Eighteen months ago, a pundit wrote off Donald Trump’s chances of ever being president again with the words: “The once omnipotent GOP beast riding the American political world like a paw-crunching King Kong is now seeing his stranglehold over the party ebb away faster than the infamous gorilla tumbled to his demise from the Empire State Building after being shot by US Navy jets.”
The same pundit added confidently that Trump was “done” because he’d become a “whiny, democracy-defying bore,” and declared Ron DeSantis the man to lead the Republicans into the 2024 election.
That pundit, I regret to admit, was me!
And it is now time to pull a DeSantis and eat a large slice of humble pie.
Trump’s comfortable victory in the New Hampshire primary last night, following his landslide win in the Iowa caucuses, has put him on the cusp of winning the Republican presidential nomination again.
It’s not quite over yet; Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent, has vowed to keep scrapping.
But it’s looking increasingly inevitable that Trump’s defied all the odds to seize back control of his party, and who would now bet against him pulling off one of the greatest comebacks in political history by beating President Biden in November?
I’ve certainly learned my lesson not to underestimate the Teflon Don, though a lot can still happen between now and the general election.
What’s undeniable, though, is that the person most responsible if Trump does win back the White House will be Biden himself.
When the history books seek to explain the electric charge that refueled a man whom most observers — like me — considered to be running on empty, they will surely settle on two reasons: 1) The ridiculously over-the-top Democrat-led efforts to stop Trump from running again off by chucking so many criminal charges at him that even Al Capone would have felt it unfair if it had happened to him, and 2) Biden’s own staggeringly dreadful incompetence as president.
The first of these sent Trump’s poll numbers rocketing higher with every charge leveled against him, as even Republicans who don’t like him viewed what was happening as a partisan witch hunt.
Trump’s no angel, but the exaggerated characterization of his supposed criminality reminds me of what the comedian Chris Rock said to me the day after the 2016 election when I asked him why he thought Trump beat Hillary Clinton: “If someone’s murdered eight people, don’t go around saying he’s murdered nine.”
But it’s the second reason, Biden’s own performance as president, that is a far bigger factor in Trump’s comeback.
In 2020, Biden was able to run as the anti-Trump candidate and use the COVID pandemic’s ruinous impact on the US economy to full effect.
Now, he has to run on his own abysmal record — and the stats don’t lie.
Biden’s approval rating has plunged to a record low of 33 percent, a number so bad that no incumbent president has ever been re-elected from such deep unpopularity.
Americans see him as a leader who’s failed them on the inflation-ravaged economy; failed them on immigration by letting the southern border explode into a dangerously unsafe full-blown crisis; failed them on crime, with many big cities seen as lawless hellholes; failed them on the foreign stage (his overnight withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was a deadly fiasco that sent adversaries like Russia and China the message that the US was no longer up for a fight); and failed them on his promise to unite a country which has never seemed more divided.
But it’s not just those failures that have made Biden so disliked and distrusted — or even his pathetically deluded, “You’re looking at the wrong polls!” denials of his failures.
It’s also his active encouragement of the woke brigade’s more extreme gender ideology nonsense, with his administration refusing to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports at schools, despite the obvious unfairness.
It’s the sense of progressive, elitist disdain that he’s fostered toward ordinary Americans, and especially toward 80 million Trump supporters.
It’s all the murky, sleazy, corrupt scandals surrounding his disgraced son Hunter, and the increasing belief that “squeaky-clean” Joe may be more directly involved himself, and a lot dirtier than he is prepared to admit when he plays the morality card against Trump.
It’s the fact that his choice of VP, Kamala Harris, is even more useless than he is.
I could go on, but there honestly isn’t enough room in a single column to list all the reasons Biden’s so unpopular.
Ultimately, though, all roads lead back to his advanced age and senility — as even two-thirds of Democrats think he’s too old to run again.
And it’s not the fact he’s 81 that’s the problem — Mick Jagger’s only a few months younger and runs around like a teenager — but the fact that he looks and sounds like he’s 101.
If he’s not falling off his bike, tumbling down the steps of Air Force One, or crashing face-down on stage, he’s spouting incomprehensible gibberish like he did yesterday when he exclaimed in a speech: “Don’t mess with uhhiminauhwemerica unless you want to get the benefit.”
When you can’t even pronounce the name of the country you’re supposed to be leading, it’s time to go.
Can you imagine Biden’s physical and cognitive state by the time he’s served another four-year term, as he wants to do?
The irony is that he seems thrilled that Trump will probably be the GOP nominee, prematurely crowning him with a rapid “Bring it on!” statement last night and saying it will be a battle for freedom and democracy.
But at the same time, Democratic activists are trying to attack democracy and Americans’ freedom to vote for whom they want, by getting Trump removed from presidential state ballots, citing a clause in the 14th Amendment that prohibits those who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country from holding federal office.
Once again, this transparent hypocrisy, not to mention the prejudgment of any trial, will help rather than harm Trump, who is licking his lips at taking on an opponent who he thinks robbed him last time and now looks like he has one foot in the grave.
I made the wrong analogy 18 months ago.
Donald Trump’s not King Kong, he’s Frankenstein’s monster.
And Biden has become Washington’s equivalent of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, reviving Trump’s rotting political corpse through his own tactical stupidity and ineptitude and creating a raging beast he can’t control that is now coming back to kill him.
My money’s on the monster.
NEWS CREDIT
