Donald Trump’s pipe dream slips away

| 9:09 am EDT June 7, 2022
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Ever since Donald Trump left office, polling has consistently showed that only about half of Republican voters wanted him to be their party’s presidential nominee in 2024. These were devastatingly bad numbers for Trump, given his name recognition and recent incumbency. Trump’s already-bad numbers were eventually going to fall further, and sure enough, now they have. One new poll shows Trump has dropped to second place in the 2024 Republican primary race.

Yet for the past year and a half, nearly the entire mainstream media and pundit class (on the left, right, and center) has insisted that Trump was a lock for 2024 – even though the numbers never came close to supporting that narrative. Now that Trump isn’t even the Republican frontrunner, watch the media act surprised, as if no one could have seen this very obvious inevitable thing coming.

Now we’ll have to hear about the “rise of Ron DeSantis” but the numbers don’t support that either. DeSantis is just Brand B for now. Trump’s numbers have been bad since 1/6, and have now dipped further, giving DeSantis the “lead.” But it’s not worth anything to him this early.

The last thing a paper tiger like DeSantis wants is to be seen as the “frontrunner” this early, because then the media’s kid gloves come off, and DeSantis gets exposed, and his numbers fade, as Republican voters seek out a new and less tarnished Brand B instead. We’ve seen this time and again in Republican presidential primary election cycles.

The media will now chase ratings by framing 2024 as Trump vs. DeSantis, when in reality that’s just a guy who’s pretending to run vs. a guy who is unlikely to be in contention. In reality the 2024 Republican frontrunner will be someone who peaks just late enough that there won’t be enough time for real vetting or scrutiny. Meaning the Republican candidates not named Trump or DeSantis are the most dangerous ones, because the media will just ignore them until it’s too late.

At no point in the past year and a half has Trump been in contention for 2024. The numbers have made that clear all along. Yet for the past year and a half all we’ve heard was that Trump was a lock for 2024. Why does the media even bother, if it’s just going make things up while chasing ratings? I’m not giving you some contrarian take here. I’m just pointing out what the numbers have clearly shown all along.

The problem is that the entire mainstream media has been giving everyone the same baseless contrarian hot take on this for a year and a half about Trump being a lock for 2024, so a lot of people have just accepted it as being true. Meanwhile back in the real world, the numbers have made clear all along that January 6th knocked Trump out of contention for 2024, and he never did recover. Because he failed to find a way to improve his numbers, they’re now predictably dropping as his incumbency advantage has faded. None of this was a surprise at any point along the way.