Give me a break
The media is now breathlessly hyping the notion that Trump could run again in 2024, even though they know damn well that he’ll be in prison by then (if his failing health doesn’t get him first). These fictional ratings-driven narratives from the media are just embarrassing.
No, it won’t Donald Trump Jr or Ivanka in 2024 either. Give me a break. Don Junior is earmarked for prison in too many ways to count, and that’s before getting to his unraveling public behavior and obviously worsening personal problems. Ivanka has her own Trump Organization liability.
But even the Trump family’s legal troubles aren’t the only reason they won’t be on the political stage by 2024. Consider that Donald Trump just lost in a multimillion vote blowout. The Republicans in the House and Senate knew he was going to lose this badly; they just didn’t have the guts to oust him beforehand, for fear of retaliation. Now that Trump and his family will be on the defensive in the criminal justice system for the next several years, they won’t be the kings of the GOP, or even the kingmakers.
What we’ll see by 2024 is a lot of Republican politicians trying to figure out how to position themselves as being anti-Trump while also being pro-Trumpism. It won’t work, for a lot of reasons. But the point is that by 2024, the GOP will be trying to figure out how to dance around Donald Trump’s failure and pariah status in the same way that the GOP has spent the past several years trying to figure out how to dance around George W. Bush.
The media surely knows this. But right now networks like MSNBC and CNN are tasked with trying to figure out how to keep their anti-Trump viewers tuned in, now that Trump is gone. One way to do that is to push the notion that Trump and his family are somehow going to remain as relevant to politics as ever once he’s humiliatingly removed from office. That’s a canard.
Once the media has played out the “Someone named Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee” narrative, it’ll move on to the real story here: Trump and his family are about to face an endless series of criminal charges, legal action, asset seizures, and so on. The notion that this family somehow has a political future is laugh out loud hilarious.
We saw this in 2008 after John McCain lost in a historically ugly blowout, largely because he picked the broadly unpopular Sarah Palin. Shortly after the loss, pundits on the left and right alike all insisted that Palin would either be the 2012 nominee or the “Republican kingmaker” going forward. Of course by 2012 the GOP was doing everything it could to run away from her. Trump will be even more of a pariah by then. But hey, the media always has to fill the transition period with some kind of hype.
