Trump, Readying His Run for 2024, Comes Into Focus as an Enhanced Historic Figure

by Conrad Black

The trajectory of the campaign for next year’s presidential election has been clear for some months: President Trump has led all the way, has grown slightly but steadily stronger, and stands much more strongly in the polls and in his prospects generally than he did at any time in the 2020 or 2016 election campaigns.

In the run-up to the previous election, only in a brief golden window between the rejection of the first impeachment of Mr. Trump and the onset of the Covid pandemic and the irresistible demand for a national shutdown was he ever leading the polls. It is now impossible to find a plausible scenario in which he is denied renomination by the Republican party.

This in itself would make him an enhanced historic figure as only the fifth person to come first or second in three consecutive presidential elections: Jefferson, Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were the others. William Jennings Bryan and Richard Nixon were nominees three times but not consecutively, and Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren sought the office three times but not consecutively and only twice as one of the two principal contenders.

One after another, the life vests of the anti-Trump movement have been torn off the increasingly frightened Trump-despisers wearing them: the arrival in the campaign of Governor DeSantis was breathlessly awaited and must now be considered an almost inexplicable failure.

I was one of those who wrote, here and elsewhere, that it seemed obvious that given the party alignment and the fact that he was only in his mid-40s, the best course for Mr. DeSantis was to make a deal with Mr. Trump that the governor would support him this year and, whatever the outcome, Mr. Trump would support Mr. DeSantis in 2028. If the present trend continues, it will not be easy for the Florida governor to reassemble himself as a strong candidate for the White House after what appears to be a serious debacle this year.

The ultimate Democrat weapon to achieve their reelection was telegraphed long in advance to be politicized indictments of the former president; confident statements were constantly leaked for months that the Trump phenomenon would be blown to smithereens at last when the dreadful ogre was finally brought face-to-face with righteous justice.

The four indictments have been handed up, and Mr. Trump has risen slightly in the polls. The most encouraging development in the Biden era is this clear evidence that the majority of Americans now have some awareness of how severely their criminal justice system has putrefied.

The prosecutors have practically unlimited powers to extort and suborn evidence, to grant immunity from perjury proceedings to witnesses giving false inculpatory testimony, and in the federal system to rack up totalitarian levels of success in convictions, 95 percent of them without the tedious bourgeois formality of a trial, so great is the ability of prosecutors to manipulate the plea-bargain system.

The only one of the four indictments of Mr. Trump to which any serious legal authority attaches the slightest credence is the documents case. I don’t believe any of these indictments will ever come to trial as motions and appeals of motion decisions should push them all past the election at which point the purpose for them evaporates.

The New York, January 6, and Georgia cases are such utter nonsense — and as far as I can deduce fail to really allege a crime — that higher courts will strike them. As for the documents case, I have no standing to try the case here, but I don’t think there is any chance that Mr. Trump violated the Espionage Act.

This was a records case which has to overcome a president’s ability to declassify, and I think the chances of a Florida jury deciding unanimously that the former president committed a crime over these issues is approximately zero. Yet this was the heart and soul of the Democratic Party campaign for reelection: the abuse of the criminal justice system to try to smear and derail the former president and current leader of the opposition with glaringly spurious criminal charges known by their authors to be absurd and almost unfounded.

As the trials are set back, the cases themselves will cease to be highly publicized and the issue becomes whether the aversion to Mr. Trump is greater than the combination of the public revulsion at the abuse of the justice system and the corruption of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, as well as public dissatisfaction with the failure in almost every policy field of the current administration.

I don’t believe President Biden is re-electable, and it is not believable to me that the same party bosses who rescued him from the dustbin of history after he’d flunked out of the primaries in 2020 will not, as gently as they can, guide him into retirement. They will have to do this in time to allow for the primaries to ensure that the vice president is not the presidential nominee.

Gavin Newsom, building on his record as governor of California, and turbocharger for the Jerry Brown-Newsom destruction of the Golden State, is not going to be a formidable vote-getter across the country. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he or she will be carrying the can for a catastrophic administration: inflation, crime, borders, the green terror, Afghanistan, and in some respects, Ukraine.

This can’t be disguised any longer behind an avalanche of defamation and false prosecution of Donald Trump. For the last eight years, all the Democrats have had is their promotion of anti-Trump hysteria; it is finally fizzling as the kimono is opened on the corruption of the Bidens.

The Biden administration is like a heavily damaged Allied bomber returning from the skies of Germany in 1944, pieces falling off its fuselage and the unflappable pilot informing his copilot that since the landing gear won’t come down, it could “get a little rough.” There are now signs of disintegration in the airtight stonewall of national political media hostility to Mr. Trump.

Jake Tapper, an indefatigable amplifier of any conceivable criticism against Mr. Trump these last eight years, to his credit, and without apparently turning blue as he did so, acknowledged on CNN last week that on Ukraine, in 2019 and 2020 “Trump was right and Biden was wrong.”

Megyn Kelly, no Trump supporter, must have spoken for most Americans when she described Rachel Maddow’s love-in with Secretary Clinton on the day of the Georgia indictment as “disgusting.” So it was: Ms. Maddow, who thought she was exposing Mr. Trump as a tax cheat when she disclosed the many millions of dollars he had paid in tax in one year from his improperly leaked tax return.

Ms. Maddow also whitewashed the greatest destroyer of subpoenaed evidence in American history, Mrs. Clinton, who attributed her defeat in 2016 to acts of treason by Mr. Trump with the Russians, and to being “shivved twice by Jim Comey,” the FBI director who did everything humanly possible to salvage her candidacy, while corrupting and disgracing the FBI.

It is true that, according to polls, a majority of Americans is now disinclined to vote for Mr. Trump, but that does not allow for whatever might be their views of the alternative at the next election, and it does not take into account that the present Mr. Trump is a new Mr. Trump. He is a much-wronged and courageously persevering candidate who has established in the minds of approximately half the country that the treatment of unverifiable harvested ballots in 2020 raises authentic doubt about the validity of the election result.

Unlike the first version of candidate and President Trump, he now rarely issues cringe-worthy posts or wildly implausible accusations. He has become a much more presentable candidate and he is facing a withered and palsied Democratic opposition.

First published in the New York Sun.