Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign Is Off to a Rough Start

It has been a rough three weeks for former President Donald Trump since he announced his third presidential campaign with a speech at Mar-a-Lago.

Summary

It has been a rough three weeks for former President Donald Trump since he announced his third presidential campaign with a speech at Mar-a-Lago.

• Days before Thanksgiving, Trump planned a private dinner with an old celebrity pal who had recently made a series of bigoted statements attacking Jewish people.
• Instead, his erstwhile friend Kanye “Ye” West brought white nationalist and proud anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and other guests including Milo Yiannopolis, possibly the most notable political figure to defend pederasty in recent years. Once news of the dinner leaked, it exploded like a political bomb.
• Yiannopolis later claimed he set up the dinner to “make Trump’s life miserable.” Many of his fellow Republicans, including staunch Trump supporters, condemned the former president for breaking bread with a white supremacist.
• West would go on to praise Hitler and defend Nazis in an anti-Semitic tirade on InfoWars that made even conspiracy theorist Alex Jones visibly uncomfortable.
• The former president trails Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a series of polls taken after the 2022 midterm elections. Trump led most pre-midterm polling, but has suffered in the polls after many Republicans blamed the former president for a disappointing midterm performance.
• A Deseret News-Hinckley Institute of Politics poll of a hypothetical 2024 Utah G.O.P. presidential primary found Trump had fallen into third place with 14.6 percent, trailing not only Gov. DeSantis (24.2 percent) but outgoing anti-Trump Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming (16.4 percent).
• Trump is staying out of Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff at the request of the Herschel Walker campaign, according to POLITICO. If Republicans believe the way to win in Georgia in 2022 is for Donald Trump to stay away, it’s unclear how Trump and the G.O.P. plan to contest Georgia in 2024.
• On Saturday, the former President escalated his rhetoric about the 2020 election in a Saturday morning post on Truth Social. “So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
• The most recent Republican president’s call for the “termination” of the Constitution was met with immediate condemnation from prominent members of both parties. The Biden White House shot back, “You cannot only love America when you win.”
• Republican Senators panned Trump’s comments as “ridiculous,” “very inappropriate” and “irresponsible,” while one laughed out loud when reporters told her Trump wanted the 2020 election overturned. Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the No. 2 Senate Republican, condemned Trump’s remarks and called them a “golden opportunity” for his potential primary rivals.
• Former Vice President Mike Pence rebuked his former boss. Pence said, “I must tell you that I think that everyone that serves in public office, everyone that aspires to serve or serve again should make it clear that we will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
• Trump insisted on Monday he does not actually want to “terminate” the Constitution, rather he just wants “steps to be immediately taken” so that “if an election is irrefutably fraudulent, it should go to the rightful winner or, at a minimum, be redone.”
• Although it has faded into the background compared to recent events, Trump remains in deep legal jeopardy while the Justice Department continues the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation.
• Trump also faces an investigation into the Trump Organization and a state probe in Georgia related to his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
• The 2024 presidential nominating contests won’t kick off for well over a year, in theory leaving Trump plenty of time to right the ship. Even so, this cannot have been the start the Trump 2024 team were planning for in the heady days before the midterms when the “red wave” seemed like a certainty.

• CNN highlighted two loose ends congressional Democrats will need to address before Republicans take over in January. The Jan. 6 Committee report will reportedly drop in the coming days, while the House Ways and Means Committee just got access to six years of Trump’s federal tax returns.
• Controversies aside, “Trump is still the 2024 GOP frontrunner – for now,” observed Ben Jacobs for Vox. “After all,” Jacobs wrote, “Trump has weathered scandals that would end the career of almost any other politician.”
• Ruth Marcus thinks Trump’s call to terminate the constitution was “equally dangerous and even more insidious.” Marcus reviewed all of Trump’s most controversial statements from the past seven years and argued Trump’s latest comments “should be neither excused nor forgotten.”

• “At some point, conservative-leaning voters are going to notice that all Trump cares about now is the pretense that he won the election of 2020, and that, in order to push that idea, he will happily destroy anything and everything that gets in his way,” Charles C. W. Cooke wrote in National Review. He continued, “Until then, I must ask: Are you not tired of this crap?”
• “Trump’s bid for a non-consecutive second term is faced with the same level of resistance that hampered his first, when Beltway actors weaponized the levers of government to politically terminate their public enemy number one, beginning from before day one,” argued Tristan Justice for The Federalist. “If Americans don’t vote because they don’t trust that their votes will count, then America doesn’t have a democracy to begin with.”
• “The meeting of the minds that occurred over the long Thanksgiving weekend at Mar-a-Lago between Trump, the white-supremacist agitator Nicholas Fuentes, and the artist formerly known as Kanye West seems torn from the transcript of HBO’s expose into Bellevue Hospital,” Noah Rothman observed in Commentary. “Fuentes, an unapologetic bigot and Holocaust-denier, reportedly impressed Trump with nothing more than obsequious displays of affection. Sparks flew when “Ye” and Trump argued over which of them would win in a head-to-head election. It’s a wonder that any of them could hear each other over the voices in their heads.”

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© Dominic Moore, 2022