Donald Trump Wants to Be Your Retribution…and It Could Destroy America in the Long Run – Donald J. Trump is one of the most iconic figures of our age. You may love him. You probably hate him. But everyone knows him.
From the spray-on tan to his oversized hairdo, elongated ties, exaggerated mannerisms, pugilistic attitude, and over-the-top antics, Donald Trump has defined the age he’s been blessed to live in.
The forty-fifth president is also one of the most aggrieved individuals in recent memory. Many of those grievances are real. Several of those grievances, though, were self-induced. Trump’s actions brought on the scandals that his various political enemies are now using to bring him down.
The former president is not letting his various indictments and pending indictments get him down. In fact, President Trump is using that as fuel for the fire that is his 2024 Presidential Campaign.
This pathos that Trump is experiencing—and has experienced since the moment he glided down the golden escalator of Trump Tower to make his announcement for the presidency in 2016—is alluring to many of his most ardent supporters.
Presently, the agony and ecstasy of Donald J. Trump is propelling him to double-digit leads over any of his GOP rivals, including the successful forty-sixth governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
Will Moderates Definitely Love Donald Trump?
A key question that must be asked is whether the more moderate voters who turn out for a General Election, in which the Republican candidate squares off against the Democratic Party’s presidential choice, will be as swayed by Donald Trump’s struggle.
Trump is already polling well with key swing state voters who don’t fall under the usual Republican Party voter base.
And if it is, indeed, a bipolar competition in which only Trump vs. Biden—so long as there’s no funny business from either side in the General Election—the forty-fifth president just might eke out enough votes in those key swing states (as he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016) to put him over the edge to victory.
Then again, his enduring rage fest might turn off those voters. Especially if the likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., runs as an independent or if Cornel West maintains his Green Party presidential bid along with Joe Biden’s candidacy as the Democratic Party’s nominee. Suddenly, that narrow-but-straight pathway for Trump to return himself to the presidency disappears.
Setting the possibility of a multi-sided fight for the presidency aside, or the prospects that Joe Biden might not be able to run for president again, leaving his party in a significant lurch (because his running-mate is, as I’ve written repeatedly, a dud), is Trump’s sturm und drang routine going to work for him (beyond the GOP Primary that is)?
Pick a Side
“This is the final battle […] Either they win or we win.” The former president asserted ominously to a galvanized crowd of supporters. On many levels, he’s right. For Trump, this really is it. He’s all-in, as they say.
After all, if he loses this election, he’ll lose the ability to pardon himself from the now multiple federal grand jury indictments he’s being subjected to. Given his apparent hold on the GOP, too, it’s likely that an inability to win yet another election will lead to the collapse of the Republican brand.
Because, take my word for it, there’s no way that the brand goes back to the pre-Trump entity it was. And without Trump, as we’ve seen with even Ron DeSantis’ inability to generate a substantial wave of support, the party will wither and die.
It also means that the country is left in the hands of a single party which very few people outside of the major cities believe is working in their interests (the Democrats are not).
So, unless Trump wins reelection, the MAGA movement (in other words, the working-and-middle classes), the Republican Party as we understand it—and therefore, likely the organized Right-wing resistance to the solidifying Left-wing grip on our institutions—as well as Trump’s personal brand and, in all probability, his freedom dies.
That’s some heavy stuff.
Will this create the wave of support that Trump needs to win in 2024? I remain unconvinced.
The Wrath of Donald Trump
Donald Trump wants to go to war with the government. We gave him that ability to “drain the swamp” seven years ago. Trump didn’t drain the swamp at all. He was drowned in it. Now it’s burying him beneath its brackish, muddy waters, tying him down with the mangled roots of widespread corruption and graft.
For many GOP stalwarts they want simply to hand the reins of the party over to Trump for one last go at the White House.
They’ve bought into the narrative that Trump has spun that because he was wronged by the Faceless Men—villains of all of us “normies”—that we owe him one last chance to reclaim what was rightly his; to complete the dramatic cycle that was begun when he first ran in 2016.
But this isn’t some Wagnerian opera in three cycles. This is the fate of whatever is left of our tattered republic.
And Donald Trump is right: the 2024 Presidential Election is our last chance to set things right for the next generation before we hand over the whole thing to the totalitarians living among us.
Independents and certain minority voters are as alienated by the forty-fifth president as he is adored by hardcore Republicans and disenfranchised white, working-class voters.
Nominating Trump might very well cede the future to the Democrats by default.
All this talk of “retribution” is getting over-the-top, too. George Washington never spoke about exacting vengeance from the British who had wronged him and his fellow Americans prompting them to leave their once perpetual union with Britain.
Abraham Lincoln made a point of never demanding retribution for the South’s secession, fully understanding that, after the so-called “Brothers’ War” ended in the defeat of the South, we would all again have to live under the same roof as a family.
Not even the Confederate leader during the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, spoke about seeking revenge upon the North. He envisioned that his proto-state would simply separate and go its own way if the Civil War had ended in a Union defeat (which, it looked as though it would at the start of the war but Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman would change all that for the Union by war’s end, when it counted).
What I’m getting at here is that seeking justice for wrongs is the right thing do.
But there’s a certain way to go about it.
Making your personal grievances and animosities with the dreaded “Deep State” the hallmark of your campaign might get you the Republican nomination, but there are enough women voters alone out there who probably will not welcome such visceral rhetoric from a major political candidate—especially one who is already steeped in controversy, like Donald Trump.
A new candidate who will establish a more equitable justice in our political system and reorder our system in a fairer way is needed.
That candidate might be Donald Trump. But given his negatives and the way he makes everything about him as an individual rather than the leader of a great movement of patriotic Americans makes this prospect highly unlikely.
Who Could It Be Now?
It could be Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy.
Although, they will be unlikely at this point to overcome the lead that Trump has over them in the GOP Primary.
Maybe it’ll be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., running as an independent after the Democrats rig their primary against him.
It won’t be Joe Biden, though.
There will be no justice if he is reelected, which is why it matters who the Republican candidate will be.
And the threat Joe Biden and his cronies pose to our freedom is why it makes little sense for the Republicans to pick a man mired in controversy, some of his own making and some being the making of his foes, like Trump, to be their candidate in 2024.
Trump can win the primary bigly.
He can’t win a General Election too well. One way or another, his enemies won’t let him have it.
But, people do love their dramas.
So, maybe Trump has that going for him that the other candidates don’t. He’s the kind of drama, whether it be in the boardroom or on reality television or as president.
Frankly, though, I don’t need retribution at this point. I need resurrection. The rebirth of the America that existed right up until COVID-19 wafted across the Pacific Ocean from China and eviscerated our country.
I want to restore sanity and normalcy. I want my freedom back. I just don’t know if Trump is the guy to do that because he hasn’t figured out that it’s not about him.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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