by Boyd D, Cathey, The Unz Review:
It now seems probable that former President Donald Trump will announce his candidacy for president of the United States in 2024, perhaps as soon as after the 2022 elections are completed.
Back in 2016 I was a staunch Trump supporter. And I would still support “the Donald” if he ran again in 2024, but for different reasons.
Let me explain.
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I fully acknowledge that Trump is not the calm, studious, dignified statesman which many Americans have tended to associate traditionally with the nation’s highest office. He comes across at times like a bully, a man lacking certain social graces and gravitas, which are seen to be a prerequisite for the position. I have a couple of friends for whom that brash, bull-in-a-china shop quality really grates and disqualifies a candidate. As one friend expressed it: “He’s a Yankee ruffian!”
But even more off putting, perhaps the greatest failing of Trump (for me, at least) was his disastrous appointments in his administration of persons who acted almost directly contrary to the general emphasis that he seemed to stress during his 2016 campaign.
There was sabotage from within and, although apparent in some of his domestic policies, it was perhaps most glaring in his foreign policy initiatives. His vaunted Make America Great Again campaign, his opposition to foreign American adventurism, and his desire for better relations (and an understanding) with Russia were undercut by a range of advisors, from Mike Pompeo, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, and others, as well as many permanent Deep State professionals, sinecured into the government bureaucracy (especially at the State Department and DOJ). His appointments were, in some very significant instances, disastrous and ended by nearly destroying the prominent MAGA promises of his campaign.
Whether due to the influence of a Jared Kushner, or of the Republican National Committee, or of the Mitch McConnell-types in GOP congressional leadership—or of all of these—Trump’s “come home America” platform and resistance to an evangelical American global overreach, were dashed soon after taking office by his miscues on Syria and acceptance of the John McCain/Neoconservative globalist template.
Yet, as others have noticed, his usual first instincts, his intuitions, not borne or influenced by the corruption of the established and congressional GOP or the so-called “conservative” think-tanks inside the DC beltline, were generally correct and perceived by many newly-awakened voters, those “MAGA” folks so long ignored and despised by condescending Hilary Clinton-types and the legacy media.
Some friends have suggested that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida would be a much more palatable candidate. For them DeSantis might be a kind of “Donald Trump without the extra and undesirable personal baggage,” someone who could enunciate and enact the same programs, certainly domestically, that Trump has advanced, but with less viral and frenzied hostility from the legacy media and an increasingly radical Democratic Party—a political organization which makes old-school Stalinism seem conservative in comparison.
I disagree, and for a number of reasons.
Each morning I read the literally hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces, from varying perspectives, which show up on MSN Edge. Increasingly I have noticed a tsunami of items which not only hysterically denounce MAGA folks and anyone fearless enough to express any sympathy (much less support) for President Donald Trump, but demand their total “canceling,” exclusion from the franchise, even imprisonment or physical execution.
Academics (and their brain-dead students), broadcasters, and writers at such publications as The Atlantic, Salon, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times lead these virtual “MAGA search-and-kill death squads,” but a huge number of political leaders, and not just Democrats, echo these raging attacks.
The unleashed, unbridled hatred for Trump and his supporters is there for anyone to see and digest. It is visceral, violent, and very real. Those anti-Trump folks possess and are possessed by a demonic desire to destroy and liquidate their opponents. There is a palpable fierceness about them and their expressed rage, whether in the words of politicians like a Rep. Jamie Raskin, or written and spoken in the words of dozens of “journalists” employed and handsomely paid by MSNBC, CNN, or by The Washington Post.
There is also an unmistakable condescension directed at the mass of the “great unwashed,” the MAGA folks, whose role in “our democracy” is to keep quiet meekly and just keep working as virtual slaves of a super-elite of political leaders, corporate executives, tech bosses (with their fascinating algorithms which inevitably exclude any opinions which differ from the official line): an increasingly global Deep State.
