By Dave Andrusko
I won’t bore you with examples—there are plenty, I assure you—of media types victim-blaming pro-life President Donald Trump for the attempt on his life. When they aren’t chastising Trump for getting out of the way of a would-be assassin’s bullet, they are mad as hornets that Mr. Trump would “pounce” on the attack, as if he had staged the event for political advantage. (Actually, at least one commentator made that absurd claim!)
Politico’s Jonathan Martin is another angry pundit. “Trump Once Unified Democrats and Divided Republicans,” the headline declares. “The Shooting And Debate Turned the Tables. The attempted assassination of the former president prompted his Republican critics to relent, perhaps permanently.”
Trump is now in complete control of the Republican Party. Worse yet, from Martin’s vantage point, is that that control
was cemented in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump escaped death and seconds later rallied his stunned audience to forge a bond few American presidents have enjoyed with their supporters.
[If there was even a sliver of a chance for Republican in-fighting, earlier Republican rivals—most prominently former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley—will be speaking at the convention which begins today.]
“For nearly a decade, Donald Trump has been the biggest force for unity among Democrats,” Martin writes. “Since 2017, Democrats have owed almost most of their electoral success to a backlash against Trump and Trumpism.”
However, “in the wake of Biden’s catastrophic, and catatonic, debate showing the forces of Stop Trump are now badly splintered,” Martin explains.
After all these years of Trump-propelled unity, the coalition is at odds because, while the threat he poses is now even more sobering, the understanding they had to mute internal dissent has come undone.
Instead of spending Biden’s first term determining who could block Trump’s return, they slept-walked into Armageddon. Democrats are now attempting to compress what should have been a three-year-long conversation into three weeks, the summer of the election. And they’re speaking in existential terms about the stakes.
Since the 2020 campaign President Biden
has been insulated from any serious internal opposition because to question him would be a distraction, or worse, from the project of keeping Trump out of the White House.
Martin is one of many, many journalists and/or Democratic political operatives who desperately want pro-abortion President Joe Biden not to run. But time is quickly running out but Biden gives no hint he will voluntarily step aside.
Aargh.
Martin ends his rant this this:
What’s for certain is this: If the president insists on staying in the race, he will do so without the protection the threat of Trump once afforded him within his coalition. The moat has been breached.
There are a lot an angry Democrats out there.