Jan. 6 hearings may wound Donald Trump but his self-delusion will do him in

Donald Trump can’t let the ‘Big Lie’ go. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP

The bookmakers have a market for the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump is a 5/2 favourite. Florida governor, Ron DeSantis at 7/2 lies second then follows the incumbent Joe Biden at 11/2 with his Veep, Kamala Harris, at 12/1, alongside Mike Pence.

A bet on anyone 28 months out seems an effective way for punters to be separated from their money as a glance down the list shows.

Hillary “Surely it’s my turn now” Clinton is sitting alongside Dwayne Johnson on the lower rungs of the lines of betting at 50/1. I can’t smell what the Rock is cookin’ but it’s probably not a presidential tilt in 2024.

Ignoring the Rock’s odd appearance, it’s all a bit predictable.

The question is, will Jan. 6 (this is what Americans now call the tumult in the Congress building and its subsequent investigations, thus having to avoid politically laced language) lead to the termination of Trump’s ambitions to pull a Grover Cleveland and become the 45th and 47th POTUS?

The New York Times and Washington Post talk excitedly of Trump being prosecuted for some vague crime or other while acknowledging that no clear pathway to prosecution of a sitting president exists. It’s probably marginally more likely now than when hearings commenced but it still sits at Clinton and The Rock odds.

For those who love a circus, the delicious prospect of Trump being prosecuted by the Department of Justice and tried in a courtroom, would make the OJ Simpson trial look like the Manangatang Court House on a Wednesday afternoon.

Trump’s political influence is waning. Certainly, the House select committee’s investigations have exposed the 45th POTUS’s desperation to cling to power. But it is small beans compared to his own delusions. Trump can’t let the Big Lie go while everyone else, including the Republican Party, is desperate to move on.

Despite Trump’s claim that his endorsement creates GOP winners, the records show almost the exact reverse. There is a long list of candidates who had fallen over themselves to receive a shiny Trump endorsement only to find themselves making head bowed concessions speeches.

Former Republican senator, David Perdue, failed to win his gubernatorial primary in Georgia despite wholehearted support from Trump.

The former president appeared in television advertisements and spent millions from his Great America PAC in support of Perdue. He believed Republican voters would punish Kemp for failing to overturn Georgia’s results in the 2020 election. He was wrong. Kemp won the primary by more than 50 points.

Donald Trump at a rally in support of David Perdue. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

Scandal-plagued congressman Madison Cawthorn lost his primary in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district despite Trump telling voters he was worth “a second chance.”

A Trump-endorsed candidate for the senate race in Pennsylvania, Sean Parnell, was forced to drop out of the race late last year, after a judge ruled in favour of his ex-wife and granted her primary custody of the couple’s children amid allegations of spousal and child abuse.

Texas senator Ted Cruz has endorsed Rebecca Kleefisch for governor in Wisconsin.

Back In June, Trump put his weight behind Tim Michels.

Trump is stumping for Michels and attending rallies on his behalf. In polling for the Republican gubernatorial primary, Michels and Kleefisch are neck and neck. It is one to watch with the primary due on August 9.

A candidate receiving an anointment from Ted Cruz might be left wondering about its value, too, after Cruz endorsed Alabama congressman Mo Brooks’ run for the Senate. Trump had endorsed Brooks and then unendorsed him in March.

Brooks, the former Trump acolyte, turned on the former president accusing him of having “ … no loyalty to anyone beside himself” only after a week of begging for a Trump re-endorsement. Brooks lost to a GOP moderate described by Trump’s son Donald Jr as “the Liz Cheney of Alabama” by 15 points in the primary.

Miffed at the defeat, Brooks now says he is willing to testify at the House Committee’s Jan. 6 investigations. For those with their magnifying glasses out, Brooks was one of only two senators Trump spoke to during the 187 minutes from his speech to supporters at the Ellipse to his video filmed at the White House asking rioters to leave the Congress and go home.

We don’t know what was discussed but it looks like Brooks is about to let us know.

Trump’s failed endorsements can also be explained by stumping for candidates who have bleak chances of winning, his preferences driven by a revenge lust that he won in 2020 and any Republican who says differently feels his wrath.

Brooks was disendorsed by Trump after Brooks had said the GOP needed to move on from Trump’s fixation on 2020 election fraud.

Nearly 18 million people watched the second round of the House select committee’s prime time hearings, a little lower than the first round where 20 million Americans tuned in. For context that’s just around half of the number of viewers who watched the LA Rams beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the play off on January 24.

We may have become used to hearing polling results that say a clear majority of Republican voters believe that Trump was the winner in 2020.

The question put by major polling companies for much of the last 18 months is, “Do you believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected president?” The most recent poll – a New York Times Siena poll – put the figure among Republican voters at 62 per cent in the negative.

While other polling has that figure a little higher, when you flip those results, between one third and one quarter of GOP voters believe Biden was legitimately elected.

And therein lies Trump’s biggest problem. In a primary clash against DeSantis, for example, the Florida governor will talk about his plans and prospects if elected president while Trump will not be able to avoid babbling conspiratorially and without evidence, that he was dudded in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan four years earlier.

For the record, more than two-thirds of independent or non-aligned voters don’t accept the Big Lie either.

For all that, Trump has a thumping war chest. Political donations are the Trump business model now. That sense of perpetual candidacy with the occasional hint he may run, keeps the money rolling in.

Like a white pointer shark, Trump has to keep moving. The moment he announces he won’t run or if he does run, gets belted in a primary or two and withdraws, he is politically dead.

All the excitement from the Jan. 6 hearings won’t do him in. A trial might even revive his fortunes. But it is his own delusion, his dangerous fantasy, the Big Lie that he cannot walk away from that will do him in.