Is Trump the Democrats' Stooge

When you’ve lost Rupert Murdoch….

It seems that President Trump has, with his non-stop antics, lost the support of Murdoch’s New York Post. Whether this will be reflected in other Murdoch media, like Fox News, we do not yet know. At the least, the Trump attack on McConnell was denounced in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

And yet, when the Post calls Trump a stooge for the Democrats, we ought to pay some attention. Some of you, dear readers, are Trumps supporters and some are Trump detractors. If you are supporters you have long since rejected Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment-- Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans. If you are detractors….

Anyway, according to the Post, the one thing that Democrats have going for them in the upcoming election is Donald Trump. Single handedly Trump has distracted the national attention from the abysmal Biden record. In truth, Trump did contribute to the January, 2021 loss of two senate seats in Georgia. If Republicans had won one of the two, it would have stopped the Biden agenda in its tracks. 

Think about that one.

The paper editorializes:

With President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress presiding over a steady stream of disasters from still-soaring inflation, crime, Biden’s questionable faculties and a metastasizing illegal-migrant crisis, they’re beyond eager to have the nation talking about . . . Donald Trump.

The ex-prez is happy to serve as the Dems’ stooge, as long as it gets him the headlines he craves. 

Most recently, Trump attacked Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and bothered to include an unacceptable insult against his wife:

The latest was his rant at Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Friday for letting the Dems pass a stopgap federal-funding bill to avoid shutting down the government.

Letting Democrats continue to spend “trillions” means Mitch has a “DEATH WISH,” the Donald posted menacingly to his supporters, following up with cruel and infantile insults to McConnell’s wife.

Would it have been better for the Senate Republicans to shut down the government? Perhaps, says the Post, but that entailed its own risks:

Yes, the republic’s finances are a horrific mess, one worsened by the $4 trillion in new spending passed under Biden. And in some conditions shuttering the government might be the GOP’s best move, though history shows that it usually backfires big-time and McConnell’s unquestionably a better judge of tactics than the Colonel Kurtz of Mar-a-Lago.

More important, most of that spending wouldn’t have passed if Trump’s late-2020 “stolen election” lunacy hadn’t given Democrats control of the US Senate by depressing GOP turnout in the Georgia runoffs.

But then, the Post considers that Trump’s candidates in the upcoming elections have largely been lackluster, and barely qualified. Again, whose purpose does this serve?

The best chance to change course now is this year’s midterms, which could give Republicans control of the House and Senate — though Trump’s made that far harder by pushing dubious candidates in the GOP primaries (and then failing to open his $100 million-plus campaign war chest to help them in the general).

The Post has gone over this before, to little avail. Its editorial concludes:

Democrats’ best hope in the runup to Nov. 8 is that Trump will keep stepping in to make himself the center of attention, on subjects that are inevitably all about him — not the nation’s many needs.

Does he not know the Dems see him as effectively their stooge, or does he just not care?

The larger issue is simple. Republicans understand that they will have a much better chance of winning in 2024 if Donald Trump is not on the ticket. And yet, the constant abuse and harassment of Trump, by Democrats and the media, has generated both sympathy and anger in his supporters.

This means, if Republicans are to run a stronger candidate, a Ron DeSantis, the only path will require Donald Trump removing himself from contention.