Team Trump Just Can't Help Feeding Democrats' Latest Narrative
Yes, presidential campaigns talking like private radical chatrooms has consequences.
Lately, Democrats and their media allies have tried to emphasize the talking point that if Donald Trump gets back into office, he’d act like a dictator in a mad bid for revenge against everyone who crossed him. Which is preposterous to anyone who remembers how lax Trump was toward political opponents who committed actual crimes, but in its infinite wisdom the former president’s 2024 campaign seems perversely enthusiastic about pouring gasoline on this particular attack.
MAGA lapdog publication The Federalist published an op-ed by John Daniel Davidson Tuesday helpfully compiling several examples of lefty hysterics on the subject (albeit while preposterously taking it all as a sign they’re “afraid” of the guy they rolled at every turn):
CNN’s Jake Tapper was apparently so scared out of his wits by these essays, he brought some of the writers and editors onto his show to talk about their prognostications of doom for the republic under Trump — including, Tapper said with a straight face, “how women could be targeted” under a Trump “retribution presidency” [...]
You almost have to admire the audacity of Democrats actively doing to Trump everything they say Trump will do to them if he regains the White House. You can’t get more on-the-nose in this regard than a triple-bylined piece that ran in The New York Times on Monday warning, “Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.”
Certainly, the Left is hypocritically and insincerely projecting. According to the MSM, every Republican president or presidential nominee is Hitler until a successor becomes the new Hitler and the old one is recast as a reasonable fellow to contrast against the unfathomable evil of today’s GOP. It’s been that way since Reagan, and it has never once correlated to actual Democrat fear, justified or otherwise.
You know it’s nonsense. I know it’s nonsense. But does Trump know it’s nonsense?
On November 28, he posted on Truth Social that the government “should come down hard on [MSNBC] and make them pay for their illegal political activity” of anti-Trump, anti-Republican bias (which presumably means we can add campaign finance reform to the list of issues the Right is supposed to drift leftward on). On Tuesday, Steve Bannon declared, “I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us and all the producers to watch us – this is just not rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious,” to which fellow Trump hanger-on Kash Patel boasted:
We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out.
(Note well that in the same conversation, Patel also says that “the one thing we learned in the Trump administration, the first go around is we got to put in all American patriots top to bottom.” The need to staff an administration with like-minded workers being something that had to be learned from experience rather than obvious going in gives one an idea of how successful these clowns would be in a second term.)
Blowhard attorney Mike Davis, who openly fantasizes about being Trump’s Attorney General, casually tweets about which media liberals to place where “in the DC gulag.” In yet another softball town hall with Sean Hannity this week, Trump joked about not being a dictator “other than on day one,” which the Biden-Harris campaign clipped out of its context (which was merely about using executive authority to close the border and expand oil drilling).
No, none of the above means Trump would be some kind of tyrant if reelected. Trump’s awfulness is not a license to indulge anything and everything that might be said about him.
What it does mean is that Trump and those around him (because nobody with any sense or integrity wants anything to do with him anymore) are so juvenile and undisciplined that they will spout off things that make the Left’s narratives seem plausible to voters who don’t know these issues as intimately as conservative activists or journalists. In Trump’s case that’s simply due to his rank emotionalism and complete lack of filter; for his grifter guard it’s more likely entertaining bluster for the civically-illiterate Ultra-MAGA faithful whose conception of “fighting back” is based entirely in some vague sense of retribution.
Ginning up the base while freaking out everyone else...what could go wrong?