It is a darn interesting news cycle writ large for the three people most likely to be elected president in 2024.
We shall take them one by one.
Plus, a special Wide World of News exclusive essay by Mr./Mrs. X, an overall view of the presidential election, America, and Western civilization, a piece that will delight, confound, annoy, or infuriate you.
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* Former Obama White House official Greg Craig has a New York Times op-ed piece in which he writes with a straight face that Joe Biden should let Democratic voters pick his 2024 running mate, arguing that this would not be done as any sign of disrespect for Vice President Kamala Harris, but rather just a way to create excitement and reassure voters about another Biden term. The opinion article is too clever by 2/3, but it does reflect the elite Democratic desire to do something (anything) about the general public and elite view of the incumbent Veep, and the threat should could pose to the reelect.
* I have no idea if the Marianne Williamson candidacy for the Democratic nomination will cause Joe Biden or the Democratic Party problems, but one can’t rule it out, for all sorts of reasons. For instance, what if she wins some delegates and then Joe Biden has to drop out? Here’s her Washington Post interview launch:
Author and activist Marianne Williamson said she will campaign in South Carolina, New Hampshire and the site of the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, after she formally declares herself the first Democratic presidential challenger to President Biden’s reelection next Saturday.
“President Biden is doing his best to help people survive an unjust system. A Democratic president should be doing much more,” she said in an interview Sunday at a Washington coffee shop. “We need to offer people more than the alleviation of their stress. We need to offer fundamental economic reform. Nothing short of that will beat the Republicans in 2024.”
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* The release of his short (256-page) book is this week, and neither you nor Governor DeSantis will be surprised to learn that the New York Times has given it a less-than-positive review:
As governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been casting himself as a Trump-like pugilist. But the overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.
Not that he admits any of this, peppering “The Courage to Be Free” with frequent eruptions about “the legacy media” and “runaway wokeness.” But all the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core….
For the most part, “The Courage to Be Free” is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.
* Among the items on my checklist to watch during the book tour:
- How many books does he sell.
- Does he only promote it in conservative media. (Fox Digital gets a first-look excerpt…)
- Does he take media questions.
- If he takes media questions, does he mess any up.
- Does he do anything positive that is surprising.
- Does he display, in the phrase of the New York Times, “a discernible sense of humor.”
* The Associated Press curtain raises the book tour with this:
Republican presidential contenders typically fight for prime speaking slots at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But as conservative activists gather in suburban Washington this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will be courting donors more than a thousand miles away in Texas and California.
The apparent CPAC snub is nothing new for DeSantis, who has emerged in the early phase of the 2024 presidential election as a leading contender for the GOP nomination even as he ignores many conventions of modern politics.
DeSantis is a frequent voice in conservative cultural fights on cable television, but he often avoids gatherings of fellow Republican governors and party leaders, who are quick to complain in private about his go-it-alone approach. He is the only top-tier presidential prospect yet to court voters in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina, the states hosting the GOP’s opening presidential primary contests. And he is often at odds with the press, refusing even to notify local media of last week’s rare three-state tour with law enforcement….
The Club for Growth will host DeSantis among a half-dozen presidential prospects at a closed-door retreat in Florida next weekend with top donors. Trump is not invited….
The Florida governor is already scheduled to headline two Republican fundraisers in Texas on Saturday. The next day he’ll speak at a $500-a-head reception for the GOP of Orange County, California. He’ll serve as the keynote speaker for the Alabama GOP the following week.
And perhaps the most important paragraph from the AP story:
He is expected to make his first appearances in key states on the primary calendar such as Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming weeks in addition to general election battlegrounds like Georgia and Pennsylvania.
* The Washington Post updated its Saturday story about DeSantis’ Palm Beach confab with some interesting pushback (How did that happen…?) on the question of the Sunshine State topper’s personal warmth. The new stuff is in bold:
Some people who have met with in recent weeks say he remains stilted in one-on-one conversations and sometimes struggles to make small talk or appear enthusiastic while engaging in the glad-handing critical to winning states such as New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. Other Republicans dismiss criticisms of DeSantis’s retail politics skills or say he’s markedly improved.
Retreat attendees said DeSantis worked the crowd comfortably throughout cocktail receptions and after-dinner gatherings, talking with people at length. One attendee said he seemed like a “different guy” than the DeSantis who ran for governor in 2018, appearing confident in closed-door settings with powerful Republicans.
* Jeff Roe, who has served at the presidential campaign architect for both Ted Cruz and Glenn Youngkin, appeared on Fox News Sunday and had Gang of 500 ears on fire with this panel remark:
ROE: [T]he reality is, is this is a two-person race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Nearly 75 percent of the voters have chosen between those two. We've not seen that from a governor or even frankly a senator have that kind of strength this early in a - in a presidential primary.
So, the reality is, this will be a very small field. A lot of people were talking about a crazy barroom brawl. I don't think so at all. I think it's going to be a small field because the money's not there, the debate stage rules will keep it very limited. Yet have to have a donor threshold, you have to have national polling, and there's simply no room for a - for a third and fourth or even fifth person in this race.
Some Gangers have taken this to mean that Roe is signaling that Youngkin won’t run, despite his getting a glowing George F. Will column about his White House prospects and despite the fact that the New York Times says he will be meeting with the chunkiest of feline donors in Gotham City this week. No Youngkin candidacy would mean a lot more bundlers and talent going to DeSantis.
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* Will the man himself or his team try to aggressively bracket the DeSantis book tour – or let their rival have his day in the sun? Gonna be interesting to see.
* The Washington Post’s vaunted fact checker sides fully with Trump over Biden/Buttigieg in the matter of the Ohio train accident:
From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.
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* The Wall Street Journal:
Russia’s struggles to seize and keep territory in Ukraine over the past year has likely fueled doubts by Chinese leader Xi Jinping that China’s military could successfully invade Taiwan later this decade, Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said.
“I think our judgment at least is that (Chinese) President Xi and his military leadership have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” Mr. Burns said Sunday on CBS. “As they’ve looked at Putin’s experience in Ukraine, that’s probably reinforced some of those doubts.”
Mr. Burns said that the U.S. continued to take the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seriously, adding that the risks of a conflict would likely grow further into the decade and beyond. U.S. intelligence and defense officials believe Mr. Xi wants to be ready to do so by 2027, if not sooner, but Mr. Burns said that goal isn’t set in stone.
“President Xi has instructed the PLA, the Chinese military leadership, to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan, but that doesn’t mean that he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well,” he said.
* I don’t know yet what to think about the new reporting on the origins of COVID, but I think the Wall Street Journal ed board has it right, as it begins its editorial thusly:
The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, doesn’t mean the case is definitive. But it is more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.
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Wide World of News Reader Mr./Mrs. X sent in this provocative essay, published here exclusively, which I recommend to you. I can’t reveal the writer’s identity, but it is a person of great accomplishment. The views in the essay are those of Mr./Mrs. X alone, but I agree with a lot of them!
Eight Seemingly Important Questions:
· Is Biden really going to be the Democratic nominee in 2024?
· Who, if not him?
· What’s the problem with DeSantis?
· How could Trump possibly beat Biden?
· Who is this Gang of 500 the purports to speak for us all?
· Why in God’s name would or could anyone vote for Trump?
· And, finally, who can possibly be for Russia beating Ukraine?
In actuality, these are not eight separate questions; they are all the same asked in somewhat different dimensions.
The Ur question is this:
Why has the broad two-party consensus, post WWII finally completely broken down?
For, had that not happened, none of the above questions would need be asked.
Post WWII, until Trump, the question of who became president, Republican or Democrat, did little to affect the overwhelmingly strength of the West, and its ability to enforce the postwar consensus. The leader of the consensus, the US, by far the overwhelming global power, had followed the same strategic course since being awoken to the reality of evil possibly overcoming the Western Enlightenment with the outbreak of WWII. The differences between Republican and Democratic administrations after WWII, when considered dispassionately in broad brush terms, was negligible. Each had been shocked to their cores by the evil viciousness of Hitler and Tojo.
Canonical Republicans Nixon and Reagan each had hooks substantial enough to allow liberals to colorfully vilify, but were still perfectly fine in terms of practical governance. For the right, liberal programs (before the “woke” era) were good foils to do politics against, but never practically hateful enough in reality to actually eliminate. From any practical sense, neither party was truly threatened in their basic convictions by the other.
Arguments between liberal and conservative were intellectually substantive only to some degree. And, from a practical perspective, when applied to governance as implemented at a state or municipal level, amounted to nothing. Buses had to run. Kids had to be educated. Budgets had to be balanced.
Mostly these ideological positions of right and left were designed to define an artificial choice always between two similarly educated believers in the Enlightenment, which, after all, was the model for American’s founding geniuses. Ideologies, mouthed at a meaningless level of generality, served as the coin flip. Post WWII, either party could do.
But, and this is critical, bubbling underneath this consensus, there sat a substantial latent darker side of the American collective mentality. There always has been, and always will be, a side to our nature ready to credit conspiracies, support demagogueries, and give vent to other destructive irrationalities, to deflect real or imagined pain and fear. But post WWII, for the population of voters so inclined in this direction, there was little place to go. The political structure was as one, left or right, Republican or Democrat. Both sides positioned themselves as upholding a well-established moral suasion. Both parties were for truth telling, belief in facts, science, and other rational policies. This moral suasion was built upon the small “l” liberal consensus, backed by the State, the Churches, and other institutions, that was, from the days of the Enlightenment, designed to keep the dark forces at the periphery.
No politician until Trump understood that this containment could be broken by the power of voice alone, if spoken unconstrained by commonly held cultural norms, and willing, even eager, to use bluntness and brutality, to penetrate directly through to the inner fears of what had slowly and quietly become a substantial beleaguered working class.
Now that Trump has shown the efficacy of that big voice, including screaming the big lie when advantageous, others have picked up the mantel. Most, to a man and woman, do not believe the words they utter. This shows, giving Trump a huge advantage, as he believes his lies are necessary and fully justified to his righteous cause. To him, the cause is everything, and justifies all that he does. His followers completely agree. Trump, like no politician in living memory, punctured the nice pieties of the “Gang of 500” and went directly into a motherlode of darkness.
Existential darkness in human life is unnatural. Existence is mostly hard, but has purpose. Darkness is appropriate only when purpose is washed away. The Enlightenment was meant to lighten the lot of humanity and provide individual purpose. And, it did. But, in our era, it has also brought into the mix the evolution of a weird liberal wokeness, and the stupidity of a disemboweling of the American working class by allowing the Chinese to build everything. Our government even tacitly overlooked the Chinese stealing our knowhow to do it. This collapsed working class economic power (to the enormous advantage of the global elites), resulted not only in an income disparity of breathtaking proportions, but much more importantly, intensified a loss of personal identity. The pleasure of being useful in the world, by making steel or cars, or anything cool and neat, went away. There is in these times little point to a working class life in America. And that is the fundamental problem of America.
Which Donald J. Trump has done us the favor of pointing out.
The anger and fear loss of identity engendered took on all manner of forms in the minds of the dispossessed. The natural antipathy any human feels for someone not of his tribe could of course firestorm up into unthinkably irrational hatreds. Reasons for worker disenfranchisement had to be found, as the political class and its Gang of 500, guilty of causing and abetting the disaster, offered nothing to explain or fix it. Blame for the discontent of course fell on all the usual suspects, including some unusual ones, my favorite being the famous space lasers operated by the Jews.
Trump, to this up to then only latent audience, was the prophet Mohammad, the Lord Jesus, and Genghis Khan all rolled into one. To the surprise of all the “pols,” they represented enough of the population to let Trump own, or at least rent, one of the two parties. Because of the Electoral College, this group, 30% of the electorate, is easily more than enough for him to do so.
The Republican have had a history since Johnson’s civil rights legislation of trying to appeal to these people anyway, even though this was always done by wink and nod, and as a cynical bait and switch exercise. Republican elites felt the same way about the world as did liberal elites, but had less qualms about building ties to the hurting working class white base than did their liberal counterparts. Liberals were too pleased with themselves for listening to Eleanor Roosevelt and freeing the Negroes to pay attention. LBJ, a far better human than credited, did Eleanor’s work far more than she was ever able, but, as he predicted, this started to turn the white working class voter over to the Republicans. Then, the opening to China, globalization, and liberalism running amok, powerfully certified the inevitable.
Trump took over the Republicans as naturally as a fish swims in the sea. His core supporters all behave as the eight questions above invoke for reasons now as visceral to them as what drives Arabs to want to kill Jews, and Protestants to want to kill Catholics.
Trump, to practically employ his talent to the degree he does, has to be sociopathic. No one with normal collective empathies can do what he does out of sheer conscious premeditation. Because of this pathology, he will defeat all other Republicans who have learned his ways and are willing imitators, but lack his pathology. Trump supporters know instinctively a Cruz or DeSantis, more products of an Enlightenment education and cultural adaption than 99% of Americans, are phony Trumps, and will revert to the small “l” Enlightenment consensus once elected. Trump is the only genuine article. He actually wants to overthrow Western Civilization.
It is important to understand Trump has done this on his own. The Trump administration largely resisted him. But the Republican party, if he wins in 2’4, will be fully in his grip, and if he wins, he will change the world to Xi’s and Putin’s liking. Trump winning will be the end of America, and the end of the West (Europe without America is helpless…) which is exactly what his supporters wish.
A dynamic working class making enough money and having enough satisfaction to think living means something would have not only kept the 8 questions off the table, it would continue to form the strong inner core that insures America always stays America, which is to be the path by which the Western Enlightenment becomes the world’s.
But come up they have. And endangered therefore is America’s mission.
Here are the answers to the eight questions:
Biden should not run.
Trump must be convicted.
McConnell, McCarthy, and the Democrats must create a unity ticket.
The Gang of 500 must wake up, not continue to aloofly think so well of itself, and fully support these moves as a national security necessity.
If such a thing were to happen, the Russians and Chinese would immediately back the hell down, go into their respective shells, knowing the US was fully back, with all of Europe solidly behind them.
But...because of these Trumpian times, both Xi and Putin are sorely tempted to read history as favoring Trump, and see in this their best and our worst outcomes as possible. Thus, at this moment, Putin will not back down. The West, to its credit, with Biden’s visit to Ukraine, has defacto signaled entry into WWIII. Tanks and planes will arrive. Supply chains for the long term are being built. Armament factories are scaling up. So, Putin is confronted...for now.
We are today at war with Russia. China is thinking about all of this carefully, and will soon choose to materially help Russia or not, putting them in the position of having Russia do for them what we are having Ukraine do for us.
These are the geopolitical stakes of those questions posed above.
I note that America has not won a war since WWII, and the Russians and Chinese think we only won that one because of both of them -- which is substantially true.) So, Xi may swing to Russia, and the US may swing to Trump. To America’s mission, this is a disaster beyond imagining.
We should have taken better care of our working class to ensure their healthy spirit. And been less judgmental of their antipathy for sexual and racial liberalism. All the while continuing to honor the spirit of the Enlightenment. We could have easily done both. But we didn’t. The West, not by heaven ordained to be successful in its mission, may pay the price.
