Donald Trump cannot become president of the United States because he led an insurrection against the government on January 6, 2021, most experts and journalists agree. Republican primary voters and caucus-goers should choose a different candidate over Trump, they say. And if they don’t, then the courts should either keep Trump off the ballot, they argue, or put him in prison so that he cannot become president.
Voters disagree. The latest polls show they have a more favorable view of Trump than Biden, and more would vote for Trump than Biden in six swing states. In Iowa, where Republicans will caucus to decide who to nominate as president, Trump remains over 30 points ahead of his rivals. Anti-Trump pollster Frank Luntz yesterday predicted that voters would elect Trump president in November, and top Democrats are leaking stories to the media of their growing alarm.
A lot could happen between now and the November 7 presidential election that could prevent Trump from becoming president. Biden could still drop out and be replaced by a more popular Democrat. There could be a “black swan” event, such as a financial crisis, terrorist attack, or war, that changes the calculus of voters. Or a court may order the incarceration of Trump and prevent him from being elected.
But the chances of Trump becoming America’s next president are higher than not. If Biden had intended to drop out, he would have done so already. The concerns raised publicly by former President Barack Obama and his top political advisor, David Axelrod, appear to be the result of genuine panic. There’s no guarantee that a black swan event would help rather than hurt Biden. And if a court ordered the incarceration of Trump, voters may respond by voting for Trump to reassert their authority.
Even if voters don’t elect Trump president, the establishment has undermined its legitimacy in its reaction to him. Instead of acknowledging that voters legitimately elected Trump in 2016, they insisted that he stole the election with the help of the Russians. Instead of admitting that America really does have an immigration crisis, the media, Democrats, and Republican elites labeled his advocacy for a border wall as racist. And instead of acknowledging that America needed to reassess its role as a policeman to the world, they accused Trump of leaving Europe vulnerable to Russian President Vladamir Putin and to fascism.
The problem is that the truth comes out eventually, and reality bats last. Anyone who bothered to investigate learned that Russian interference in the 2016 election was too trivial to measure. Even progressive Democrats, like the mayor of Chicago, are today raising the alarm about uncontrolled immigration. Not only did Russia invade Ukraine under Biden, not Trump, but US support for Ukraine failed spectacularly, first to result in a peace treaty and now to a potential Russian victory. “Ukraine’s military prospects are looking bleak,” The New York Times admitted this morning, “Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive… is over, having failed to meet any of its objectives” [my emphasis].
Much else that Trump did while in office looks better in retrospect. During the summer of 2018, the peak of US accusations that Trump was abandoning Europe to Putin, Trump went to Germany and said, in a public meeting, “Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new [Nordstream] pipeline. And you tell me if that’s appropriate, because I think it’s not, and I think it’s a very bad thing for NATO and I don’t think it should have happened.”
The response from the German government, the international news media, and the anti-Trump establishment in the US was of contempt and ridicule.
The news media claimed that Trump had spread disinformation. The New York Times declared Trump’s “claim that Germany is ‘captive’ to Russia because of energy dependence… misleading." Politifact called Trump’s statement “mostly false.” Viral video marketer Now This News tweeted the video saying, “President Trump began the NATO summit by insulting Germany, one of our closest allies, with lies.”
But they weren’t lies. Rather, Trump’s statements had been more truthful than anything any Western politician or major media outlet had yet said about the Nordstream pipeline. If anything, Trump had understated Germany’s dependence on Russia since he was warning against Nordstream II, whereas Nordstream I had already created the dependency. But the main reason Trump was raising his concern with the Germans is because he wanted Germany to import more American liquified natural gas (LNG), which is what Germany did after Russia invaded Ukraine and somebody, perhaps the U.S. with Poland and other allies, blew up Nordstream II.
Biden, the media, and the anti-Trump establishment were all on the wrong side of the issue. Where Trump had imposed sanctions on Nordstream II in December 2019, President Biden lifted them in May 2021. While Biden and the establishment had been criticizing Trump as Putin’s lap dog, it was Biden’s presidential campaign, not Trump’s, that had accepted funding from the Russian lobbyist for Nordstream II. The psychological projection involved in the case was perfect.
