats to be in charge. That we see it differently doesn’t matter – and is irrelevant. What we must do in response is what we’ve always had to do but refused: sincerely believe that basic human decency requires the GOP to be in charge.

It isn’t a very large mental shift, but it is a necessary one – because it builds into the mind the need to always thwart the Democrats and always advance the GOP. Never compromise. Never give anything and if you really are forced to give them something, make certain that you get ten times as much for yourself. Never attack your own side; abandon those found to be corrupt, but don’t attack them. Ignore them. If asked about one of ours who goes wrong, immediately launch into an attack on a Democrat who did similar. Always cast Democrat programs in the darkest possible terms – it is easy to do because all their supposed social programs are mere grift to payoff donors. What is being done against CRT is the template – the old GOP might have merely quibbled around the edges while essentially conceding the main point. But the people battling CRT started with the assertion that CRT is evil…and they’ve forced the Democrats into the untenable position of defending the worst aspects of CRT…and it is working for us. It played a huge role in winning Virginia.

It is all a very long way to 2024, but I think I can be safe in saying that how it will come out won’t be in anyone’s predictive model. We’re in flux. We’re in danger of civil war, actually. None of the old political certainties are holding up. Liberals in San Francisco are buying guns while working class Latino voters are for the first time casting GOP votes. Meanwhile, upper class white people with a college degree become even stronger for the Democrats. Victory and disaster stare us in the face: we’ll get one or the other. And only a fighter – backed by fighters – can prevail.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

The GOP is slow rolling some of Biden’s nominees. Managed to collect the scalp of one of them. Biden is being forced back on minimum wage, amnesty for illegals and election reform. In other words: going as you’d expect when the President is a senile, 78 year old and the Democrats only have 50 Senators and a razor-thin majority in the House.

I did check out Trump’s CPAC speech – still not sure if he’ll try again in 2024, but the bottom line is that at least for the moment, if he runs, he’s got it. Lots can change between now and, say, June of 2023, but it is Trump’s for the asking. We’ll see if he asks. If he doesn’t get in, I’m warming to Ron DeSantis as a lot of people are, though I’m still completely open on whom I’ll actually back.

Lockdowns are being ended in Texas and that’s good – hopefully this will spread, but I’m still thinking the Democrat governors want to keep them going. In fact, I think the overall Democrat desire is to keep them going right through 2024. They seem to have calculated it out that the fear-mongering about Covid benefits them. And, maybe it does? It may well have added a couple million real votes to their total in 2020. There is a big split and a huge number of Americans are simply scared to death of the virus – I can only assume these are the people who still both consume and believe the MSM. Keep in mind that as the States reopen, there will be an economic boost and that will at least temporarily boost Biden.

I hope to goodness we don’t get into a major war these next four years: the military is going entirely SJW. I’ve heard they are even screening social media posts of recruits to see if there is any wrongthink out there. How the heck they plan on staffing the armed forces when they are excluding patriots, I have no idea. I highly recommend against any young people joining the military – and that is a sad thing for a veteran to say. But I don’t think they’ll allow you to be a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine these days. You have to check off the Intersectionality boxes, instead. Not worth the trouble – or the risk that you’ll be sent into battle and your CO got his or her job based on a SJW quota rather than battle worthiness.

Cancel Culture has come for Doctor Seuss and I find it enormously funny. Thy guy was a Commie’s Commie – but he wasn’t woke enough for modern times. Anyone want to tell the SJWs that Che killed homosexuals?

I’m still writing! A lot. Second draft of Shadow Army is now complete and I plan on dropping it in June, with the sequel to that, Kings and Queen, coming maybe in November or December. And I just finished the first draft of Book 6, which had a title but the Mrs hates the title so I’ve probably got to think up a new one.