Despite indictments, Donald Trump could well beat Joe Biden

Only one thing can safely be predicted about next year’s US presidential election and that is that it will be an extremely unusual contest. In the first place, we do not yet know who the two contenders will be. A year ago, the general assumption was that Joe Biden, seeking a second term in the White House, would be the Democratic standard bearer, whereas a question mark hung over Donald Trump, as the 2020 loser and bedevilled with legal problems.

Today, that scenario is in reverse. Trump seems a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls puts Trump at 53 per cent, Ron DeSantis on just under 21 per cent and the other GOP aspirants in low single figures, including Mike Pence, on 6 per cent. Trump’s enemies in the Republican establishment – insofar as such an entity still exists – had hoped the indictments brought against him would alienate his supporters; on the contrary, they have reinforced not only his support, but his campaign funding.

It is in the Democratic camp that alarm is setting in. Biden’s gaffes (“God save the Queen, man!”), his age, his obvious inability to sustain a gruelling presidential election campaign (he virtually sat out the 2020 campaign in a basement), his economic record, the decline of America on the international stage (cf. Afghanistan) and his appeasement of his party’s extreme left do not commend him to independent voters, or even to some Democrats. The polls show that Democratic voters do not want Biden as candidate.

This puts the Democratic establishment in a real bind. Only five US presidents have been refused renomination by their party for a second term and the last time this occurred was in 1885. Biden has a strong presumptive claim to the nomination, which he seems determined to secure. Dislodging an incumbent president is a dangerous and disruptive process that could leave damaging scars on the Democratic Party, on the eve of a presidential contest.

Democratic grandees might wish to compromise, by removing the toxic Kamala Harris instead, to make the ticket marginally more attractive; but, in the present neurotic state of gender politics, that would restrict their choice of successor to a woman, which raises the spectre of AOC screaming stitch-up, if a sane woman were selected instead of her. It could all get very messy.

On the other hand, a year is a long time in the life of someone in Joe Biden’s state of mental health and his cognitive decline has accelerated recently. By the time the primaries reach their climax, poor old Joe might no longer be a credible candidate, might even come to see sense. Steve Bannon, who was CEO of Trump’s victorious 2016 campaign, insists that Biden will not be the candidate, believing he will be replaced by Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is already campaigning for the nomination, while pretending to be working for Biden.

Again, for the Democrats, here be dragons. If the nominee were Michelle Obama, that would be unlikely to prove the magic solution it might once have seemed. It raises the controversial issue of dynastic politics, creating an unhappy congruency with Hillary Clinton and First Lady entitlement, besides which the Obama name is no longer the talisman it once was. As for Gavin Newsom, the choice would be disastrous for the Democrats: every hour of every day, GOP television advertisements across 50 states would brutally reveal the condition of San Francisco, once America’s most beautiful city, now a dystopian hell-hole of drugs and crime.

Presenting that concrete, undeniable reality as a trailer for the whole of America under a Newsom presidency would be a lethal blow to Democratic hopes. What an open goal for Trump at his rallies: the mockery, the killer statistics, the nicknames. The Democrats might be wiser to bite the bullet, stuff Sleepy Joe with medication and trot him out on key occasions – like the Soviet gerontocracy atop Lenin’s tomb on May Day, almost as calcified as “The Doll” (in Muscovite slang) in the sarcophagus below.

In contrast, a Trump nomination would give the GOP a formidable fighting candidate, with everyone clear (love him or loathe him) what his vision of America is. A further advantage is that he is the one potential GOP candidate who could erode Biden’s advantage of incumbency, by highlighting his own recent incumbency and contrasting the outcomes of the two presidential terms.

What would happen if the election is a re-run Biden-Trump contest? We cannot rely on the polls, since they are a snapshot of voter opinion today, which may be quite different from opinions in November 2024. Yet one or two solid indicators can be gleaned from them. The most significant fact is that Trump is polling so strongly. Democrats are dismayed: this was not supposed to happen. How can a man who was thrown out of the White House two and a half years ago and refused to accept he had been defeated, supposedly provoking a riot – sorry, insurrection – and with three indictments now raised against him be a serious contender?

Yet he is. In the most recent RealClearPolitics polls aggregation, Biden is leading Trump by just one point: 44.2 per cent to 43.2 per cent. That is after the indictments of Trump and with the entire mainstream media relentlessly demonising the former president, while hiding the scandals increasingly engulfing the incumbent. The Democrats’ original calculation was that the indictments of Trump would alienate voters. That has not happened; his legal troubles seem to have damaged him slightly among independents, but probably those are the left-leaning ones who would have broken for Biden anyway.

Biden’s worst nightmare is a credible third candidate, either an independent put up by the No Labels group, concerned by the Democrats’ drift to the left, or a Green candidate, either of whom would hoover up votes from lukewarm Biden supporters.

What the tin-eared Democrats, insanely obsessed with hatred of Trump, do not understand is how they appear to the American people. Until the election of Donald Trump, only two US presidents had ever been impeached: the Democrats doubled that tally by subjecting Trump to impeachment, not once but twice. The grounds on which they did so were derisory: the so-called Russian conspiracy was exposed as an absurd nonsense. Yet the Democrats degraded the office of president and trivialised the key constitutional resource of impeachment, purely to indulge their rancour against a successful political opponent.

Now, they have further degraded the presidency by subjecting the same recent incumbent to three indictments, again out of malice and in the hope of eliminating him as a presidential contender. The American public recognises this as more of the same: trumped-up (no pun intended) charges by the Democrats against a man they are determined to hound out of politics and into prison. They have now corrupted the justice system for political ends.

It is a measure of the desperation with which the Democrats cobbled together their indictments that they have burdened themselves with the need to prove Trump did not truly believe he had won the 2020 election. Apart from the virtual impossibility of proving any individual’s interior disposition, did anyone ever appear more genuinely aggrieved and outraged than Trump in the aftermath of the election? His conviction was patent. Time for the Dems to delete all those articles and online comments saying, “This fruitcake really believes he was robbed…”

Americans value their constitution and the instruments of governance it created: they do not appreciate the pillars of the Republic being pulled down and revered institutions, including the Supreme Court, trashed by a party now under the control of its Marxist wing. Delusional Democrats imagined that each successive indictment would further discredit Trump. Instead, each charge has further discredited a very blatant persecution, the latest tawdry substitute for the Russian chimera.

The Democrats are anxious to rush through the cases against Trump before the election, in the hope of bringing up so much unsavoury evidence that voters will desert him, or even of securing his conviction. They should be careful what they wish for. Trump’s alleged impropriety with security-sensitive documents begins to look like normal White House protocol, when Joe Biden’s garage is littered with nuclear codes and similar trivia.

But the great foolishness of the Democrats in resorting to criminal proceedings is Biden’s vulnerability. The Hunter Biden scandal is assuming menacing proportions. Last month a district judge refused to endorse a plea deal agreed with Hunter Biden’s lawyers that was extravagantly generous: in return for pleading guilty to failing to pay $100,000 owed in taxes in 2017 and 2018, he had hoped not to face proceedings on a gun charge and substance offence that was a felony. Short of throwing in the Congressional Medal of Honour, it was a sweetheart deal extremely beneficial to the accused, hence the judge’s refusal to accept it.

That puts Biden criminality back in the forefront, a running sore as the election campaign builds up. All it takes, a year or 15 months from now, is some damning revelation about “the Big Guy” and Joe is toast. In Main Street, Peoria, the Chinese Communist Party is not regarded as a respectable business partner.

That is not all. The core of the Democrat movement is Hollywood and things are not well there. It is not just the “deplorables” ungratefully declining to watch woke travesties of much-loved Disney classics, nor the writers’ strike; the attempted suppression of the film “Sound of Freedom”, dealing with child sexual trafficking, has got the whole country and a wider global constituency asking: why?

Hollywood exudes the nervous tension of a community awaiting a tsunami. The log of Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, with the names of passengers who travelled to his notorious island, is rumoured to read like an Oscars guest list. There may have to be a parting of the ways – and the donations – between Hollywood and the Democratic establishment.

The Democrats will rue the day they embraced hard-left policies. Their allies on the streets are vote-repelling BLM/Antifa thugs and capering “Trans” activists. The US electorate is no longer prepared to accept the double standard whereby a bad-tempered riot at the Capitol is an “insurrection”, while the city of Portland in flames is a “largely peaceful demonstration”. The grooming of children in schools by transgender fanatics has further disillusioned many quite liberal people.

The Democrats persuaded themselves, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on Dobbs, that abortion would be their strongest suit (the economy not being a realistic option) at the presidential election. The reality is somewhat different. In June, a Gallup poll was published which, on the face of it, seemed to confirm the Democrats’ expectations, since it was widely headlined as “69 per cent of Americans support abortion”. That, however, was misleading. The 69 per cent support was for the principle that, in certain circumstances, abortion should be legal – that it should not be completely outlawed.

As Gallup noted: “Specifically, close to half of Americans, 47%, now say abortion should be legal in all (34%) or most (13%) circumstances, while a similar proportion, 49%, want it legal in only a few (36%) or illegal in all (13%) circumstances.” That equation, with 49 per cent of Americans opposing all or most abortions and 47 per cent supporting all or most abortions, is a far cry from the high majority (in fact, it is a narrow minority) support Democrats had assumed. Even that support is largely for abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, while Democrat extremists have been crusading and passing state laws for abortion up to birth.

Despite the sclerotic state of the presidency, subtle changes have been taking place in America under the Biden presidency. The whole “woke” phenomenon has provoked a revulsion, to the point where the number of social conservatives in the US is the highest since 2012. A separate Gallup poll showed that the number of people identifying as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on social issues is now 38 per cent, compared to 30 per cent in 2021.

That is an environment that offers hope to Donald Trump. Of course, it is far too early to predict outcomes, when the identity of the candidates has not even been determined. Anything can happen in a presidential race and there are plenty of reasons why Donald Trump could fail again, as in 2020. But what can be said, even at this early stage, is that only an idiot – or the mainstream media – would rule out the realistic possibility of Donald Trump becoming not only the 45^th, but also the 47^th President of the United States.

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