James Morrow: Why the Democrats just can’t quit Donald Trump
The more progressives attack Donald Trump, the more his supporters love him... which creates a whole new set of problems for the Republicans going into 2024, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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At some point America’s Democrats are going to get wise and realise that if they truly want to get rid of Donald Trump they need to actually shut up about him.
Until then, we are going to continue to have to deal with ridiculous spectacles like the House of Representative’s January 6 committee referring the former president to the Justice Department on charges that he incited an insurrection against the United States government.
Because everyone knows that whatever happened on January 6 – and this is not to excuse anything that anyone did – the official investigation into the event has been little more than a stitch up from the start.
From its inception, the January 6 committee has been about generating nothing more noble than a series of rolling anti-Trump events, hearings and press conferences that could easily be mistaken for the “two minute hates” in George Orwell’s 1984.
A month ago, the Washington Post – no friend to Trump – reported that current and former committee staff were “angry and disillusioned” by a push led by committee vice-chair Liz Cheney “to focus the report primarily on former president Donald Trump”.
They added that they “bristled at the committee morphing into what they have come to view as the vehicle for the outgoing Wyoming lawmaker’s political future”.
Nor, given the habit now common to Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Georgia’s Stacey Abrams on down of “denying” election results when things don’t go their way, no one really believes that this was about “defending democracy” or anything as high minded as that.
Jamie Raskin, the Democrat congressman who led the second impeachment attempt against Trump and officially announced the Justice Department referral from the January 6 committee, tried to get Florida’s slate of electors thrown out on a technicality after the 2016 election which put Trump in office.
The irony of the same people who not only blamed Trump’s 2016 election win on a laughably thin Russian collusion conspiracy but also used all the apparatus of government to overturn the results via impeachment and other means now charging their nemesis with “purposely disseminat(ing) false allegations of fraud” is just a bit too much to bear.
And unless or until Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to do anything about it, the decision to refer charges is, legally speaking, about as threatening as an accusation that he failed to return a shopping trolley to its bay in a Westfield car park.
So the committee – and more broadly the Democrats and their closely adjacent huff-and-puff media commentators – should really spare us the outrage.
But what makes this even more bizarre is that until this week, Trump was doing a pretty good job self destructing all on his own.
There was the strange spectacle when, around the time of November’s midterm elections, Trump called Florida governor and rising Republican star Ron DeSantis “Ron De-Sanctimonious”.
More recently there was the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! (his all-caps) that turned out to be related to a line of electronic trading cards depicting Trump as a variety of superhero.
These are not the actions of a guy who is leading the pack for the nomination, but rather the moves made by someone who has not yet gotten the memo that whatever good he did – and Trump achieved a hell of a lot during his four years in office that he will never get proper credit for – it’s time to move aside for the next generation.
Which thus brings up another, even more cynical possibility.
Namely, that the Democrats actually know that their partisan posturing is just an exercise in double-barrelled cynicism and are keeping Trump in the headlines for their own purposes.
As a strategy, this makes a screwy sort of sense.
On the one hand, it keeps the most rabid and cult-like portions of the Democrat base in a frenzy over the prospect that some day the Bad Orange Man whose name they won’t even say will one day be led out of Mar-a-Lago in handcuffs.
And on the other, it allows Trump to keep playing the victim for the perhaps one-third of Republicans who remain not just true believers but also see any attempt to usurp him from his figurative spot at the head of the party as an act of treason by squishy “establishment” types in league with the left.
So long as he remains on the stage, Republicans have a real problem because, while Trump may be able to win the the nomination – despite, or perhaps because of, his baggage – he simply won’t be able to win a general election in a nation weary of the drama.
This may be giving the Democrats too much credit for playing some sort of four dimensional chess but it also fits a pattern that sees the left willing to burn down institutions in order to (in their minds) save them.
Elevating Trump, and all the drama that comes with him, is thus very much in keeping with that game.
Republicans should resist the temptation to play.
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