Trump is going to be the GOP nominee barring a cataclysm

American presidential elections go through a series of stages, in the course of which a massive metamorphosis takes place, so that the line-up on polling day usually looks very different from the consensus view at the beginning of the process. The current situation, still far from any reliable prediction of the final confrontation and outcome, might be called the end of the beginning.

On the Republican side, the first presidential debate has already taken place, without participation by Donald Trump – Hamlet without the Prince – and the second is scheduled for 27 September. The function of these debates, in conjunction with opinion polls, is to convert the initial melee of presidential aspirants into a coherent pecking order. That process has confirmed the irrelevance of the likes of Mike Pence and Chris Christie (despite a slight growth in his support, from Never Trump Republicans), that Ron DeSantis has a mountain to climb and is sliding down it, the slightly enhanced credibility of Nikki Haley and the startling pyrotechnics of Vivek Ramaswamy.

DeSantis is in serious trouble and his donors are turning off the financial tap. Ramaswamy has adopted a strategy of praising Donald Trump, in contrast to his rivals, winning a somewhat Delphic response from The Donald on the issue of a running mate. It is clear that Ramaswamy’s strategy is to campaign not for the presidential nomination, but the vice-presidential. If he secured that and Trump won, being constitutionally debarred from serving a further term, Vice-President Ramaswamy – assuming he had managed to remain on good terms with the volatile Donald for four years – would have a good prospect of succeeding him in the Oval Office.

That is almost certainly Ramaswamy’s calculation, but whether this fire-cracker candidate can stay the course without crashing and burning, even during the primaries, is the big question. There is, on the Republican side of the contest, a feeling that candidates are just going through the motions: barring a cataclysm, Trump is going to be the GOP nominee. The latest polls show Trump leading the GOP primary field by 46 points: what are the odds on his competitors, some of whom currently command 2 per cent support, overtaking that lead?

Of course, it is early days yet, the Iowa caucuses are still five months away; but, having invoked every conceivable caveat, does anyone seriously now believe that Trump will not be the GOP choice for next year’s presidential election? He has the advantage of previous incumbency and total control of the GOP, whose grandees were hostile in 2016. Another aspect of the Trump phenomenon is that the GOP is the only mainstream conservative party in the Western world that has successfully been reclaimed from its faux-conservative elite by the grass-roots membership.

Trump has another great advantage: the deranged persecution of him being conducted by the Democrats. Undeterred by two failed impeachments, his political opponents have assembled four indictments against him. This is as ludicrous as it is vicious. Trump will effectively be undergoing his third, fourth, fifth and sixth impeachments during the course of the election campaign, a persecution designed to discredit and distract him. 

The attempt at discrediting him has already failed. People remember the two-volume document of supposed evidence supporting charges of his collusion with Russia, impressively printed in the formal style of Congressional papers, but all solemn nonsense. Now Americans are going through the same experience, with mountains of “evidence” collected by ultra-partisan prosecutors, prostituting the justice system of the United States to pursue a political vendetta.

Sane Democrats (a shrinking minority) are increasingly accusing their own party of overkill. One indictment might have commanded some credibility: four expose the exercise for what it is – a hate-induced attempt to imprison a man they fear, as likely to sweep away all their corruption and petty woke tyrannies.

The Georgia indictment, orchestrated by attention-seeking, politically ambitious Fani Willis, Fulton County District Attorney, comprises 41 counts and 19 named defendants, even including a violation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act, normally reserved for charging organized crime figures. Angry GOP activists may be tempted to return the compliment, in respect of what they are increasingly referring to as “the Biden crime family”.

What betrays the true purpose of the indictments – to derail Trump’s election campaign – is Willis’s insistence that this incredibly complex case, on the scale of a Stalinist show trial, be brought to court by March, though she herself took more than two years to build the massively documented case that the defendants’ attorneys have to master.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, a Democrat who would never vote for Trump, is one of the United States’ most authoritative constitutional and criminal lawyers. He has described the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump as the “worst abuse of prosecutorial discretion” he has witnessed in his 60-years-long career. Of the Stormy Daniels case, he says the alleged offence is not even a misdemeanour.

The partisanship is blatant and unashamed. This non-case is being promoted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, a leftist activist whose election was funded by George Soros. But it would be wrong to imagine that the pile-on against Trump is the uncoordinated action of a few maverick prosecutors. The White House visitors’ log has revealed that Jay Bratt, a senior aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith, had three meetings at the White House between September 2021 and 31 March this year, including two discussions with Caroline Saba, deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office. 

One of the indictees, Rudy Giuliani, asked to comment on this evidence of White House coordination of the Trump prosecutions, said: “What’s happening is they have trashed every ethical rule that exists and they have created a state police. It is a Biden state prosecutor and a Biden state police.” While this was already evident, it is a high-risk strategy for someone who, along with his son, is so precariously situated in relation to the law as Joe Biden, to pursue such a retribution-inviting course.

What the Democratic Party has done to America is unforgivable. It is not just the reduction of the once great city of San Francisco to a shanty slum, nor even the humiliation of America by the shameful flight from Afghanistan. The core constitutional institution of the United States, the presidency, has been debased, to satisfy gut feelings of hatred and entitlement. In the entire history of the US there have been just four presidential impeachments: half of them were directed at Donald Trump, on the wildest, most absurd charges.

One would have thought that, having got so badly burned in Congress, the Democrats would have abandoned such tactics. Instead, they have launched four (so far) indictments against Trump, on the flimsiest charges. One of the cases relies on the prosecution proving that Trump did not truly believe the 2020 election was rigged against him: if there is one man in America who genuinely believes that, it is patently Donald Trump.

Americans traditionally respect their president, even if they do not agree with him. For all the charges of coarseness and gaucherie against him, Donald Trump never presided over a national humiliation equivalent to the Afghanistan withdrawal. The repeated arrests and the final indignity of the “mugshot” have brought home to many Americans that it is not Trump who is being damaged by this, but the office of the presidency; and beyond that, the integrity of a justice system now seen as weaponised and out of control.

The spectacle of a president of the United States featuring in a “mugshot”, instantly gone globally viral, under the prison number PO1135809, makes America a laughing stock. All of its historic institutions are being destroyed – as the mad woke revolutionaries intended – and global influence is haemorrhaging from the leading superpower under the dead hand of the Biden administration.

That is where the other surprise is beginning to emerge at this stage of the election campaign. On day one, the assumption was that Joe Biden would be the automatic Democratic candidate, with too many question marks over the recently defeated Donald Trump to make his position certain. Today, the situation is reversed: Trump’s lead in the GOP race is unassailable, while cognitively declining Joe Biden (“God save the Queen, man!”) is increasingly provoking doubts among Democrats.

A large majority of Democratic voters do not want him to stand. Many party grandees have mounting reservations. Who, though, would be the alternative? Kamala Harris? You are looking at a 49 red states tally in that scenario. Gavin Newsom? GOP adverts would only need to play endless footage of San Francisco, as a trailer for the rest of America under a Newsom presidency (Si monumentum requiris…).

Add to that the difficulty of dislodging an incumbent, with all the patronage and presidential trappings at his disposal, and things begin to look rather nightmarish for the Democrats. Their worst nightmare would be if Sleepy Joe rallied and had a more or less clear round between now and nomination, only to go bananas under the strain of the election campaign. Or, the worst nightmare for America, to maintain momentum, win the election and then go downhill after inauguration.

It is a measure of the desperation of the Democrats, whose present mental state is the Transatlantic equivalent of Brexit derangement disorder in this country, that some overheated brains are canvassing the possibility – if all else fails – of attempting to prevent Trump standing for the presidency under the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, from 1870, bans “insurrectionists” from standing for public office. It was designed to debar former Confederates from being elected.

However, as things stand at present, the snapshot shows Donald Trump, after four indictments and a mugshot, leading Biden by 1.2 per cent, in an average of the five most recent polls up to 2 September. So, it is still all to play for, but it would be foolhardy to discount the possibility of Trump’s return to the Oval Office next year. 

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