Trump Make America Great Again
Republicans have been asking for it ever since Jan. 6, 2021, when they tried to pretend Donald Trump’s violent attempt to overthrow democracy after he lost the election never happened. Now they’re going to get it good and hard.
The party is hurtling toward a nightmare election in 2024 with Trump as their likely presidential nominee at the same time he’s being prosecuted for multiple criminal indictments all over the country.
The most incredible part is Republican leaders already know Trump’s hateful, extreme policies repel a majority of American voters. In 2020, Americans cast a world record 81 million votes to end Trump’s corrupt presidency after a single term. Why would Republicans ever nominate him again?
It's not as if Trump’s attracting any new voters. Just the opposite. New voters are disgusted by the continuing destruction of constitutional rights by Trump’s radical, rightwing appointees to the Supreme Court. That’s driving higher turnouts in every election.
Growing Youth Vote
Every year about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. At the same time, 2½ million older Americans die every year. That means between 2016 when Trump was elected with 62 million votes (3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton) and the 2024 presidential election, the number of voters under 30 will have grown by a net increase of 52 million.
Older voters once turned out in much greater numbers than young voters. That’s far less true since Trump arrived on the scene. In every election since 2015 when so-called Gen Z turned 18, average turnout by voters under 30 has been 25% or more higher than previous generations. A whopping 46% higher turnout for voters under 30 in the midterms killed the red wave Republicans expected.
No surprise. After the U.S. Census Bureau documented massive turnout of young voters in the midterms with nearly 50% of young Wisconsinites leading the nation, Republican legislators here and elsewhere have proposed banning voting from college campuses and raising the voting age to 25.
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Extreme Policies
Republicans could not be more obvious. They support Trump’s efforts to destroy democracy and overturn the results of elections because most Americans oppose their extreme, rightwing policies.
But Republicans can’t stop young voters from coming no matter how much old cranks hate the pronouns and other words kids use to describe their genders. Those kids also care a lot more than their elders about the planet becoming a smoldering cinder, keeping assault weapons firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition out of their schools and not legally forcing women to have children every time they become pregnant.
For the overwhelming majority of Americans who are all hated by Trump and MAGA Republicans, nominating a criminally indicted ex-president while he’s being prosecuted for multiple felonies he committed in plain sight seems like an act of political insanity. That’s because it is.
But for Trump running for president has always served two primary purposes – raising enormous amounts of money from supporters foolish enough to believe his lies and staying out of jail for as long as possible.
Whether his naïve political donors realize it or not, more than half of the $35 million Trump raised between March and June will go to pay Trump’s legal bills. Only $17.7 million will go to Trump’s presidential campaign compared to more than $72 million raised by President Biden. The beauty of running for president while you’re being prosecuted for crimes is you don’t have to pay your own legal expenses.
Breaking the Law, Avoiding Consequences
So that’s why Trump’s running for president again. For four years, Trump’s Atty. Gen. Bill Barr kept him out of jail by enforcing a Justice Department rule against criminally indicting the president of the United States. But Trump lost that immunity when he lost the election.
Throughout his corrupt business career and political career, Trump’s basic strategy was to delay punishment for breaking the law as long as possible. But after stealing top-secret documents from the United States and organizing an armed insurrection to overthrow democracy after losing an election, delaying punishment is not a permanent solution.
That would require Trump winning election, firing his prosecutors and locking up Biden. Republicans are so far gone as a legitimate American political party that other Republican candidates are already promising to pardon Trump.
The only thing standing in the way of Republicans are the overwhelming majority of American voters. Those are all the Democrats, independent voters and rational Republicans that Trump and his MAGA extremists hold in sheer contempt.
The high point for Trump was 2016 when he still got fewer votes than his opponent. President Biden continues creating jobs, raising wages and bringing down inflation as the threat of a recession fades.
With Republicans re-nominating a previously rejected loser, the voter turnout supporting Biden’s fight for democracy should set a new record in 2024. The alternative would be a nightmare for all Americans.
