The majority of the conservative pundits writing at conservative opinion juggernaut PJ Media are not Trump fans, though they of course will support him over Joe and his aspiring totalitarian party. One would think that the cheap tactics and strategies of misleading the public with assorted Big Lies used by the Left against Trump from at least 2015 on would be anathema to this group, and one would be tragically wrong.
For example, here is often amusing and occasionally trenchant columnist Stephen Kruiser bemoaning the failure of Ron DeSantis to gather any momentum in the primaries, and second guessing his approach:
Ron DeSantis became Public Enemy Number One-and-a-Half (after Trump, of course) largely because of the brilliant way he handled Florida’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He essentially gave the finger to Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and every other egomaniacal bureaucratic tyrant.
DeSantis’s handling of COVID was his — I have to say it — trump card in his effort to catch Trump. It was Trump who weaponized Fauci, no matter how much he and the MAGA faithful deny it. That alone should have been mentioned by the DeSantis campaign as often as possible.
What DeSantis needed to do was ignore Haley, Vivek, and the rest of the Island of Misfit Republicans and hammer Trump on COVID. I’m pretty sure that’s what Trump and his people thought DeSantis would do because Trump and his online army were rewriting the history of his and DeSantis’s COVID responses from the moment the governor got into the race…
I am not at all positing that DeSantis would have fared better had he gone with a COVID-centric strategy; I’m saying that it was his only real shot.
A state governor could afford to buck conventional wisdom and the decrees of the CDC and health “experts”; a President could not. Trump had no choice but to rely on the judgment and recommendations of the government’s public health personnel, both logically and politically. The Democrats and the news media were hyping the pandemic for all it was worth, terrifying the public, exaggerating the deaths and risks and blaming every fatality on him. Trump had no expertise in managing a medical crisis. It would have been irresponsible, indeed impeachable, for him to just ignore the advice of those in his administration who did. Fauci, the CDC and the health officials failed the nation and failed Trump, who, all things considered, handled the situation as well as possible: he made it clear that he was eager to get things back to normal. Meanwhile, the media was making a hero out of frauds like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ended up killing people with his favored policies.
It would have been unethical, indeed despicable, for DeSantis to use the pandemic response against Trump, and he rose in my estimation by not doing it. Being right or wrong in that ethics train wreck ultimately came down to moral luck for everyone but the certifiable villains like Fauci, the media fearmongers, the pandemic’s hypocrites like Chicago’s Mayor Lightfoot, and the dictators like Cuomo, Michigan’s Whitmer, Virginia’s Ralph Northam and Gavin Newsom.
Ethics Alarms 
Those who rely on big government will despise Trump and anyone else who does not need to be inside government to create personal wealth. Any candidate who threatens the military industrial complex, K Street revenue, or the livelihoods of thousands of inconsequential or featherbedded federal employees will be attacked from the time he or she announces candidacy for President.
I too wanted DeSantis to be the nominee but maybe this was not his time. One can make the argument that Trump is owed a second bite at the apple given his record of accomplishments in his first term though some will argue his “horrid” behaviors by beltway standards is enough to disqualify him.
It is hard to assess Trump visa vis other past presidents with respect to his use of social media when only one had use of the instant communication tools that result in ill considered streams of consciousness.
Trump is viewed as a threat to democracy by people who want to take away others voices by eliminating him as a threat and by flooding our country with non citizens whose very presence will alter the the number of representatives in the House after the 2030 census. These illegal aliens don’t even need to vote to dilute the vote of citizens. Those who complain about him being a threat to democracy think we are stupid or are so blind with hatred toward the opposition they will say anything.
You mean Ralph Northam, right? Clinton bagman McAuliffe ran, but was defeated by Glenn Youngkin. Some of us are damn lucky that we did not happen to live in the worst of the worst tyrannical states now going on 4 years ago. The one valuable lesson from all of that was just how easy it is to take American freedom away, you just need the right reason to do it. I find it interesting that the Canadian courts are starting to rule that Justin Trudeau’s heavy-handed approach to the trucker protest was in fact unconstitutional. Of course it’s now more than a year after the fact, so it really doesn’t matter. I think when they have elections in a little bit more than a year he may find himself finally thrown out on his butt, but he was allowed to be a soft tyrant for far too long.
The crew over at National Review are pretty much all Never Trumpers, who have talked for months about nothing but how it’s important to nominate anyone but. That might seem nice, because it would deprive the Democratic party of their main focus, but I’m not sure it would mean anything. That party is all too experienced and focused on using the tactic of destroying the opponent, whoever he might be. The only way it would matter now is if Trump were never in the picture.
However, there are almost no Republicans of substance out there who could not be in some way linked to Trump except maybe has beens like John Kasich whose time has come and gone. The Democrats are going to be making hay out of Donald Trump for the next two or three generations, like he was the nearest thing that America had to its own Hitler. The scary thing is that a lot of Americans are buying that hook line and sinker. A lot of the people I work with really and honestly believe that if Donald Trump gets his second term than this country is doomed. A lot of them are also the same people who excused any and every measure taken under the pandemic. Some of them still wear masks wherever they go.
Right now Trump has a better shot at winning back the White House than he ever has since he left it. The idea that Nikki Haley is going to somehow beat him in the primaries is simply a dream or a wish. The idea that some democrat is going to appear and push Joe Biden aside or that Joe is going to step down like LBJ is also a dream. The man simply does not want to step down and I don’t think his handlers want him to step down because they would lose their power. It’s not about what’s best for the country and it hasn’t been about what’s best for the country with the Democratic party and a good chunk of the Republican party for at least two decades. It’s just about getting power, staying in power, and amassing wealth until you decide you’ve had enough and you’re ready to retire to some mansion that most folks can only dream of and give speeches at a quarter million dollars a pop.
Trump don’t care about any of that. He was already wealthy and could have afforded to retire long before any of this started. Unfortunately, his cause is not exactly a noble one, in his case he just wants to feed his ego. The mistake he made is that he tried to take on the system and the entrenched political power instead of taking his one-term and fading away. Maybe they would have allowed him to do that, but, Maybe not. Maybe they want to make an example of him and show anyone who dares to challenge the system that if you do challenge the system you will ultimately lose and we will lock you up for the rest of your life. I’m kind of surprised that there are no prosecutions pending against any members of his family. That’s really the way to force someone into doing whatever it is you want them to do. Trump can say “come ahead, come after me all you want, I’m going to keep fighting you.” However, if they threaten to put one of his children in jail, that might change things.
Maybe I’m not surprised, because the Democratic party doesn’t want Trump out of the race now and it doesn’t want him dead, yet. They had a fair amount of success in the last few elections by using him as a boogeyman, and by helping opponents aligned with him so that they could choose the weaker opponent to fight. After Joe is safely reelected then Trump has no further value to the Democratic party and the entrenched bureaucracy and then I think you might see an assassination just to make sure that he stays out of the realm of politics once and for all, and to send the message to anyone thinking of following his path that there is a bullet waiting for you too if you don’t fall in line. Then they can start on the Supreme Court and see about helping Thomas and Alito into some form of retirement, maybe the permanent kind if they can’t or won’t take the other kind, and convincing Trump’s appointees that it would be beneficial to their families’ health for them to consider stepping down, and the sooner the better, today would be great, within the hour would be even better, right now would be best of all.
Northam. Yes. Fixed. Thanks.