WILL TEAM TRUMP HAVE A PIVOT READY TO GO?

Before Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, the Democrats, notes George Will, were already doing a pretty good job creating a martyr.

Biden is the only plausible Democratic candidate whom Trump would today be favored to defeat. And Biden is Trump’s opponent only because Democrats assured themselves that Trump is the only opponent that Biden could plausibly hope to defeat. Which is why various Democratic prosecutors took steps that they should have known might facilitate Trump’s nomination by making him a martyr. If the Democratic Party would now present dispirited Americans with even a merely plausible choice, the result might be akin to a gust of pure oxygen on smoldering embers: an eruption of gratitude.

Yet, if the Republicans fail to call attention to the foolish platform "finish the job" seeks to continue, those "dispirited Americans" might go along with the substitution, irrespective of which new face is running on the Sanders platform.  I've been calling attention to the centrist Democrat fakement for a long time, and to Donald Trump being his own worst enemy after the press called the election for even longer.

The Republican convention will take place in Milwaukee this week, and despite Our President digging in in such a way that he will be hard to swap out, it might behoove someone to have a message about the bad policies that came bundled with the supposedly moderate Democrat who prevailed in 2020.  Let Rajan Laad offer the syllabus.  "The results of the Biden administration's misgovernance are open borders, out-of-control inflation, rampant crime, targeting of dissenting citizens, identity politics giving preference over merit, and spending on gratuitous foreign wars and items such as the Green New Deal."  Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux found a Kim Strassel column that expands the argument.

How does California’s Gavin Newsom rate next to Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer among unions, or Hispanics, or pro-choice women?

Absent is any discussion of the root cause of this dilemma: the Democratic Party’s sharp move to the left, with policies and power grabs that are deeply unpopular with the electorate. Mr. Biden is a product of this pendulum shift, and his obvious successors are a continuation of it. If Democrats truly want to improve their prospects, they might consider having a debate about ideas.

Exactly.  But can they?  The faction fights between the communist and corporatist wings of that party were pretty nasty even before Our President face-planted at that debate.

I'll let Ms Strassel repeat the argument about the "centrist Democrat" fakement.

Don’t forget how a man pushing 80 came to office. The 2020 Democratic primary was dominated by candidates vying to curry favor with a rising progressive left. Worried that Bernie Sanders would kill a chance at the White House, voters turned to the only fixture who claimed to be moderate. He was a two-time presidential primary loser, as old as Methuselah, and slipping even then, but whatever. He was deemed the only candidate able to beat Donald Trump, which was probably true. Even four years ago, the party understood pure progressivism to be a political liability.

That brings us to what might have been the first strike, the swing voters discovering an administration gone full-throttle leftist.

That self-preservation went out the window when Mr. Biden gave full rein to the Sanders platform. Blowout spending fueled the worst inflation in 40 years. Open borders caused a migrant flood that is overwhelming cities in red and blue states alike. A climate agenda fed higher energy prices and grid instability and squelched consumer choice. Washington made common cause with progressive prosecutors who enabled a crime wave in major cities. A “foreign policy for the middle class”—whatever that means—emboldened America’s adversaries.

The president who ran on uniting the country and restoring “standards and norms” also bowed to the far left’s worldview that the ends justify the means. The Justice Department signed on to the progressive lawfare campaign, unleashing criminal prosecutions against Mr. Trump and fueling fury among Republicans. Independents and moderates look with unease on actions the courts found unlawful—Covid mandates, student-loan forgiveness, environmental policy—and Democratic promises to pack the Supreme Court and federalize election law.

Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson levels a similar indictment.

Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.

Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.

If Team Trump make it all about Dementia Joe's dementia, things might turn out badly.  There'd better be an attempt to unify the country, which is what we're hearing from the Republicans, that calls attention to those bad policies and proposes betterments.  Back to Ms Strassel.

The debate flop was as much a consequence of a failed agenda as of Mr. Biden’s incoherence. Demosthenes would have struggled to put a rosy shine on today’s grocery bills, border invasion, crime and global disorder. Americans were concerned by Mr. Biden’s debate performance, but does anyone think Democrats would be jettisoning him if his “bad night” came amid a thriving economy, low prices and interest rates, or polls showing Mr. Biden winning the race?

For that matter, does anyone think Mr. Biden would still be in contention if Democrats felt they had a better bet? For all the hype of a “strong” bench, the top contenders poll as badly or worse against Mr. Trump. Democrats are frantically weighing individual strengths and weaknesses, blithely ignoring their one commonality: All are unrepentant progressives, promising to double down on a deeply unpopular agenda. The party remains unwilling to believe that voters—even many of their own—are looking for change, or that warnings about “threats” to democracy and abortion are losing their punch.

Yes, and to what extent did the Count of Mar-a-Lago call attention to any of that during the debate?

The Republican Party has problems too—and doesn’t it know it. How could it not after eight years of a media fixated on Mr. Trump and “MAGA,” drilling in on every proposal, internal battle and Truth Social post? But Democrats have been given a ridiculous pass, their policy failures justified, their weaknesses swept under the carpet. See the 16 “Nobel-prize winning economists” who last month pronounced the Biden agenda “vastly superior” to anything Republicans might offer. Really? See the 51 former intelligence officials who disappeared Mr. Biden’s Hunter liability before the 2020 election. See the press corps, which noticed Mr. Biden’s problems only two weeks ago—and still aren’t noticing anything else.

The current Democratic soul-searching is way too limited. Mr. Biden’s age is a problem. But his age isn’t the source of the party’s dismal approval ratings on the economy, the border, or crime. It’s not the cause of striking demographic shifts—under way for years—that show the working class, including minority voters, fleeing the party. Progressive policies will be on the ballot this fall as much as any one person’s name. If the party cared for its future—not just Nov. 5—it’d be having that debate.

Exactly.  It's on the Republicans to call attention to those policy failures, to offer meaningful choices to swing voters, to call attention to the rent-seekers who have captured the Biden administration and Official Washington.  Here's Martin Gurri recapitulating the fakement and calling attention to Official Washington.

[D]estiny intervened again, in the form of the Democratic establishment that for years had treated Biden as something of a joke. Suddenly, from utter desperation, he became their man.

Younger Democratic stalwarts who could be trusted to take on Trump—Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren—had wobbled or flamed out early in the primary season. That left the field wide open for Bernie Sanders, the wild-eyed socialist who was hated and feared by the elites, if for no other reason than he was deemed unelectable. Some quick maneuvering became necessary. Like synchronized swimmers moving as one, most of Biden’s opponents dropped out of the race and endorsed him. Rules were bent. Money was found. With the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and the rest of the state’s Democratic Party establishment, Biden won his first primary ever in South Carolina—and the rest, as we know, is history.

The campaign against Trump set a pattern that would continue for years. First, Biden was to be swaddled in the political equivalent of bubble wrap. He ran for the presidency of the United States from the basement of his home in Delaware. Why not? It was a time of pandemic. Second, a magnificent replica of Biden was erected by the establishment with the full complicity of the media, and it replaced, in the information sphere, the increasingly feeble, always spiteful, intellectually muddled real man. Third, a ring of iron was placed around the candidate to prevent access by the public. Biden’s appearances were carefully staged in the true sense of the word: They avoided reality and promoted a fictional character.

The basement strategy had a secondary effect: in a time when swing voters wanted to be freed from mean tweets at all hours of the day, a presidential hopeful that called a lid around the kids' bedtimes was a credible commitment to no more social media follies.  The truth came out later.

I see no reason to pity Biden. He perpetrated a hoax on the American people and has had the misfortune of being found out. The punishment will fit the crime: humiliation for heedless vanity. If he is forced to withdraw from the presidential contest, that will be all the world remembers of his brief tenure at the top. If Trump regains the presidency in 2024, Biden will end up detested by the very elites whose good opinion he has groveled all his life to obtain. Failure, this time, will be fixed and final, like destiny itself.

That might be why he was grousing about "elites" seeking to push him off the ticket.

Mr Gurri's post also notes that the "policy failures and unpopularity of the Biden administration contributed to the return of Donald Trump.  Dear reader, there are two themes.  George Will introduced one in the second header of his column.  "The White House and its media accomplices steadily maintained the fiction of Biden’s competency."  In Afghanistan, at the checkout counter or gas pump, and in Woodlawn and all the other distressed neighborhoods stressed by illegal aliens, the voters could see.  Those who lived more sheltered lives could not avert their eyes from that debate.  The second is the utter incompetence of the so-called elites that foisted Biden on us before they see to un-foist him to foist someone else on us.  "It’s coup o’clock for the so-called defenders of democracy in the party."  I'm with Ed Morrissey on what the reckoning should be.  "[T]he Bidens are every bit as complicit in this massive fraud as their 'allies'. I don't have any sympathy for any of them."  Yes, "Politics Is Rotting Brains and Making Everyone Mad."  And yet, should the Democrats' foisting of the Biden con on the country lead to a Trump landslide this November and no Democrat winning a Congressional or presidential election for a generation, well, we might not be in Abraham Lincoln's "true and righteous judgements of the Lord" territory: they have brought the fateful lightning on themselves all the same.