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I know — ridiculous question, right? Or is it?
After two years of preaching to the choir that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged, and therefore “stolen,” Donald Trump remains a man on a mission. The question is, what mission?
What does Trump really want? In his heart of hearts, does he really want to be president, again? Or is he on a mission to right the grievous wrong he believes was committed, denying him a second term?
While far from the Lone Ranger, Trump — perhaps above everything else — must, in his mind, be right. Always. So does he remain obsessed with somehow “proving” he was right about 2020 if he wins in 2024? Or does he view 2024 as the big get-even?
The bottom line, again: Does Donald Trump really want to be president, again?
These are legitimate questions that I can’t answer — and neither can anyone else — maybe not even Trump himself. So I offer these questions and others that I won’t answer, and instead allow readers only to weigh in with answers. Deal?
Conservative commentator and Hoover Institute Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson can’t answer the above questions, either, but he does have several questions of his own. In an op-ed posted to American Greatness, Hanson began by contrasting Trump with Presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt.
Team Trump is fond of comparing Trump to Cleveland, who remains our only elected president (1884) to lose a re-election bid, in a disputed vote no less, then come back four years later (1892) and win the presidency a second time. “Yet Trump seems determined, VDH wrote, “to follow a different, and bullheaded, Teddy Roosevelt model.”
Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908 and then lost a reelection bid in 1912, which split and alienated the Republican Party, ensuring the election of progressive Woodrow Wilson.
And clearly, even to a growing number of Democrats, Joe Biden’s first two years in office have been an unmitigated disaster, much of it intentionally created by Biden and his far-left handlers. From the oil crisis, which led to skyrocketing gas prices, to record inflation, due in part to Biden continuing to inject trillions of dollars into an economy with relatively limited goods and services, to an untenable and continuing southern border crisis responsible for more than five million illegal aliens crossing the border and untold numbers of shipments of deadly fentanyl, Biden is arguably the worst president in U.S. history.
In other words, a virtual silver platter awaits the Republican Party in 2024, which should make the recapture of the White House a no-brainer. “Trump should be in the driver’s seat,” noted VDH, “but he’s not.” Why?
VDH offered multiple questions, the answers to which seem at odds with winning a presidential election, beginning with “why Trump needlessly floated the absurd idea that constitutional norms might need to be changed to allow the disputed 2020 election result to be overturned.”
Hanson continued:
Why did Trump need to descend into personal invective when prior to the midterms, many primary polls were confirming his front-runner status?
Why did he not remain magnanimous, unite the party, and focus on giving millions to his endorsed but endangered candidates like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker?
Why did Trump bizarrely claim that possible presidential rival candidate Glenn Youngkin’s name sounded “Chinese”? What was the logic of attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) wife in racialist terms?
Why would Trump all but announce before the midterms that after the election he would be a candidate?
Or why right before November 8, did Trump attack Ron DeSantis (“DeSanctimonious”), the miracle-worker Republican governor of Trump’s own Florida?
Did Trump wish to rile up left-wing Trump haters to rush to the midterm polls, or to persuade miffed conservative DeSantis voters to stay home?
These are legitimate questions, and they’re not from a (pick as many ad hominem as you want): “RINO,” “Trump hater,” “CNN lover”, “Never Trumper,” or my personal favorite, a “MAGA-hating, communist-infested piece of garbage.” Victor Davis Hanson is a constitutional conservative, and hardly a partisan flamethrower.
Again, does Trump really want to be president again, or does he want to make his exit from the political stage with a Trumpian bang?
Given DeSantis’s attention-getting stellar record as Florida governor, coupled with his growing nationwide gravitas, why would Trump not run on his own record as president rather than calling DeSantis sophomoric names and claiming if it weren’t for him (Trump), DeSantis would be a “mediocre” governor at best?
Why did Trump say, in response to Musk’s ongoing release of internal Twitter documents that show the Democrat Party pressured the social media outlet, that the unquantifiable proof “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” then just two days later insist he doesn’t want to “terminate” the Constitution, and once again blame the “fake news” media for “lying” about it? Did Trump honestly believe that episode wouldn’t lead to a firestorm he needlessly created?
I’ve long believed that Trump mistakenly measures his overall popularity by assuming that a majority of Americans support him without question, just like his diehard followers who show up at his Trumpapaloozas. Thus, Trump might wrongly believe that ignoring or minimizing the critical importance of support from middle-class white women and independent voters is okay. It isn’t: The combination of the two demographics was largely responsible for his 2020 loss.
If Trump does understand the importance of independent voters and the support of middle-class white women, why does he not also understand, as Victor Davis Hanson put it, that “melodramas and social media riffs are not his friends”?