The 2024 Republican presidential primary is likely to be a heated one. While much could potentially change between now and the end of primary season next year, one thing is already clear: The establishment is doing all it can to prevent another four years of Trump.
To keep The Donald out of the White House, the establishment is unleashing a volley of attacks on a variety of fronts: Weaponizing the legal system against him, leveraging the media to attack his viability while elevating competing candidates, and denying him access to the donor networks a Republican aspirant for president would typically need to win.
But why are establishment forces so afraid? They are afraid, clearly — they don’t expend resources to destroy those whom they don’t believe actually pose a danger to their agenda. Their strategy for non-threats is to ignore them or else risk giving them a platform they wouldn’t otherwise have. If the establishment didn’t feel threatened by Trump, they would allow him to fade into irrelevance.
Instead, we have the Manhattan district attorney’s office considering an indictment of Trump over the alleged Stormy Daniels “hush money” payment that has already been rehashed a thousand times over by the 45th president’s opponents.
And we have the doors of the GOP donor class being thrown wide open to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who at this point has not officially entered the race but who is widely viewed as the one man who could potentially beat Trump in the primary — and who, despite his current non-candidacy, is making all the moves of a presidential contender, such as flying to Iowa.
It’s telling that despite being the nation’s most popular Republican governor, DeSantis was absent at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Instead, he was in Palm Beach meeting with big-dollar donors associated with the establishment Club for Growth.
Why is there such a frantic, almost panicked effort to stop Trump?
What the establishment fears is that, in Trump, they would have an adversary who now understands who they are and how they operate — and who would likely no longer feel any restraint about taking decisive action to curtail their power and enact a true America First agenda.
Part of the reason for Trump’s anticipated “take no prisoners” attitude if elected to a second term is a simple human factor: Revenge.
Trump has made no secret that he harbors disdain for the individuals who sabotaged his agenda during his term in office and who worked together to keep him from a second term in 2020. If he makes it back in, it’s not hard to imagine that he will have no qualms about taking an ax to the entire bureaucracy and Deep State that makes up the executive branch. Nor will he see any need to try to play nice with the establishment by filling his cabinet with insiders as he did while in office — one of his biggest mistakes, but one which he appeared to regret after the 2020 election, as evidenced by his attempt to fill the Pentagon and other areas of the executive branch with true loyalists in the few months before Biden’s inauguration.
Hopefully, Trump has learned from his errors and would eschew packing his administration with individuals such as John Bolton and Anthony Scaramucci, who are only there to make sure he doesn’t go too far off the establishment plantation. Of course, we can’t know exactly what Trump will do, but the Deep State is certainly aware of the possibility that Trump’s cabinet would be totally unbeholden to them this time around.
Another factor is that, unlike any of the other Republican contenders, Trump can only run for one more four-year term and thus is not limited by any of the thoughts of “compromise” that inevitably enter into the thinking of other Republicans who would enter the White House constantly looking ahead at reelection and thus be tempted to settle on many issues in the name of pragmatism.
Again, this is one area where Trump can be argued to have dropped the ball while in office — he played the gentleman on many fronts, perhaps mistakenly believing that he would get the chance to go full-throttle when safely reelected to a second term. It’s not an uncommon tactic for presidents. But it’s one that didn’t pay off for Trump, because he didn’t get a hoped-for reelection — making the compromise all for naught.
Fortunately, for Trump, he still has a strong base within the Republican Party that gives him a viable fighting chance to overcome most opposition. And when the debate season begins, it will most likely only play to his favor, as his onstage abilities are superior to anyone else in the field — even, arguably, to DeSantis.
And while money isn’t everything in politics, it certainly is an important tool for being able to get a candidate’s message out. Thankfully, Trump has built up his own small-dollar donation war chest and network in the form of his Save America SuperPAC. And he also has his own personal fortune, which he may very well end up having to tap into significantly this time around to make up for the lost mega donors.
Thus, while the establishment definitely has it out for Trump, it’s very far from over for the man who has a knack for snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.
After all, we’re talking about the man who wrote a book titled The Art of the Comeback.
