The new year has barely even started yet, and the American 2024 election cycle is already absurd. It is unlike any such cycle I have ever seen. Odd things are happening that would have been unthinkable just one or two elections ago.
Among the latest, most absurd ingredients in this increasingly bitter-tasting election soup, is a concerted effort to boot Donald Trump off the ballot in several states.
All these efforts will eventually fail, but the very fact that state officials are trying to ban a presidential candidate they don’t like paints a grim picture of desperation. It lays bare a political establishment whose only reason to get out of bed in the morning is to stop Trump from being elected president again.
Why? What are they so afraid of that they have to use methods normally reserved for totalitarian governments, to keep him from being elected?
Before we delve into this outlandish anti-Trump campaign, let me make clear where I stand regarding Trump. I am not a big fan of the former president. I can think of several others I would rather vote for as president.
I did vote for him in 2020. My current feelings for him have nothing to do with his accomplishments as president. On the contrary, he did well while in office:
- He started no new wars and got Europeans to start paying their fair share for their own defense;
- He scaled back America’s unending military commitments and kept the Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans in check;
- He spearheaded a tax reform that repatriated significant corporate investments; and
- On his watch, American families, especially those with lower incomes, made economic progress like they had not seen since the 1990s.
I also appreciate the patriotism and optimism of his Make America Great Again movement; what other politicians will people drive two days and wait for hours outside a sports stadium to hear speak?
So why am I no longer a big fan of the former president?
It is simple: he is caught up in the past. His entire political being dwells in 2020. We need a president with his or her eyes on the horizon, not the rearview mirror.
To some degree, I can understand Trump. He is convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from him, just like Democrats are convinced that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. For years after the millennium election, Gore ran around the country with his hair on fire telling everyone who wanted to listen that the election was stolen from him.
As for the 2020 election, I noted in my review of Dinesh D’Souza’s impressively well-researched video on ‘ballot stuffing’ that valid questions remain regarding election integrity. These are questions that ‘establishment’ politicians are trying their best to get away from.
At the same time, as D’Souza’s video shows, while there were definitively irregularities that put chinks in the fair-election armor, nobody seems to have enough material to formally litigate the case that Trump lost due to election fraud. At this point, less than a year from the next presidential election, we need to choose a president next year whose eyes are on the future.
Unfortunately, that is not going to be easy. The Democratic party establishment is doing everything it can to quell any tendencies toward a challenge to Biden and his reelection bid. Absurdly, they are doing this in the face of growing dissatisfaction with the president within their own ranks. More and more Democrats are quietly questioning not only the mental abilities of the incumbent president but also his chances of winning re-election. Yet, so long as the Democratic party is trying to prevent any open, fair, and honest debate about who their candidate should be, there is no way for either Democrat voters or independents leaning toward either party to make an intelligent assessment of which way to go.
The Republicans are handling the candidate selection process very differently. Instead of pouring a bucket of ice on it, they are trying to warp-speed it ahead of the primary elections. They have held a series of unprecedented candidate debates during the fall—yes, folks: for the first time ever, a party has held formal debates between presidential candidates before the first primary.
Together with a slew of more or less odd opinion polls, these debates have reduced the field of Republican candidates from eight to four (not counting Trump). And not a single primary ballot has been cast yet.
All of these bipartisan shenanigans are driven by one overarching purpose: to somehow stop the wave that is carrying Donald Trump. And a wave it is: according to the latest numbers from fivethirtyeight.com, Trump commands around 50% of the Republican primary votes, with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley in the vicinity of 11.5%. The otherwise generously proportioned Chris Christie is dwelling around a measly 3.5%, right down there with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Over at 270towin.com, we find a list of national polls that put Trump at an even higher lead of 60-70% of the primary votes.
His lead shrinks noticeably, though, when the polls focus on New Hampshire, an early primary state. Despite that, from an anti-Trumper’s viewpoint, the GOP primaries look nightmarish.
This is where the de-balloting efforts come into play. These efforts were launched when it began to look as if the multiple lawsuits filed against Trump for a variety of reasons would not have the discouraging, let alone disrupting effect on Trump that his opponents were hoping for. The anti-Trumpers have been salivating at the prospect of seeing the former president locked up in prison. So far, none of them have worked—on the contrary, some higher court rulings have thrown wrenches in the legal machinery targeting Trump.
Enter the de-balloting movement. According to ABC News, the efforts in Colorado and Maine to keep Trump off the presidential ballot are not the only ones out there:
Overall, the former president’s eligibility under Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] to be on the GOP primary ballots is still being challenged in more than a dozen states … if—or when, many experts and advocates predict—the U.S. Supreme Court takes up appeals of the Colorado case by the state’s Republican party or the Trump team, it would effectively freeze the various legal challenges in state and federal district courts across the country.
This is an entirely new weapon in American politics: to use the courts as venues to keep your opponent off the ballot entirely. As the Colorado case shows, this is an act of utter political desperation:
In a stunning and unprecedented decision, the Colorado Supreme Court … removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot, ruling that he isn’t an eligible presidential candidate because of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban”.
In other words, because Trump is accused by some of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government on January 6th, 2021, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that he has violated the 14th Amendment.
Except—Trump did not incite or commit insurrection. There is not a single court in this country that has found him guilty of anything, including insurrection. None.
Expectably, the Republican party in Colorado, which is a legally independent entity from the national Republican party, has appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States the ruling by their state’s highest court. The Trump campaign itself is expected to file an appeal as well.
Due to the appeals process, Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado for now, but that does not change the fact that the American political establishment, whatever form it takes, has now resorted to the most primitive anti-democratic measure available on this side of open violence. Like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, they are using the ballot itself as a weapon against a political opponent—and they are not limiting themselves to the court system to do it. Reports Breitbart:
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows unilaterally ruled that former President Donald Trump is unqualified to appear on the 2024 primary ballot despite lacking a law degree and substituting YouTube videos for due process.
According to Breitbart, Bellows “previously worked as Executive Director of the Maine Chapter of the ACLU,” a left-wing radical litigation outfit. In other words, she has the solid political credentials needed to be a radical anti-Trump activist in whatever office she holds.
The state-level Secretary of State is not to be confused with the U.S. Secretary of State, or America’s ‘foreign minister.’ At the state level, the title refers to an official, elected in 35 states and appointed in 12, who works under the executive branch of government (three states do not have a Secretary of State office). In other words, the Secretary of State belongs to the same branch as the governor and is not part of the judicial branch.
In most states, the Secretary of State oversees the integrity of the state’s election system.
Breitbart makes the same observation about the Maine ruling that I just made regarding Colorado, namely that Trump has never been convicted of any crime, insurrection or other. Therefore, it is a safe bet that the esteemed Secretary of State in Maine is going to face a stiff legal battle, most likely ending with a Supreme Court ruling that tells her and the four de-balloting judges in Colorado, to take a hike.
It would be easy to dismiss Maine’s Shenna Bellows as a 48-year-old Democrat party activist who is too dumb to understand the office she holds. However, that would be to underestimate her and the political machine whose water she is carrying. I have no facts on this, of course, but I would not be surprised if she has been promised help with her future political career if she tries to de-ballot Trump (many secretaries of state go on to run for governor).
In other words, this looks an awful lot like a politician who puts party affiliation and association with a certain ‘family’ within politics, above the law, the constitution, and the state and the people she serves. It has been said that when George Washington, America’s revered first president, opposed political parties, it was precisely because he foresaw that people would become more loyal to those parties than to their country.
A more troubling—and sadly more realistic—interpretation of the Maine and Colorado rulings is that the anti-Trump political elite is now going into high gear to stop him from being elected in 2024. They have even gone so far as to accuse him of being a dictator in the making; in view of the fact that the anti-Trumpers are borrowing a page from Russia and another from Venezuela in their fight against Trump, such accusations are more than a little audacious.
But they also contribute to painting an ominous picture of what the anti-Trumpers are willing to do to stop him from being sworn in as president again. If they cannot dissuade voters from supporting him by calling him a dictator, and if they cannot dictatorially keep him off the ballot, then what are they going to do? Cheat on the vote count? If they knew they could do that, regardless of what majority he commands on Election Day, they would not worry about throwing him off the ballot.
I would like to have a forward-looking visionary for president, instead of Trump or an anti-Trumper whose eyes are in the rearview mirror. However, before I crave such luxury, I cannot avoid summarizing the current situation on the U.S. presidential campaign trail:
What is it that the anti-Trumpers are so afraid of?
Is there something that they are worried that Trump will reveal about them?
Is there something that he will tell us, something that makes them so worried that they are willing to do anything and everything to keep him from becoming president again?
What Are the Anti-Trumpers Trying to Hide?
The new year has barely even started yet, and the American 2024 election cycle is already absurd. It is unlike any such cycle I have ever seen. Odd things are happening that would have been unthinkable just one or two elections ago.
Among the latest, most absurd ingredients in this increasingly bitter-tasting election soup, is a concerted effort to boot Donald Trump off the ballot in several states.
All these efforts will eventually fail, but the very fact that state officials are trying to ban a presidential candidate they don’t like paints a grim picture of desperation. It lays bare a political establishment whose only reason to get out of bed in the morning is to stop Trump from being elected president again.
Why? What are they so afraid of that they have to use methods normally reserved for totalitarian governments, to keep him from being elected?
Before we delve into this outlandish anti-Trump campaign, let me make clear where I stand regarding Trump. I am not a big fan of the former president. I can think of several others I would rather vote for as president.
I did vote for him in 2020. My current feelings for him have nothing to do with his accomplishments as president. On the contrary, he did well while in office:
I also appreciate the patriotism and optimism of his Make America Great Again movement; what other politicians will people drive two days and wait for hours outside a sports stadium to hear speak?
So why am I no longer a big fan of the former president?
It is simple: he is caught up in the past. His entire political being dwells in 2020. We need a president with his or her eyes on the horizon, not the rearview mirror.
To some degree, I can understand Trump. He is convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from him, just like Democrats are convinced that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. For years after the millennium election, Gore ran around the country with his hair on fire telling everyone who wanted to listen that the election was stolen from him.
As for the 2020 election, I noted in my review of Dinesh D’Souza’s impressively well-researched video on ‘ballot stuffing’ that valid questions remain regarding election integrity. These are questions that ‘establishment’ politicians are trying their best to get away from.
At the same time, as D’Souza’s video shows, while there were definitively irregularities that put chinks in the fair-election armor, nobody seems to have enough material to formally litigate the case that Trump lost due to election fraud. At this point, less than a year from the next presidential election, we need to choose a president next year whose eyes are on the future.
Unfortunately, that is not going to be easy. The Democratic party establishment is doing everything it can to quell any tendencies toward a challenge to Biden and his reelection bid. Absurdly, they are doing this in the face of growing dissatisfaction with the president within their own ranks. More and more Democrats are quietly questioning not only the mental abilities of the incumbent president but also his chances of winning re-election. Yet, so long as the Democratic party is trying to prevent any open, fair, and honest debate about who their candidate should be, there is no way for either Democrat voters or independents leaning toward either party to make an intelligent assessment of which way to go.
The Republicans are handling the candidate selection process very differently. Instead of pouring a bucket of ice on it, they are trying to warp-speed it ahead of the primary elections. They have held a series of unprecedented candidate debates during the fall—yes, folks: for the first time ever, a party has held formal debates between presidential candidates before the first primary.
Together with a slew of more or less odd opinion polls, these debates have reduced the field of Republican candidates from eight to four (not counting Trump). And not a single primary ballot has been cast yet.
All of these bipartisan shenanigans are driven by one overarching purpose: to somehow stop the wave that is carrying Donald Trump. And a wave it is: according to the latest numbers from fivethirtyeight.com, Trump commands around 50% of the Republican primary votes, with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley in the vicinity of 11.5%. The otherwise generously proportioned Chris Christie is dwelling around a measly 3.5%, right down there with Vivek Ramaswamy.
Over at 270towin.com, we find a list of national polls that put Trump at an even higher lead of 60-70% of the primary votes.
His lead shrinks noticeably, though, when the polls focus on New Hampshire, an early primary state. Despite that, from an anti-Trumper’s viewpoint, the GOP primaries look nightmarish.
This is where the de-balloting efforts come into play. These efforts were launched when it began to look as if the multiple lawsuits filed against Trump for a variety of reasons would not have the discouraging, let alone disrupting effect on Trump that his opponents were hoping for. The anti-Trumpers have been salivating at the prospect of seeing the former president locked up in prison. So far, none of them have worked—on the contrary, some higher court rulings have thrown wrenches in the legal machinery targeting Trump.
Enter the de-balloting movement. According to ABC News, the efforts in Colorado and Maine to keep Trump off the presidential ballot are not the only ones out there:
This is an entirely new weapon in American politics: to use the courts as venues to keep your opponent off the ballot entirely. As the Colorado case shows, this is an act of utter political desperation:
In other words, because Trump is accused by some of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government on January 6th, 2021, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that he has violated the 14th Amendment.
Except—Trump did not incite or commit insurrection. There is not a single court in this country that has found him guilty of anything, including insurrection. None.
Expectably, the Republican party in Colorado, which is a legally independent entity from the national Republican party, has appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States the ruling by their state’s highest court. The Trump campaign itself is expected to file an appeal as well.
Due to the appeals process, Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado for now, but that does not change the fact that the American political establishment, whatever form it takes, has now resorted to the most primitive anti-democratic measure available on this side of open violence. Like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, they are using the ballot itself as a weapon against a political opponent—and they are not limiting themselves to the court system to do it. Reports Breitbart:
According to Breitbart, Bellows “previously worked as Executive Director of the Maine Chapter of the ACLU,” a left-wing radical litigation outfit. In other words, she has the solid political credentials needed to be a radical anti-Trump activist in whatever office she holds.
The state-level Secretary of State is not to be confused with the U.S. Secretary of State, or America’s ‘foreign minister.’ At the state level, the title refers to an official, elected in 35 states and appointed in 12, who works under the executive branch of government (three states do not have a Secretary of State office). In other words, the Secretary of State belongs to the same branch as the governor and is not part of the judicial branch.
In most states, the Secretary of State oversees the integrity of the state’s election system.
Breitbart makes the same observation about the Maine ruling that I just made regarding Colorado, namely that Trump has never been convicted of any crime, insurrection or other. Therefore, it is a safe bet that the esteemed Secretary of State in Maine is going to face a stiff legal battle, most likely ending with a Supreme Court ruling that tells her and the four de-balloting judges in Colorado, to take a hike.
It would be easy to dismiss Maine’s Shenna Bellows as a 48-year-old Democrat party activist who is too dumb to understand the office she holds. However, that would be to underestimate her and the political machine whose water she is carrying. I have no facts on this, of course, but I would not be surprised if she has been promised help with her future political career if she tries to de-ballot Trump (many secretaries of state go on to run for governor).
In other words, this looks an awful lot like a politician who puts party affiliation and association with a certain ‘family’ within politics, above the law, the constitution, and the state and the people she serves. It has been said that when George Washington, America’s revered first president, opposed political parties, it was precisely because he foresaw that people would become more loyal to those parties than to their country.
A more troubling—and sadly more realistic—interpretation of the Maine and Colorado rulings is that the anti-Trump political elite is now going into high gear to stop him from being elected in 2024. They have even gone so far as to accuse him of being a dictator in the making; in view of the fact that the anti-Trumpers are borrowing a page from Russia and another from Venezuela in their fight against Trump, such accusations are more than a little audacious.
But they also contribute to painting an ominous picture of what the anti-Trumpers are willing to do to stop him from being sworn in as president again. If they cannot dissuade voters from supporting him by calling him a dictator, and if they cannot dictatorially keep him off the ballot, then what are they going to do? Cheat on the vote count? If they knew they could do that, regardless of what majority he commands on Election Day, they would not worry about throwing him off the ballot.
I would like to have a forward-looking visionary for president, instead of Trump or an anti-Trumper whose eyes are in the rearview mirror. However, before I crave such luxury, I cannot avoid summarizing the current situation on the U.S. presidential campaign trail:
What is it that the anti-Trumpers are so afraid of?
Is there something that they are worried that Trump will reveal about them?
Is there something that he will tell us, something that makes them so worried that they are willing to do anything and everything to keep him from becoming president again?
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