Donald Trump’s tightrope

| 9:00 pm EST January 18, 2022
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Donald Trump has been trying to walk a tightrope of keeping the door open for 2024 so the media will keep hyping it so he can keep raking in quasi-campaign money and pocketing it, while also putting enough excuses out there so no one will be shocked when he doesn’t run. Now he’s at it again.

Trump and his people have now leaked to the media that he’ll only run in 2024 if Biden’s approval rating is below 46%. But the polling averages show that Biden’s approval rating is at 43% and climbing, so Trump is laying the groundwork for not running. But because the media is hyping outlier polls and pretending that Biden’s approval rating is in the 30s, the media has an excuse to keep hyping Trump 2024.

This is actually pretty clever on Trump’s part (something I rarely say). He’s spoon-feeding the media a ratings friendly narrative about how Biden will be “doomed” by a Trump 2024 run unless Biden gets his “dismal” approval up into the mid forties. Nevermind, of course, that it’s already in the mid forties.

This is all so Trump can keep up the illusion in 2022 that he’ll be a 2024 candidate and thus continue to rake in in quasi-campaign donations, spend it all on his legal bills and personal expenses, and then have enough excuses in place so his base doesn’t think to ask for its money back when he doesn’t run in 2024.

The media keeps hyping the “massive $100 million war chest” that Trump has raised for 2024. As always, anything to scare us into staying tuned in. But for one thing, $100 million is not a lot of money in modern politics. And Trump has probably already blown it on personal expenses anyway.

The real kicker here is that Trump is basically admitting that Biden is very likely going to run for re-election, and that Biden has a strong chance of winning if he does. This is opposed to fictional media hype about Biden being “toast” and the resulting faux-debate about which Democrat is going to replace Biden in 2024.

Of course this is nothing new. Even as the media spent the early portion of the 2020 primary pretending Biden was toast, when it was demographically clear that he’d clean up in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, Trump was focused on Biden and knew he’d very likely be the democratic nominee.

There’s always a massive gap between 1) what politicians and political experts (on both sides) know is really happening, and 2) what the political media is pretending is happening while chasing ratings. In order to get ahead, politicians have to work the media’s penchant for fiction accordingly.

The media is pretending that Biden probably won’t run in 2024 and Trump definitely will. But even Trump is basically admitting that he’s unlikely to run in 2024, and that Biden will likely run and win. Yes, this means the media is somehow being even more dishonest about this than Donald Trump is!

But hey, this is the same media that always chases ratings by pretending Iowa and New Hampshire are going to tell us who the presidential nominees will be, when Iowa and New Hampshire never determine the nominees, then ignores the telltale signs coming out of South Carolina so it can portray Super Tuesday’s (extremely predictable) results as shocking breaking news that no one could have seen coming.