The anti-Trump left and right failing

 Roger Kimball:

For some time now, Michael Anton has been saying that the Establishment—Democrats tout court, of course, but also large swaths of the testosterone-challenged GOP—are dead set against allowing Donald Trump to run for president again. It’s been obvious from its beginnings that the January 6 committee—an illegally constituted kangaroo court—was interested in one thing and one thing only: eliminating Trump and his followers from the metabolism of American political life. The fact that its public face is Liz Cheney, a soon-to-be cashiered anti-Trump RINO, underscores Anton’s point, or part of it.

It’s not just the Democrats who cannot countenance Trump. It is the entire certified political class, what Anton calls the bureaucratic “uniparty” that runs the government and maintains the Overton Window that determines what is and what is not acceptable in the political life of the country. Donald Trump is not in the picture frame.

Another data point: just Friday, the New York Times gleefully reported that Fox News—Fox!—had also cut the former president loose. Apparently, he hasn’t appeared on the network since April. The Times noted that other mouthpieces of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire—the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example—had published opinion pieces harshly critical of Trump and pointedly announcing that he was unfit to run for president.

There is a certain anxiety evident in all these anti-Trump imprecations, a fact that that is made more understandable when one looks at the polls. The unhappy fact—unhappy, anyway, if you are dead set against Donald Trump being president—is that Trump is by far the most vital Republican candidate. The Republican consensus is repeating the mantra “DeSantis, DeSantis, DeSantis.” Nothing wrong with that: Ron DeSantis is a good guy, Trump without the mean tweets and other baggage that CNN dislikes. Were he the GOP candidate, I would support him avidly.

But will he be? As Newsmax reports, Trump is “crushing all potential opponents in a Republican primary,” including DeSantis. A recent Harvard-Harris poll has Trump hoovering up 56 percent of the vote in a field of seven GOP rivals. DeSantis clocks in with 16 percent. The last time I checked, 56 was a considerably bigger number than 16.

Anton’s point is that the regime is prepared to move heaven and earth to stop Trump. They would prefer to stop him from running at all. If they can’t do that, they will go to any length necessary to prevent him from winning. And if that doesn’t succeed, they will prevent him from being seated as the next president.

As I say, Anton has been singing this tune for some time now, and I have been privileged to hear some of his cadenzas on the subject. He has now gathered the various leitmotifs together into a single robust essay that was published to wide notice last week in the lively new website Compact. Titled “They Can’t Let him Back In,” Anton’s essay reads like a playbook lifted from a John Le Carré novel. If the January 6 committee fails in its appointed task to destroy Trump, Anton forecasts, there are a host of contingencies ready and waiting to complete the job.
...

Trump does have the ability to antagonize a large block of the population, but he also has the ability to appeal to a large block of voters.  I thought he did a good job in many respects despite having to deal with the fraudulent Russian collusion story pushed by the Democrats and their media cohorts.  While he can occasionally say things that make you whence the bottom line is he is way better than Biden or any other Democrat.  The polling suggests that despite the dislike by the media including Fox News, Trump has a large lead over any other potential GOP nominee.

See, also:

Recent Defeats Have Taught Democrats Nothing

They’re about to repeat the blunder of running on “Trumpism” rather than real issues.

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