Whose Side Is Trump On?

This story will make some readers seriously unhappy. Think of it this way, it’s not my idea. It comes to us from Gerard Baker, of the Wall Street Journal.

Baker’s point is simple. At a time when the Democratic Party is clearly on the political ropes, at a time when the manifest incompetence of a Democratic administration has been so clear that no one can ignore it, at a time when the Republican Party has a great chance to change America’s course, one man has stepped forward to save the Democrats.

No, it is not Barack Obama. It is certainly not Joe Biden. It is, drumroll please, Donald Trump.

In principle, Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. If Ronald Reagan made history by announcing the eleventh commandment-- thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican-- Trump seems not to have gotten the message. Not only does he talk trash about notable Republican leaders, but he tells Republicans not to vote:

… Mr. Trump somehow keeps coming to the rescue of the Democrats just as they look to be burying themselves in their own extremism, hypocrisy and unfitness for office.

The thought is prompted by the former president’s broadside last week, in which he more or less instructed his supporters to do something that should produce Democratic landslides in forthcoming elections.

Trump told Republicans not to vote. It was quite the assertion, one that sustains Baker’s argument that Trump is a Democratic plant:

“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented) Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do,” read the former president’s statement.

As you know, Trump rescued the Biden administration in January of this year by helping to turn two Georgia senate seats blue:

It’s not as though the strategy hasn’t worked perfectly before. In January, incensed by his failure to convince enough people that he had actually won last November’s election, he and some of his so-called aides suggested voters in Georgia shouldn’t bother showing up in the state’s Senate runoff election because that too was going to be rigged.

The result: Just enough Republicans who had voted in the first round last November declined to follow up in the Jan. 5 runoff, and we got Two Senators Who Changed the World. Or at least tried to.

Winning matters. Wasn’t that the original Trump message? So how did it happen that Trump connived to lose the senate. Will Trump now rescue Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe?

To that helpful intervention by Mr. Trump can be attributed trillions of dollars in prospective tax and spending increases, several confirmations of far-left Biden nominees, and this continuing offense against sanity: Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders.

And this is the gift that keeps on giving to Democrats. If Mr. Trump’s latest campaign is successful, he may well deter just enough voters from going to the polls in next month’s knife-edge Virginia governor’s race, thereby handing the Old Dominion to a Democratic Party that thinks it owns your children and has the right to tell them what to think.

So, Democratic party governance is a calamity. By all measures the Democrats should lose bigly in every upcoming election. And yet, they have a secret weapon-- Donald Trump:

As it stands, we are governed by among the most incompetent, ideologically extreme, dishonest governments in living memory. If the normal laws of political gravity were to apply, the Democrats should be headed for an epic defeat in next year’s midterms, with Republicans sweeping away the tiny Democratic majority in the House, breaking the tie in their favor in the Senate, strengthening their grip on statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, and rescuing the country from the lunacy of the Sanders-AOC political condominium.

But if Mr. Trump gets his way, none of that will happen.