Trump 2024? New Poll Says Lightning Could Strike Twice

The United States (and therefore the West) is about to enter a period of even more weirdness, and more instability. In fact, we probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Why? Look at the result of The New York Times poll released on Monday. With six months to go before the first Republican primary votes are cast, the poll reveals that Donald Trump has an overwhelming lead among all his primary opponents, commanding a stunning 54% of likely GOP primary voters. The second place candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a whopping 37 points behind.

The poll is crushingly bad news for DeSantis, who some conservatives had hoped would become the face of the post-Trump party. Unlike Trump, whose four years in the presidency was mostly a directionless shambles, DeSantis actually knows how to govern. And he has taken political risks to push back ‘wokeness’ that President Trump never did—and has succeeded.

It doesn’t matter. The poll shows that even if this were a two-man race, DeSantis would lose by a two-to-one margin.

Moreover, 37% of the likely Trump voters are what The Times calls the “MAGA Base”—people who are absolutely loyal to the former president. Despite current and likely future indictments, not a single one of the 319 people polled who fall into this category believe that the former president has committed a serious federal crime.

Barring an act of God taking Trump out of the race, he will be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. Though Democrats jump for joy at the prospect—Trump is likely the only Republican that the enfeebled Joe Biden could defeat—the shock Trump victory in 2016 shows that only a fool would say it could never happen again.

Why is Trump doing so well? The Times finds that nine out of ten GOP voters believe the country is going in the wrong direction. This quote from a Trump backer says it all:

“He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore,” David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. “You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.”

Those are funny lines, but there’s a lot of truth in them. Conservatives—especially blue-collar conservatives—are fed up with the left-wing drift of the country. They are sick of having transgender ideology shoved down their throats. They are tired of being told that everything is racist, sexist, anti-gay, or otherwise bad because it hurts somebody’s feelings.

DeSantis knows this—which is why he has emphasized the culture war in his campaign. It’s why he has emphasized being what Trump never was: an effective culture warrior at the policy level. And yet, it has helped him not at all. MAGA Nation believes that their real champion is the man whom the Left hates the most.

Why do I say this is going to throw America, and therefore the Western world, into a period of greater instability?

The obvious reason is that a Trump restoration would cause an unpredictable reaction among America’s liberals and institutionalists. They flipped out when he won in 2016, and accelerated the Great Awokening: the society-wide shift within institutions towards privileging left-wing ideology around racial, sexual, and gender identity. Trump’s return would be in large part a reaction to the Left’s reaction, and would in turn spark further radicalization of the Left.

You see where this is going. The United States now seems to be in an uncontrollable dynamic reminiscent of Spain in the early 1930s, on its inexorable march towards civil war.

Second, though I would welcome a likely Trump approach to foreign policy—pushing for a settlement to the Ukraine-Russia war, for example, and ceasing the U.S. government’s bullying of countries that don’t share Washington’s liberalism on LGBT matters—there’s no doubt that the turmoil that would follow a Trump restoration would weaken America’s position in the world at a time of rising peril. America is already divided against itself internally, with record low numbers of people expressing pride in the country. An America whose diplomatic and national security establishments were in disarray, and even in open revolt against the Commander In Chief—the “Deep State” business—is one that is more prone to invite attack or some other exploitation by its enemies. This is something that European countries, which have grown weaker and less able to stand up to Washington, will have to face.

Most important, I think, is what a Trump restoration would say about the degradation of American democracy.

It was unthinkable until the past few years that a man facing so much criminal trouble, and so openly contemptuous of moral norms, could be elected president. Remember: Republican primary voters overwhelmingly choose Trump, despite that fact that in Ron DeSantis, they have someone who is Trumpist on policy, politically effective, and without the personal drama. This says that Trump cannot be understood in normal liberal democratic political terms, but more as a cult of personality figure.

I don’t have much trouble understanding why many people like Trump (more on which below). What I struggle to understand is why so many Americans persist in thinking that backing him is a smart choice when we have had four years to see how he would do in office. With the exception of the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, Trump did not do well. And his post-presidential shenanigans cost the GOP the Senate in 2020, as well as big setbacks in the 2022 midterms.

Yet to the MAGA hardcore, Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed. In the Times poll, GOP primary voters said Trump was far better than DeSantis at “getting things done” and “able to beat Biden”—claims that are easily challenged by the record. This tells us that they love Trump not for what he has done or failed to do. They love him because he is hated by the same people who hate them. “I am your retribution,” Trump boasted to a campaign crowd earlier this year. How can you hear that and not fear for the health of democracy?

Having said all that, why do I count myself as one of the 37% of conservative voters—a number equal to the MAGA Base—who are “persuadable” (the remaining 25% are firmly against Trump)? Because of the decadence of the American establishment, and the contempt it has for people like me. Yes, this is a Joe Biden thing, but by no means only a Joe Biden thing.

Consider:

• Since the COVID crisis ended, we have learned how much the U.S. government lied about what it knew, and exercised its authority to pressure media and tech companies to manage the narrative, against the interests of the American public
• We have learned that prior to the 2020 election, the U.S. media and tech giants actively suppressed reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and fifty or so national security elites, including former directors of U.S. intelligence agencies, signed a public letter denouncing the laptop reports as “Russian disinformation.” The laptop stories, of course, were true.
• Despite the mainstream U.S. media showing little to no interest on the story, the corruption of Biden’s crackhead son Hunter, whose reputation is being destroyed by the day with more and more revelations of dirty business dealings, undermines the idea that Biden is any cleaner than Trump. Government whistleblowers—including Democrats—have testified that they were pressured to go easy on the president’s son. And last week, Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal with the feds fell apart under judicial scrutiny, raising the question of why the Justice Department treated him with kid gloves.
• The Biden Administration has gone pedal to the metal pushing wokeness, including attempting to force school districts to teach LGBT ideology to small children. But the problem goes far beyond the executive branch. From coast to coast, school systems have quietly imposed policies to propagandize children in radical race, sex, and gender ideology. American academia is self-destructing over the same thing. The fields of law and medicine, whose functioning is essential to advanced modern society, are imploding over ideology.
• Crime and homelessness is an enormous blight on many American cities, with the most liberal ones being the most disgusting. Shoplifting is out of control, with thieves brazenly stealing from stores because they know that nothing is likely to happen to them. Progressive ideology, especially on crime fighting, has a lot to do with this.
• America’s southern border has mostly been open during the Biden years.
• The U.S. military has succumbed to the same woke ideology that has captured all other elite institutions. The armed forces are failing their recruitment goals, as more and more young Americans see no reason why they should be prepared to die in a military that prioritizes political indoctrination over building war-fighting skills, including unit cohesion. The U.S. Navy, for example, is struggling to build ships, but it had no trouble finding an official drag queen.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The United States is in serious internal decline, and would be even if Donald Trump were riding out his retirement years quietly watching the sunsets over Palm Beach. Yes, Trump is a scary clown to many Europeans, even European conservatives, but you should not be deceived about the justifiable anger and frustration that tens of millions of Americans have over conditions in the country, and at the ruling class—both Democratic and Republican—in charge of failing institutions. These people know that the elites hate them and what they stand for, and never stopped seeing them as, to use Hillary Clinton’s toxic term, “deplorables.”

It’s as true today as it was in 2016: Donald Trump is not the cause of the crisis; he is only its most potent symptom.