Not a great start for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign
Even Republicans condemn Donald Trump for hosting a white supremacist, while supporter Kanye West defended Nazis. What else can go wrong?
Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House in 2024 is not off to a great start.
Less than three weeks since his grandiose announcement of his candidacy at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the former president has come under fire for hosting a white supremacist, Nick Fuentes, for lunch at his home.
Rapper Kanye West – who know calls himself Ye and is one of Trump’s most prominent supporters and who was also present – has praised Adolf Hitler and defended Nazis in an interview with controversial radio show host Alex Jones.
And Trump over the weekend suggested the US constitution be suspended after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk released emails showing how Democrat party officials pressured Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was published by the New York Post a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, also suggesting he be declared (rhetorically, one might hope) “the rightful winner” of the 2020 election.
Some of these events were not Trump’s fault; West appears to have had a mental breakdown, for instance. And maybe, as Trump claims, he genuinely didn’t know who Fuentes was.
But for Democrats looking for fresh material to undermine Trump’s third presidential bid – and make life difficult for the thinning ranks of the former president’s congressional Republican supporters – Christmas has come early.
Trump obviously isn’t an anti-Semite to anyone who’s paid attention, having Jewish family members himself and having worked hard to help Israel while president. But most voters don’t pay attention; mud sticks.
Even former Trump ally and current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has urged the former president to renounce the toxic dinner pair, to no effect so far.
“On Kanye West and that other unacceptable guest, I think it’s not merely unacceptable it’s just wrong. And I hope he sees his way to staying out of it and condemning it,” Netanyahu said on Monday on NBC News.
In a possible sign of Trump’s waning political clout, senior Republicans in congress have condemned various components of his recent behaviour.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader long at odds with the former president, even felt confident enough to declare that no one who had such a lunch would ever be elected president.
All this only a few days before Georgia’s Senate run-off election on Tuesday, in which Republican Hershel Walker, a former American football star, faces off against incumbent Democrat senator Raphael Warnock.
Most polls and betting markets predict the Democrats will retain the seat, which
would leave the ruling party
with 51 seats in the Senate, an improvement on the 50 it held before the midterm elections.
Perhaps Trump, having a well-established aversion to “losers”, shares that view, given he’s kept a wide berth of the state during the campaign for the last Senate seat still to be decided in the 2022 midterm elections on November 8.
Regardless, a Walker loss will not help the former president, given he forcefully backed the former footballer for the Republican nomination, and will rub salt into the wounds of a party that to a large extent blames Trump’s endorsed candidates for its underwhelming performance nationally.
Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Geoff Duncan, said at the weekend that Walker, whose campaign has been undermined by a series of own goals and allegations of hypocrisy, would “probably go down as one of the worst candidates in our party’s history”.
Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, still riding high after his thumping re-election, has not said, and perhaps does not need to say, anything about his own presidential ambitions while his former mentor self-immolates.
For what they are worth – they did a poor job of predicting midterm outcomes – political betting markets now rank DeSantis the clear favourite to win the Republican nomination for 2024.
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