River News: Our View

We aren’t really deep into the presidential primary season yet, but already it looks like the presidential nominees have been selected, and ultimately the new boss, whichever one we pick in November 2024, will be the old boss.

It’s going to be Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.

Caveat: This is a crazy nation — all nations being dragged into totalitarianism are — and unexpected things could happen. Biden could forget where he is one too many times. Kamala Harris could choke on her word salad. Plus, we’ve never had a president govern from prison before, but, hey, why not try new things?

The point is, anything could happen, but the handwriting is on the wall. The Democratic side is rigged for Biden because that’s what Democrats do and have always done — they rig elections. It’s part of their DNA. 

On the Republican side, Trump is crushing the opposition. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll has him 37 points ahead of now also-ran Ron DeSantis, 54 percent-17 percent, and no one else is above 5 percent. 

Things could change but not likely. We certainly aren’t going to see warmongering Mike Pence or Nikki Haley lead the GOP ticket, and Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy are too green for voters to really get behind. It’s Trump or DeSantis, and pretty soon, with DeSantis’s donors dumping him faster than Spotify dumped Harry and Meghan, it likely will be just Trump.

So how did we get here?

Well, first things first, DeSantis collapsed as a candidate and, no, not because of his now-famous wooden ways. He collapsed because he flushed the governor of Florida down the toilet and replaced him with DeSantis the politician. 

Once upon a time, you know, about five months ago, DeSantis was giving The Donald a run for his money in the polls. He came out of the pandemic as an iconic defender of liberty, taking on Big Pharma and fighting vaccine mandates and school closures and censorship and every other authoritarian policy the Democrats were pursuing.

Florida prospered and grew in population. If not loaded with charisma, DeSantis built upon all that with steady hands and competent management of his state, and he whittled away at regulation and declared war on the deep state.

For those who wanted Trumpism without Trump, it was a dream come true.

And then, on the way to his crowning, while dancing at his pre-coronation gala, DeSantis did a terrible thing: He forgot who brought him to the dance in the first place. And there, right before a nation’s eyes, he jilted Lady Liberty and took up with a stranger called Political Consultant.

Ever since that day, DeSantis’s heart and mind have cooed for Political Consultant, and he has listened to every word Political Consultant has had to say.

Suddenly, all the talk about the authoritarianism of the pandemic went away; all the pronouncements about defending freedom did, too. Everything was suddenly about fighting wokeism in a nothing-else-matters culture war, not only Disney and other corporations but in schools and hospitals and under couches and in beds. For DeSantis, wokeism was everywhere. 

Now there is nothing wrong with fighting “woke,” far from it. But today’s world demands a balance between the culture wars, foreign policy, and economic policy. DeSantis sacrificed the latter for the former. He became one-dimensional.

More important, as he dropped the defense of civil liberties from his roster, he actually crossed the line and began to advocate for sometimes sacrificing those liberties in the name of fighting wokeism. He clapped when a political opponent of his was banned from Twitter, for instance.

He backed a bill that would not only ban the teaching of critical race theory — a good thing — but set up the state government as a Ministry of Truth to approve what is said in the classroom.

Here’s what that bill said: “General education courses may not distort significant historical events with misleading or incorrect presentations of fact …”

Sorry, but who decides these “facts”? The CDC says that it’s a fact that vaccines are safe and effective. Who decided that fact? We don’t need government deciding what is fact and what is not, whether it’s the Biden administration or the DeSantis administration.

Instead of embracing parental rights — and their right to oversee what is said in their childrens’ classrooms and to choose those classrooms in the first place — the governor embraced the very authoritarianism he set out to fight. He not only jilted Lady Liberty but shot her in the back. That’s where listening to political consultants will get you.

As for Trump’s strengths, they are not all as obvious as DeSantis’s failings. Sure, Trump starts out with a compassionate base, most of whom believe the 2020 election was stolen from him. Last we looked, some 70 percent of Republicans think just that.

Trump also obviously has a great track record. Until the pandemic knocked him off his game, he was headed for a landslide re-election. His deregulation and tax cutting policies were working wonders for the economy, he worked hard to stop the advance of the globalist army by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that would have finished off what is left of working class and middle America.

The bottom line is, his base loves him for truly helping make America great again. And the bogus indictments just make Trump stronger and stronger, as would any convictions.

But there’s another, less obvious reason Trump has grown so strong in the polls, and that is because he has put together a substantive list of policy proposals for his next term. They are the very embodiment of Trumpism, and he is the only GOP candidate with such a resonant vision. People may not see these proposals mentioned by the mainstream media, but Trump touts them at his rallies, and, more, he pushes them through the infrastructure of his vast grassroots network. 

To cite just a couple of examples, he is promising a Trump Reciprocal Trade Act if elected that would target China, India, and any nation that imposes tariffs on U.S. products, as well as baseline tariffs to achieve fair trade. He has called for criminalizing so-called gender-affirming surgeries, otherwise known as child mutilation, and he would establish Freedom Cities on federal land, where new cities would be built around “hives of industry.”

He has vowed to obliterate the deep state. After the way he’s been treated, don’t expect him to yield on that promise (the same for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). The Department of Education, the EPA, the intelligence agencies — all would be in the crosshairs of a second Trump presidency.

Finally there’s Ukraine, where’s Trump’s opposition to the war sets him apart from almost every other candidate in either party, except for Ramaswamy and Kennedy. DeSantis has lost credibility on the issue with his vague politician talk, so it’s Trump who gains with the grassroots GOP base and the growing anti-war sentiment within it.

Could Trump win the general election? The convention wisdom is no because of his ongoing problem with suburban voters, especially suburban women, but who knows? The indictments and political convictions won’t matter a whit, and, while Republicans do still have the abortion issue around their neck, Trump is more liberal than other Republicans on the issue.

Alas, there’s that thing about Democrats stealing elections. The Biden team certainly looks confident since it has no headquarters and only six paid staffers, so maybe they know something we don’t.

But there are also independent and potential independent candidates who could derail Biden with just a tiny fraction of the vote — Cornell West, maybe Kennedy, maybe Joe Manchin — so where the 2024 wheel stops is anybody’s guess. 

Heck, it hasn’t even stopped spinning in the GOP yet. DeSantis could yet beg Lady Liberty to take him back and set things right.

Best bet, though, is Trump v. Biden. It’s the populist base against the globalist establishment, round 3. 

That’s the rubber match, and it’s coming faster than you think.