According to the legacy media, disaster is about to befall America.
Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination. The latest Des Moines Register/NBC News poll shows Trump at 51% in Iowa, up 8% since October, with Ron DeSantis in a distant second at 19% and Nikki Haley at 16%. According to analyst Steve Kornacki, there is an enthusiasm gap in favor of Trump: 70% of Trump supporters say their minds are made up. He is currently at 72% favorability with Iowa caucusgoers.
And there continues to be a significant enthusiasm gap between Trump and the others:
Supporters who say minds are made up:
Trump 70%
Haley 34%
DeSantis 30%Supporters who say they are "extremely enthusiastic" about choice:
Trump 45%
Haley 21%
DeSantis 16%— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) December 11, 2023
In the general election, Trump is also up. And he’s not up by a small margin. He is up significantly.
If the election were held today, Trump would become president of the United States. According to a Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend, Trump leads Biden 47% to 43% in the national polls; if third-party and independent candidates enter the mix, that lead jumps to six points, 37% to 31%. What’s more, according to the latest CNN poll, Trump leads Biden by 10 points in Michigan; he leads by five in Georgia; according to the latest Minneapolis Post poll, Trump is only down three points to Biden in Minnesota.
In other words, Trump would likely win by a landslide were the election held today.
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There are two reasons for this.
First, Joe Biden is terribly, terribly unpopular. That same Wall Street Journal poll shows just 23% of voters say Biden’s policies have helped them personally, compared to 53% who say his policies have hurt them. That data show half of voters say Trump’s policies helped them versus 37% who say they hurt. Biden’s job performance is at 37% approval and 61% disapproval; just 30% of voters like Bidenomics. The only issues where Biden leads Trump are on abortion (44% to 33%) and “tone in politics” (37% to 31%).
That condition is unlikely to alleviate for Biden before the election. It is, according to the Wall Street Journal, “less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn’t changing any time soon.” How bad is it? The Journal reports, “Before the Fed started raising rates, a person with a monthly housing budget of $2,000 could have bought a home valued at more than $400,000. Today, that same buyer would need to find a home valued at $295,000 or less.” Average new home payments are up to $3,322, up from $1,746 at the end of 2020.
What’s more, Biden’s supposed soft landing doesn’t look particularly likely to happen, despite the happy talk from the media. November job growth was weak, which is what the Fed was looking for when they raised interest rates in order to tamp down inflation. But that job growth was only even in “weak” territory because of three sectors: health care, government employment, and leisure and hospitality. In fact, those three plus private education employment are the reason for 81% of all jobs created in 2023.
Business starts are weak. Gross output — a measure of the entire economy, not merely the spending side in Gross Domestic Product — has been flatlined. In the first two quarters of the year, business spending dropped 9%.
There is a reason Warren Buffett is pulling his winnings off the table. Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, sold $28.7 billion in stock in the first three quarters of the year. Buffett has a simple strategy: Sell when the prices are too high. He thinks stock prices are too high. And they are.
Biden’s team keeps trying to whistle their way past the graveyard on his candidacy. The literal graveyard. Semafor’s Ben Smith reported that at the White House holiday party, Biden “strayed into a couple of hazy monologues, which ended only when his wife interrupted him to remind him it was a party. His speech wasn’t terrible, or even noteworthy. But everyone in the room realized Biden had a simple rhetorical job and hadn’t quite pulled it off.”
Biden could not get through a holiday speech at the White House. The easiest job in the world. So, unenthusiastic Democrats are now being forced to defend the ailing octogenarian. In an interview over the weekend, Minnesota governor Tim Walz exhorted, “I’ll take Joe Biden at 100 over any of these guys at whatever age they’re at because he’s delivering.”
All of which might be ok, except everyone knows Biden is unlikely to serve a full second term. Which leaves — drumroll — Kamala Harris.
Last night, she and Doug Emhoff, the Second Gentleman, issued yet another hilarious Hanukkah missive. Last year, they put out a video about how Hanukkah was all about love and light, clearly demonstrating they knew nothing about the holiday or its origins. Hanukkah is actually about religious Jews throwing Hellenists and their allies out of the Temple and reconsecrating the nation to the Biblical God. But they confirmed last night they knew nothing with this insane post.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff deleted his “story of Hanukkah” post criticized for not actually telling the story of Hanukkah. pic.twitter.com/5UrAwp6po3
— Joseph A. Wulfsohn (@JosephWulfsohn) December 12, 2023
That is not the story of Hanukkah. It doesn’t even meet the story of Hanukkah halfway. It’s not in the same Venn Diagram as the story of Hanukkah.
So, that’s Biden’s backup.
Now, the election isn’t held today, which brings us to the second reason Trump is leading Biden in the polls right now: He’s not in the news. That’s also the reason Trump is supposedly up in Iowa, head and shoulders above the rest of the candidates. Because he’s not in the news, he’s beating Biden. That takes the electability argument away from DeSantis and Haley. And because he’s not in the news, everyone has been able to look away from Trump’s crazy, which has always been his Achilles heel.
Ironically, one of the best things ever to happen to Trump politically was his social media ban. It has made him nearly invisible. The fact that Trump sank money into TruthSocial and doesn’t want to lose it means he hasn’t come back on X, and that means we’re not treated to a small media wildfire every time he tweets. Mostly, TruthSocial now acts as a venting mechanism, and everybody pretty much ignores it, which is best for Trump overall.
So, here’s the question: Will things stay that way?
Perhaps they will — not because Trump doesn’t love being at the center of attention, but because there’s actually nothing he can do to change anyone’s opinion of him. But elections are also about enthusiasm, and Trump could theoretically reinvigorate enthusiasm against him if he busts through walls like a big orange Kool-Aid Man: “Oh, yeaaaahhh.”
Trump is already giving hints that he wants to do so. During his recent interview with Sean Hannity, for example, Sean asked him if he would be a dictator. Instead of just saying, “That’s ridiculous. I was president already and I wasn’t a dictator. The real dictator is Joe Biden,” he, instead, played to the crowd and trolled the media by saying he wouldn’t be a dictator, except on Day One. He meant that like Obama and Biden, he would use a pen and a phone. It was a joke. But it also gave his enemies oxygen. Which is why yesterday, Trump had to explain it was a joke.
Now, Trump’s enemies have one playbook: He’ll be a dictator. This is what all the brilliant minds in the Democratic Party and the media have come up with: TrumpHitler! Small mustache! Funny hair! Orange Man Mussolini!
Matthew Dowd claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “It’s democracy versus dictatorship.” And NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on fascism, compared Trump to Mussolini and Pinochet.
Then, of course, came Mitt Romney, who has taken zero breaks from posturing on behalf of his own legacy — a legacy that now amounts to “Failed in 2012, paved the way for Trump, tried to serve in Trump’s administration, was rejected, then joined with Democrats on key measures in order to shore up his failing legacy.” He said Trump’s behavior suggested fascism:
The Trump-fascist argument isn’t likely to work. But Nikki Haley has one argument that could work — that Trump is unelectable because people perceive him as an agent of chaos:
That argument only works under two conditions. One is likely to be fulfilled: the feeling of Trump being chaotic. Certainly, that’s what the Democrats and the Biden DOJ are doing by indicting Trump on every crime from jaywalking to murder. There’s a reason Jack Smith, the January 6 prosecutor, wants his case accelerated.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Smith’s request on Trump’s claims of immunity against federal trial over January 6. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Smith wants the court to take up the case before a lower appeals court considers it, allowing the justices to squarely weigh in on when, if at all, Trump’s trial should move forward. The special counsel’s move came 10 days after the trial judge presiding over Trump’s case declined his bid to toss the criminal election-interference charges, rejecting arguments that he is immune from prosecution. … Smith asked the justices to cut out the lower appeals court and rule directly on the matter. … “To further the imperative public interest in a timely trial, the Government seeks a full and final resolution of the defendant’s claims—that he is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution where he was impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin—before the March 4, 2024 trial date,” Smith’s team wrote.
They want Trump on trial and they want him on trial now. They hope Trump will eat the headlines.
It is very likely that Trump will be on trial after losing this immunity appeal, but even that will not make the Biden case that Trump is a chaos agent. In order for that to work, Biden has to appear solid and non-chaotic — and that isn’t happening.
Which brings us back to the polls.
If every election, as I’ve said over and over, is a referendum on one of the two candidates, the referendum right now is on the current president. And barring some cataclysmic collapse by Trump or magical recovery by Biden, the underlying fundamentals of this race are likely to remain stable all the way up to election day.
This means that today’s Trump advantage is no mere chimera. It may just be the 2024 reality. Which is why the media and Democrats are panicking — and they should be.