Your letters for May 24, 2024
By NewsPress Now
Your letters for May 24, 2024
Gaming the
election, part two
Trump, likewise, has both assets and liabilities. His vulnerabilities are mirror images of Biden’s advantages: he lacks incumbency and the powers that come with it; he does not have an army of officials on his side and he will have a financial disadvantage.
How many gag orders remain? How many late-summer days will Trump spend stuck in court? How many hundreds of millions of his dollars will be expropriated by out-of-control anti-Trump left-wing judges? Can Trump — or any candidate — successfully run with a $1 billion overhead in legal fees and fines and with critical days on the campaign trail diverted to left-wing, media-frenzied, blue-city courtrooms? He knows that if he sticks solely to the agenda, contrasting Biden’s failures with his own past stellar record and future contract with America, he can win. He realizes that he must take the high road and talk idealistically rather than going low and getting angry.
But who could be expected to do so after being the victim of two unfair impeachments, left-wing lies like Russian collusion and disinformation, efforts to railroad him into prison with outrageously politicized legal vendettas and attempts to remove his name from the ballot?
Trump’s advantages. First, his records on foreign policy, inflation, and the economy. But most important for the election is his ability to connect with people. So far, the split-screen differences between candidate Trump and President Biden have proved overwhelmingly to Trump’s advantage: Biden in New York schmoozing at a black-tie night with celebrities and ex-presidents to haul in $26 million in campaign cash from the hyper-rich, while Trump is with middle-class NYPD rank-and-file at a rainy wake for a murdered cop — killed by a repeat felon released without bail.
Or Trump buying fast food and milkshakes amid a mostly Black Atlanta Chick-fil-A crowd, while Biden dines with the venomous Robert De Niro and the zillionaire Jeff Bezos at a White House dinner, with the celebrities’ trophy girls.
He must magnanimously reach out to former rivals such as Haley, even as she continues to demonize him, and to DeSantis, as well. He must unite the House Republicans to keep their razor-thin majority at all costs. He must campaign nonstop among poor whites, Blacks, and Latinos, appealing to shared class concerns rather than the racial obsessions and psychodramas of the bicoastal elite.
He should skip the ad hominem invective, forget the past rivalries with his primary opponents and assume a corrupt media does not deserve a minute of his time. But if he climbs down into the mud with his leftist opponents, trades insults, wrestles with his opponents and obsesses about fake news and the crooked media, he will likely lose.
Aside from Trump’s temperament, we must always remember that the answers to two other fundamental questions will determine the outcome of the election:
Can the Republicans monitor the balloting and return it to the environment of 2016 rather than 2020? Can Trump convince millions of minorities, independents and former Biden voters that there are plenty of reasons to vote for someone they may not like, including the very future of the United States as a free republic as envisioned by the Founders, rather than an increasingly weak, anemic, cranky socialist has-been?
Finally, we must also remember that, ultimately, the outcome of the election could be determined by unpredictable events. What happens if the Gaza War expands to Lebanon, Syria and Iran, as Israel is attacked from all directions? Or the military of the United States is attacked in the Middle East, as in the past?
What will be the status of Ukraine be by November? Will China risk attacking or blockading Taiwan on the theory that it will never be gifted a more ossified president than Biden? Will the left unleash another late-season October surprise like the 2016 Access Hollywood tape or the 2020 “Russian disinformation” laptop farce?
And, lastly, will the candidates in October and November resemble the candidates of today? Will Trump still be vibrant at 78? Will Biden still be upright at 81?
Will Biden’s feebleness still earn him sympathy, or at least respectful silence? Or will it devolve to the point that the public, worn out by his lapses, concludes that Joe Biden would not be able to keep any job in America —except the Presidency of the United States?
Ben Pecora
St. Joseph
