Posted on 07/05/2021 4:09:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
As Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ profile as a viable GOP presidential front-runner continues to grow, former President Donald Trump is back in the public eye and on an early ‘campaign trail’ of sorts, making public appearances perhaps earlier than he would prefer in order to - I’m guessing - throw his weight around a bit and remind everyone in the party that he’s still the Alpha dog.
Given recent events, it’s not a bad idea. After all, DeSantis is and has been out there virtually every day creating accomplishments in his state that conservatives can only dream of nationwide, and a recent 2024 straw poll actually had the Florida governor slightly ahead of the former president. If Trump has any desire at all to run again, he likely knows he can’t stay out of the headlines too long.
Though he did tell Fox News host Sean Hannity last week that the decision about whether to take another shot at the presidency in 2024 at the ripe old age of 78 had already been privately made, the former president coyly neglected to make that decision public. Yes, it’s way early in the game for presidential declarations, even from the likes of Donald Trump, but given the fact that this single decision will mean the difference between a real GOP primary, where candidates and ideas are tested against each other and (hopefully) the cream rises to the top, and another unopposed primary coronation, the sooner everyone knows, the better.
If you read this column regularly, you may know where I stand on this issue. He probably won’t, but I think it’s time for Donald Trump to pass the torch to someone with all (or most) of his positives and none (or not so many) of his negatives. Someone younger. Someone fresher. Someone who could serve two terms. Someone who doesn’t expand the Democratic voting base simply by his presence on the ballot.
Though waltzing virtually unopposed through a GOP primary would be easy, a general election victory seems next to impossible at this point. No matter how much Donald Trump and his staunchest supporters would like to resurrect the salad days of 2016’s legendary victory and 2020 before disaster struck - the raucous crowds, electrifying speeches, and riveting energy - 2024 will undoubtedly present a vastly different political landscape. And despite his many accomplishments, memories countless voters will have of the Trump presidency will, unfortunately, revolve around two unfortunate things - the January 6, 2021 “insurrection” (no, it wasn’t an “insurrection,” but you and I both know that’s how Democrats and the media have and will continue to play it), and what’s increasingly become MY primary beef with the former president - America’s disastrous response to COVID-19.
Now, by “disastrous response,” I’m obviously not talking about the media’s narrative that we should have locked down earlier and longer or masked up ‘harrrderrrrrr.’ None of those things made things better over the long haul, and strong arguments can be made that they actually made things worse. No, what made the former president’s response to COVID-19 so disastrous wasn’t that he was too lax with useless non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, business closures, and forced masking, but rather that he didn’t stand up to the nonsense early on, and as such, as the man at the top, became sadly the founder and first leader of what many of us would later refer to as ‘Covidstan’ (U.S. edition).
Think I’m wrong? Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Remember the “15 days to slow the spread” that morphed into 15+ months of hell? Yeah, that started under the Trump administration.
Remember when Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was widely lambasted by the media for daring to reopen his state in April 2020 when it was profoundly evident to any rational, thinking person that the literal apocalypse was NOT happening? Then-President Trump was among the loudest critics. (If you’ll recall, his exact words were: “too soon.”)
Remember when Dr. Anthony Fauci was elevated to the de facto head of U.S. coronavirus response? Sure, it’s now fashionable on the right to hate Fauci, but do you remember the guy who got this train to hell chugging in the first place, then failed to stop it while he had the chance? Oh, that guy was President Trump.
Remember who made the decision to put Dr. Deborah Birx, the scarfed-queen of the “stylish” face diaper, on the White House coronavirus task force, then permitted her to go galavanting across the country on the public dime encouraging red-state leaders to impose and enforce mask mandates? Who allowed that traveling clown show to happen, huh? The man at the top, that’s who.
Remember when sanctimonious media types kept picking on Trump for not wearing a mask, and instead of making logical, rational arguments against it, he buckled and relented? He knew better, but he did it anyway, leaving the rest of us to fight that fight without him.
Remember Dr. Robert “Masks Are As Good As A Vaccine, Or Something” Redfield, the former fried chicken king who somehow became head of the Centers for Disease Control who should have been unceremoniously yanked from his position immediately after making that ridiculous statement, but instead was allowed to continue his buffoonery generally unopposed? I’ll let you take a wild guess as to who did absolutely nothing about it (hint: his name rhymes with Ronald Crump).
Remember when the former president threw us a bone with Dr. Scott Atlas on the White House coronavirus task force, then gave him zero power and left everyone else in place to undermine him at every turn?
Remember when a U.S. president allowed his agencies to literally forbid landowners from evicting non-paying tenants, thereby subjecting countless investment property owners to foreclosure and financial hardship? The president who allowed that socialistic crap was none other than, well, you know.
Finally (and I know the jury is still somewhat out on this one), remember when almost everyone thought a brand-new mRNA vaccine technology should be brought to the public at waaaarp-speeeed and injected into the veins of every living man, woman, and child in order to stop a virus with a 99.7% survival rate that mostly kills a known subset of the super-old, super-sick, and super-obese? Trump still considers this his grandest accomplishment, but if history ends up judging these vaccines to have been a bad idea, that accomplishment, and what’s left of Trump’s legacy, is toast.
In Trump’s defense, remember all those round-tables the former president hosted where he brought in Team Reality experts like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff to discuss the uselessness of lockdowns? LOL Just kidding! That was Ron DeSantis.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. We can get angry at Democrats for being power-hungry ghouls and taking advantage of COVID for their own evil ends, but like a wolf or a sociopath, they are just doing what comes natural to them. No, our real anger should be reserved for people who were supposed to be our own, people like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and yes, former President Donald Trump. THEY are the ones who allowed and enabled our God-ordained liberties to be seized based on a trumped-up lie.
If Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination, I would vote for him, just as I'd vote for a trained monkey over anyone with a D beside their name. But I hope it never comes to that point, because the former president’s actions during COVID, particularly his failure to quickly pivot when it became evident things weren’t as Team Apocalypse would have us believe, renders him undeserving of another term.
Morefield can go e’ff himself.
You said it.
What absolute horsecrap. So now Trump is to blame for COVID, a Chinese-manufactured pandemic??
What delusional and meandering projection this article is.
The author appears to be hopelessly mired in Consensus Reality, just like all the other Trump Haters. He believes the ProgDem crap and his own rap.
Useful tool. Bah, humbug.
I remember in mid March 2020 the 15 days started. At the end of March Trump wanted to open and the health officials in states didn’t? Then they decided on 2 more weeks of social distancing and hand washing. Then after the 30 days none of the governors wanted to open including Desantis and they wanted a real shut down? Trump wanted everything open by Easter. Governors said no. Desantis said we are shutting down and closing schools for the rest of 2020. The Governor’s said they could do what they want and Trump was not a king. It wasn’t Trump. It was the Governors who created this.
Me too
But who will be on the ticket as VP
The Notorious MTG.....?
Thank you, all of that context was, oddly, missing from what I read. The vaccine was, in part, a response to just about every govenor wanting to shut down everything.
Trump says he wants the country ‘opened up and just raring to go by Easter,’ despite health experts’ warnings
By Kevin Liptak, Maegan Vazquez, Nick Valencia and Jim Acosta, CNN
Updated 11:47 PM EDT, Tue March 24, 2020
DeSantis orders statewide shutdown
By GRAY ROHRER and STEVEN LEMONGELLO
ORLANDO SENTINEL
APR 01, 2020 AT 4:34 PM
Florida governor issues coronavirus stay-at-home order after heavy criticism
April 1, 2020 at 3:31 p.m.
Coronavirus: Desantis says Florida schools will remain closed for rest of school year
FLORIDA TIMES-UNION | 4:49 pm EDT April 18, 2020
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Saturday afternoon that Florida’s public school campuses will remain closed for the remainder of the school year.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Offers No End To Bar Shutdown Due To Spiking Coronavirus Cases
July 13, 2020 at 8:31 am
Texas and Florida close bars after explosion of COVID-19 cases
June 26, 2020, 10:59 AM EDT / Updated June 26, 2020, 4:22 PM EDT
By Corky Siemaszko
The governors of Florida and Texas closed down the bars Friday to slow down the spread of the coronavirus that has been rampaging at record levels through their states.
Trump respected where Federal authority ended and States’ rights began. Same reason he didn’t send troops into Portland and Seattle last summer to end the riots.
All part of the “Newspeak” strategery of rewriting the truth. You see, Joe Biden let the cat out of the bag on this:
“Truth Before Fact…”
Hard for me to disagree with this piece when I have been saying the same things ever since Trump turned over his entire presidency to Fauci and Birx. Huge blunder that was the catalyst for essentially ripping up the Constitution.
Managed to make it through 5 years without getting a single clue about what Trump is about.
I think it’s the result of a bad decision…Trump wanted to depoliticize the response, so he put Pence in charge of the show, and it was Pence (a true idiot, IMHO) who actually handed it off to Fauci. And then I think it was unstoppable, because of course the media was instantly behind Fauci, becoming his adoring followers and attacking Trump whenever he dared to disagree or suggest some other course of action. (Remember when he very logically asked why we weren’t looking for treatments, such as some that had shown success with similar viruses, and was accused of telling people to drink fish tank cleaner?)
I found Trumps’s attack on the governor of Georgia for opening up to be very puzzling, but otherwise I think that a lot of Trump’s actions or lack thereof reflect the fact that he was probably the weakest President we have had in decades. That is, he certainly had ideas and things he wanted to accomplish, but by then he had been completely undermined by the constant Dem attacks, investigations, persecution of his associates, and elevation of swamp creatures (such as Fauci, the government’s highest paid bureaucrat) over the Office of the President. Their contempt for Trump went beyond even shockingly disrespectful gestures such as Nancy Pelosi’s tearing up the SOTU address and extended to outright mutiny.
People in the government and even in the military simply refused to do what he told them do do, and the same was true with the state governors, who realized they could get away with whatever they wanted against such a weakened President.
They will let anyone write for Townhall now
Well done. I agree with your take. The Georgia thing was a real head scratcher definitely. Your last paragraph sums up the final two years of his presidency. The deep state simply ignored him. He was powerless.
The author is a complete moron.
One thing he got right
I’m guessing
I want good GOP politicians who are doing a good job where they are to quit abandoning their positions just to satisfy their ambition. I don’t like giving up any GOP held position, and I don’t like seeing any GOP position put at risk unnecessarily. DeSantis should remain governor of Florida and run for governor again. Then he can look at the POTUS slot if he wants to.
Well, it is ClownHall.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.