I have never doubted it for a minute
Tim Miller confirms it. He watched CPAC. There can be no doubt:
Before I trigger everyone with a report from the many hours of CPAC streaming I engaged in whilst waiting for a delayed flight and not crying like a little baby about it, I want to make a clear and direct statement about my views on the 2024 presidential election.
There is nothing in the world that I, Tim Miller, want more than for Donald Trump to not run for president in 2024.
If a magic genie with a sweet William F. Buckley impersonation shows up on my stoop in Oakland and offers me three wishes, I pledge to you that I will use my very first wish to turn Donald Trump into a toad, even though that will give all the establishment Republicans who I deeply resent the gift they won’t admit they want.
I know the anti-anti-Trumpers want to project their grift onto us and claim that we Never Trumpers actually want Trump to run because we like the retweets, or think he’s easy to beat (which is insane), or whatever. But rest assured: That is not the case.
With that little bit of throat-clearing out of the way, I have some bad news to report. If you, like me, had been compartmentalizing a Trump 2024 run for mental-health purposes, I’m sorry to break it to you, but he looks like a man who is definitely running for president in 2024. His CPAC speech this weekend was a rude awakening as to both his intentions and the strength he would bring to that campaign.
First, his intentions: There was no bigger roar from the crowd during the speech than during the following section, and there was no bigger shit-eating grin on his burnt-toast face than the one that came following the roar:
I ran twice. I won twice and did much better the second time than I did the first getting millions and millions of more votes than in 2016. And likewise getting more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country by far. . . . And now we may have to do it again. We may have to do it again.
That little bit of anti-democratic vamping came right on the heels of what would be his core campaign message to the GOP base in a 2024 campaign.
The border was the best and safest in U.S. recorded history. They’ve turned it into a nightmare so quickly, the election was rigged and stolen. And now our country is being systematically destroyed.
If you are reading this, then you are likely a person of reason who is not persuaded by the lies and childish hyperbole.
But let’s imagine this message in the context of a 2024 Republican primary. Trump is claiming that when he was president, everything was great. Then the election was stolen. And now everything is being destroyed by the people his voters hate.
What exactly is his hypothetical challenger’s response to this? It seems to me that Trump has everyone checkmated.
They could say that Trump is a loser, and that the election wasn’t stolen, and that it was his fault everything has been destroyed. Someone could campaign on that, I guess. But . . . does that seem like a winning argument in a party that has spent most of 2022 excommunicating anyone who speaks the truth about the 2020 election?
And speaking of 2022, Trump’s speech revealed that not only will he have a tailor-made message for GOP primary voters, but he’ll have an entire army of newly-elected evangelists who have pledged a blood oath to his Megachurch.
Here’s Kari Lake performatively patting her chest and demonstrating her deep agape love for Trump from the audience after she gets her shoutout.
Here’s Tudor Dixon posing like she was just handed the first rose on The Bachelorette when Trump mentions her.
The same will happen with every other suck-up and sycophant who washes into Washington during the upcoming midterm.
Now, there are no certainties in life. Maybe the 60 percent of “Trump maybes” Whit Ayers talked about in this excellent edition Kristol Conversations will all break for Ron DeSantis. Or maybe Merrick Garland will indict Trump’s ass and find the one jury in America that will convict him. Or maybe . . . well, let’s not get into some of my more macabre fantasies.
But here’s what we know: The man speaking to an adoring crowd at CPAC was someone who is already campaigning, who has a narrative that will be tough to pierce, and who owns an entire new crop of succubus surrogates who have juice with the base.
His hands may be tiny and soft, but his grip on the party is pretty tight.
Yes it is. And. Since he’s willing to cheat, they couldn’t be happier.