If This Isn't Theater & DeSantis Really **IS** Trying To Grab The Baton From Trump Now?
He's Been Talked Into A Serious And Fatal Mistake
Well May was a rough month for me.
I not only had to eat humble pie on the end of the John Durham Special Counsel, I’d also just spent more than three months confidently telling people that I didn’t think Ron DeSantis would run for President in 2024.
Oops!
Like many others, I truly did not think DeSantis would do it. Doing it makes no sense. Even now, as his campaign flounders and falters and I’m watching what very likely could be one of the most historical campaign implosions ever, I can’t believe he’s doing this.
The only rational explanation I’ve heard over the past few months is that DeSantis and his big pockets GOP Establishment UniParty backers fully expected Trump to have been so swamped and weighed down by arrests & indictments and legal machinations that he’d drop like a rock in the polls, maybe even drop out of the race, and present a real opportunity for someone else to step in and grab hold of the 2024 GOP nomination.
That didn’t happen, of course. No matter how many bogus charges, indictments, trials and jury awards Trump was hit with, his numbers didn’t drop and he continued to insist he was running and indeed, the polls demonstrate none of the corrupt “justice system” efforts to derail his campaign are having any real effect.
CNN thought with Trump just having been
declared financially liable to the tune of $2 million for some kind of sexual assault or slur directed against E. Jean Carroll, on top of
the 30+ financial records felonies that corrupt Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had indicted Trump and had him arrested & arraigned for, as well as being
the target of a brand new Special Counsel investigation being led by Jack Smith,
the time was now perfect to bring him back in front of their national audience and bait him into self-destruction.
Needless to say, that Town Hall on CNN did **not** go the way the people that set it up expected it to. The very next night you had Anderson Cooper incoherently babbling that the network was acknowledging it had made a serious mistake and he’d understand if the viewers never tuned in to watch CNN ever again.
So any expected Trump plunge in the polls or abandonment by the base does not appear to be happening. After waiting for months for the expected Trump blowback to develop, DeSantis finally made his announcement last week in a Twitter Spaces hosted by the platform’s new CEO Elon Musk.
Things didn’t exactly go as planned with the big launch of his campaign on Twitter, which wasn’t a very good sign for the DeSantis camp. The campaign launch is crucial, especially when its a candidate trailing as much as DeSantis is.
It makes zero sense for DeSantis to jump in now when he was already considered the heir apparent to Trump in 2028. Instead of being handed the crown, he will now try to seize it from Trump’s hands in front of a sizeable base that Trump has been carefully building since 2015. The odds of DeSantis successfully pulling off this maneuver were never very high to start with.
Pollster Rich Baris, who goes by The Peoples Pundit on social media, is widely acknowledged as having been the most accurate predictor of the last several election cycles. He’s already discussing the latest polls taken since DeSantis made his strange Twitter Spaces campaign launch where after technical difficulties, only around 300,000 got to hear his long-awaited verbal announcement.
Baris is pointing out that the expected announcement surge for DeSantis has not materialized.
Baris also appeared on Human Events with Jack Posobiec to discuss what the polls are showing since DeSantis jumped into the race.
A lot of people who immediately got excited by DeSantis’ announcement of his Presidential run did not seem to fully grasp that his campaign was literally already underwater from the start. DeSantis had slid backwards more than 20 points since January and depending on what poll you looked at, faced a steep uphill climb of anywhere from 30-40 points to close the gap with frontrunner Donald J. Trump.
A good analogy to describe this would that The Good Ship DeSantis was already sinking below the water line at the launch. That doesn’t mean its going to sink out of sight, but it had better start moving soon if it wants to avoid that fate.
A Whole Lot Of People Now Face Real Exposure
If that needle does not start moving by the middle of June, you can fully expect to see many of the very loud “Conservative” DeSantis social media influencers suddenly abandoning ship.
They may be taking big money to shill for DeSantis as they try to gaslight the base about the FL Governor being the ‘reasonable’ ‘drama free’ NeoCon UniParty replacement for Trump, but whatever they’re being paid, it ain’t near enough to go down with the Good Ship DeSantis.
The dumb ones instantly took the leap. They accepted the money and abandoned Trump very publicly.
The **smart** ones took a wait-and-see attitude. And right now, they’re glad they did.
As the dumb ones realize it looks like they’re stranded on the Titanic being asked to help rearrange the deck chairs after hitting the iceberg, the smart ones are biding their time and hoping somehow between now and November 2024 Trump is ushered into a prison cell.
I know who these people are because I’ve been watching them for years now at this point. Many were still attacking Trump and his agenda until Paul Ryan and about 50 GOP House members bolted for the door before the 2018 election. After 2018 they suddenly very insincerely jumped on the Trump train. At least for awhile.
And as soon as Trump very openly had the 2020 election rigged against him and then outrightly stolen from him, not one of these people lifted a finger to protest that epic crime. Instead they hemmed and they hawed and they talked about waiting for the evidence to emerge, if there was any, and how the courts should handle it.
These are the same people now telling you with a straight face how they’re just mystified why Trump can’t let go of that 2020 election and just move on already. How dumb it is that he wants to constantly relitigate it. How he’s just a sore loser who can’t admit he completely mishandled his re-election campaign. They’ve spent the last 8 months telling you the exact same shit about Kari Lake.
Maybe Trump’s Takeover of the GOP Isn’t Going All That Well?
Its easy to be lulled into a false sense of security as many people expect that Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP Party is going swimmingly well. Its actually not going as well as some people think it has.
I’ve attended 4 CPAC’s in a row, and I’ll tell you something I’ve learned from my observations there: Trump is very well aware that when he goes to CPAC he’s surrounded by GOP UniParty snakes, skunks and grifters. He knows he’s in enemy territory. But he loves being there. He loves rubbing their faces in it, how most of the rank and file people in the audience are rooting for HIM and not THEM.
It galls them. They grit their teeth and smile and bear it, but make no mistake. They cannot wait for him to be gone at last.
Hence, the DeSantis gambit.
But the thing that’s being drawn out the most by this DeSantis run that I see is this:
Never Trump & GOP UniParty Swamp Creatures will never understand the base Trump has built. They’ve had 8 years to figure it out and yet still it escapes them.
They do not know how to reach these people where they live. Trump does.
Their contempt for the base Trump has built keeps them from accurately seeing it. Which why all their attempts to reach out to it and trick it and fool it are doomed to failure. These people are Swamp-proof. Its why they responded to Trump in the first place.
Whatever you may think of the Trump base, whether you dismiss it as a cult or some other negative viewpoint, you had better make sure you grasp this: these people were all betrayed on a very deep and personal level by the GOPe/Dem/UniParty/Fake News authority figures they once trusted. Trump knows this and knows well how to reach these people where they are at.
I do not say they are Swamp-proof just to sound clever. I’m saying that because THEY ARE. Swamp-proof. Only outsiders can reach them.
And if you can’t make the sale to them of being an outsider, you are - to be blunt - wasting your fucking time.
This is what the big pockets GOPe UniParty donors lining up behind DeSantis cannot grasp. It is their doom, and in the end, their downfall.
An ‘organic grass roots campaign’ using popular social media influencers to try to pull people away from Trump to DeSantis was always going to fail.
Some people liken the MAGA movement to personality cult. And they’re getting tired of trying to convince the cult members to abandon their cult leader. Great, that’s their opinion. What **I’m** pointing out is that Trump always understood HOW TO REACH THESE PEOPLE. Those assholes in the Swamp GOP never have. They still don’t and they never will.
Remember that book Salena Zito wrote trying to EXPLAIN to them why Trump was connecting with the blue collar people in the blue wall states? And Bill Kristol and Co. at the Weekly Standard and National Review launched their own personal jihad against her for writing it?
These UniParty GOPe pricks didn’t want to fucking hear it then and they still don’t want to hear it today.
Rather than listen to what Zito was trying to to tell them, it was SO MUCH EASIER to fire her and try brand her as an untouchable. Which is what they did.
An awful lot of people are selling the narrative that Trump's lost his mojo. He can't do it AGAIN. Sure, he surprised them all in 2016, so they didn't try to steal it. He grew his base by **at least** 11 million + for 2020, yeah ok sure. And then they STOLE it from him and he didn't stop them from doing that. But 2024 is the year reality hits Trump. HARD.
I wouldn't be all THAT sure he lost his mojo. That he can't do it again.
Especially compared to who he'll be running against. Even if its **not** Joe Biden, whoever the Democrat nominee is, that person will be dragging behind them the truly awful, shitty, terrible, rotten, no-good record Biden ran up from 2021-2023.
What are the trendlines of the past year? Trump is literally being vindicated on all his claims. “Trump was right about everything!” isn’t just a cool slogan. He’s been found right on COVID origins, SpyGate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and an ever-increasing amount of evidence continues to emerge vindicating his claim of having had the 2020 election rigged against him and stolen from him.
Its more obvious than ever that a “Plandemic” was dropped on the world by a real-life SPECTRE right out of a freaking James Bond movie, with two big goals in mind:
Destroy the historically epic economy Trump had helped the country build in just two short years and
Facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Trump via massive amounts of mail-in voting fraud
It was expected that their ‘Plandemic’ would have utterly destroyed any chance of Trump being reelected by the time November 2020 arrived. Instead, what happened?
Trump was winning so handily on election night, despite FOUR YEARS OF THEIR CAREFULLY RIGGING THE ELECTION AGAINST HIM, that they were forced into the extremity of a “Plan B”.
They were forced to blatantly stop the vote counting in all the battleground states right after Fox News called Arizona for Biden with only 1% of the vote counted. Then came the massive 3 am ballot dumps, which continued frantically for three straight days until finally they decided they’d given Biden enough of a comfortable margin and declared him the winner on Friday night with 81,000,000 votes.
They don’t want to have to do THAT again, I assure you.
Understand this: the Swamp will never admit it, but they were HORRIFIED by the real 2020 vote numbers.
Absolutely TERRIFIED by them.
They hung the Plandemic & the lockdowns around Trump's neck, those last 2 years from 2019-2020 were **supposed** to utterly ruin him. What happened instead?
Instead of deserting him, Trump's base actually GREW over those last two years. He **gained** almost 12 million votes over what he got in 2016. And you just know they buried a lot of Trump votes and didn't let them into the official count.
They're TERRIFIED he'll do that again.
In the past, the rigging & fraud, though obvious if you knew how to look, was not nearly as blatant-and-right-in-your-face like it is now. The Old GOPe would roll over and play the game.
Kari Lake and Donald Trump don't play their game.
They had **never** tried to steal an election from people like these two.
For 3 1/2 years now the same GOPe simps have relentlessly tried to gaslight us all about what we saw.
“You can admit it. Say it with me: “Trump lost!”
Its the old Richard Pryor comedy sketch brought to life:
‘Bitch, who are you gonna believe, ME or your LYIN’ EYES?!?!’
What do these people think the reaction of the base is gonna be to ‘influencers’ still trying to mentally abuse it so? With this endless, contemptuous gaslighting in the service of their UniParty masters? To count as an influencer you have to have SOME ACTUAL INFLUENCE FIRST.
Let me tell you the amazing secret of Trump’s base, why it’s done nothing but G-R-O-W despite 8 yrs of endless, vicious, unrelenting & **increasingly desperate** attempts to destroy him, his family, anybody associates with him, and the movement he tapped into and currently leads.
These people in Trump's base were the people YOU GOPe & Dem UniParty politicos used & abused for DECADES when they TRUSTED YOU.
You are ALL OF YOU still joined at the **hip** with FAKE NEWS. You lie to them & the Fake News lies to them & then you BOTH LIE IN CONCERT together.
I came out of the GOPe wing of the party after realizing I'd been lied to & mentally abused by the NeoCons as they launched their Forever Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan.
You think I **still** trust and listen to the same people who sold No Name, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Romneys to me?
FUCK NO.
NO I DON’T.
In fact, THIS is the face I make when they send out Bret Baier, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Domenech, Rich Lowry, are ANY of that GOPe talking head crowd to try to bamboozle me:
To get Outsider street cred, DeSantis would have to actually BE an outsider, getting endorsed and promoted by outsiders. That’s not what’s happening. The Trump base is watching the same GOPe simps they stopped trusting and listening to **years ago** now talking down at them about how the smartest move they can make right now is to dump The Teflon Don for The Ron!
Thanks for the advice, but you can stop already. You are **NOT** going to make this sale, so you should quit wasting your time.
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Brian, GREAT column! One other possibility about DeSanctimonious, if remote (h/t: X22): he and Our President are role playing to suck all the oxygen our of any GOPe primary contention. He'll pull out at some point, possibly right before voting starts, having decided that the timing "just isn't right" (no shit!). With as much as Trump has hit him with already this is looking less and less likely as the Real Ron is brought out into the sunlight on his way to the Trump Quicksand, but the effect of sucking up all the oxygen is the same. Huh. Kinda like Trump planned this all along?
As to all the whiners and bitchers with their "I LOVE Trump, but..." HE'S NOT PLAYING TO THOSE WHO GET IT AT LEAST A LITTLE BIT! He's standing up to the most evil force that the civilized world has ever known and IT AIN'T TIDDLY WINKS, FOLKS! HOW DO YOU THINK HE'S CONNECTED WITH THE "GREAT UNWASHED" WHEN NO ONE ELSE HAS BEEN ABLE TO? He is openly offering the part of himself that literally is one of them/us! Seemingly uncouth. Titanium balls big enough to be seen from space. Willing to call a spade a spade, no matter what the counterattacks that he knows are coming will be. ABSOLUTELY FEARLESS IN DEFENSE OF HIS/OUR COUNTRY! Isn't that exactly what is needed for our country and Western Civilization at this point in time? Will anything less win this, one of the major inflection points in world history? HELL NO!!! Already one of the greatest Presidents in history, along with Washington and Lincoln, he's on his way to becoming literally the saviour of the greatest country in world history and of Western Civilization!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyMghy2Zpqk
And great background on DeSanctimonious, which I'm guessing you're already aware of: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/?s=desantis
And that IS the truth, Brian!👍 Besides, the left doesn’t understand people with good values and intentions. Never will.