Be Glad About Pompeo’s Doomed Primary Challenge To Trump

Let’s face it – the news that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intends to challenge former president Donald Trump in a 2024 primary puts one to mind not of Godzilla v. King Kong, but of Godzilla v. Bambi. It’s Muhammad Ali stepping into the ring against Don Knotts. Pompeo is doomed. But we should be glad that he is offering up himself for sacrifice. Many conservatives are open to a competitive GOP primary, not because they dislike Trump (they like him) but because they want to make sure we nominate the strongest candidate in 2024. Moreover, Trump needs a challenge to prepare him for the real fight in the general. And he’s not afraid of one.

Will Pompeo really run? Reporters with good sources are saying Pompeo is telling his donors he is. And I have heard the same thing from inside sources who would know. Of course, the buried lede is that Pompeo has presidential campaign donors – well, there’s one born every minute.

Other top-flight potential GOP candidates are not jumping in. Ron DeSantis is focused on his family (we’re all pulling for his wife) and winning reelection. Robert O’Brien, the former (excellent) National Security Advisor, is busy helping win back the House and intends to endorse the President the day the President announces. DC establishment darlin’ Nikki Haley, the Jeb! of 2024, will do whatever she has to do to get ahead, and right now she thinks that means staying out if Trump gets in.

But will Trump run? I originally did not expect him to run, but now I do. Between Asterisk’s floundering poll numbers and Trump’s public words and actions, as well as people who would know telling me that he’s running, it’s clear he’s leaning that way. He’s biding his time, and he should. There’s no reason to do anything now but build up his team for a third campaign – and it seems that’s what he’s doing.

Now, to point out that Mike Pompeo’s chances of prevailing in the primary are about the same as Kamala Harris winning “Border Czar of the Year” is not to throw shade on him. Pompeo would make a fine president. I have heard him speak on the Trump Doctrine, the America First foreign policy that he helped execute and that the current crusty occupant of the White House’s serial failures have fully vindicated. He was excellent, demonstrating a deep and thorough understanding of the challenges we face, which – contrary to our current pseudo-leadership’s view – are not climate change or systemic racism. He’s very conservative. Despite him being a West Pointer, should he be nominated we can all give him our enthusiastic support. And if he is nominated over Trump, we can all ride on our unicorns to the polling places to vote for him.

The best argument for Pompeo is that, unlike Trump, he doesn’t scare the unsatisfied suburban wine women who make up the Democrat base like Trump does, but don’t worry – he’ll be literally Hitler when the time comes. The argument against him is that he’s bland. Trump oozes charisma (and, to leftists and cruise ship cons, its opposite) while Mike Pompeo inspires, at best, “Well, I guess he’s okay. Yawn.”

To want a real primary challenge is not the throw shade on Trump either. A real campaign will sharpen Trump, hone him, and get him ready for a real fight, be it against Kamala or someone remotely competent.

This should not be a coronation. Trump has to earn his right to make his Grover Cleveland move. That means a real primary with a real challenger, not a media-driven, toobinesque vanity run by some Never Trump doofus like Larry Hogan or the Beltway Cowgirl, who will have nothing to do after being tossed from office next year.

We saw what not having a challenge did to Hillary. She was out-of-shape, soft, unready, and unprepared. Trump needs to go into the general with momentum, the momentum one gets from crushing his primary opponents. And Trump thrives on competition – if you want him to win the general in 2024, then you want him to spar hard in the primary.

Trump has to work out some kinks in his delivery. As Byron York observed, at a recent rally he had the crowd rocking when he was roasting President * over his myriad failures, from the border to Afghanistan to inflation and beyond. Yet, when Trump started going on and on about 2020 in excruciating detail, the rally got off to a flying stop.

If his campaign is about relitigating the last one, we lose. We all know 2020 was rigged. I was in Nevada lawyering for the president in the aftermath, so I saw the traditional fraud, the unlawful rule changes, the zillionaires’ ”donations” to government election agencies, and the informal rigging of the media and corporations in 2020. But that’s the past; the 2020 fight is over. The only thing I want to hear about it is how Ronna McDaniel is preparing – with lots of lawyers and lots of money – for the fight in 2024, because her inexcusable failure to prepare for the legal fights in the half-dozen blue cities where the shenanigans took place caused that fiasco. The Arizona audit revealed a bunch of corruption. Great. What is the name of the GOP law firm currently filing lawsuits in Arizona to fix those issues? Tumbleweeds.

And they are boring tumbleweeds. A boring Trump is a losing Trump, and talking about 2020 won’t win is a single new voter, Conversely, the Democrats whining like little female doggies over the January 6th insignificant “insurrection” is their own losing tangent. Fix the problems, then talk about how Democrats suck. There’s your winning strategy.

We also need assurance that Trump has fixed his personnel problems. The fact that Ronna McDaniel is still around after botching the election integrity fight for him is unsettling. But the fact that, towards the end, he hired solid folks, including Mike Pompeo, is hopeful. It would be good to see Pompeo ask Trump in a debate why he didn’t fire Tony Fauci and Chris Wray – and for Trump to answer “I should have, and I learned that lesson. No slack during Trump 2.0!”

Bringing up tough questions and having Trump address them is the most important reason we need a primary challenge, even one that’s relatively hopeless. We need Trump to confront his mistakes and assure us he’s learned is lessons. The guy accomplished amazing things even with the entire establishment against him and despite his self-inflicted wounds. We can’t assuage the establishment’s fury, but imagine what he will do with fewer own-goals. And imagine how angry the establishment hacks will be when he beats them again.

Trump is likely to triumph in the end, but he also needs to be circumspect. He could crush Pompeo like a bug if he wished, with the cutting invective that put the gooey likes of Jeb! away in 2016. But he’s not the outsider this time. Like it or not, Trump is the insider, the voice of the GOP base, and now he has to build the movement and reinforce party rather than just lay waste. He needs to thread the needle and prevail over Pompeo and any other non-Conservative, Inc., candidates without leaving them smoking craters. Save the nukes for the Liz Cheneys.

The fact is that 2024 is neither 2016 nor 2020. This third campaign needs to be different. So, if you want to see Trump win in 2024, bring on the challengers.

Your Vote Won’t Count

There is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one. Hope gives you an excuse not to act.

By Dan Gelernter
October 12, 2021

We’re coming up on another election of national importance—the Virginia governor’s race is November 2. My friends are hopefully suggesting on social media that this will be the election that turns things around, where the full anger of the common folk at being bossed around by autocratic overlords finally manifests itself and we throw the bums out.

Mind you, they were saying the same thing with the same hope about the California recall election. And I said at the time, weeks before the vote was tallied, there was no point in hoping that patriotic anger would outbalance the massive machinery at work behind the scenes: Your votes didn’t matter in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t matter in the California recall, they won’t matter in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and they won’t matter next year.

In case you’ve forgotten the high-level overview of the situation, let’s have Time Magazine remind us:

‘Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,’ says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. ‘But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.’
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

According to Time, this was a huge triumph, since the “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” (again, their words) was designed to protect “democracy” from being undermined by stupid people like you who believe the wrong things and want to elect the wrong people. You were against the “proper” outcome!

So what’s the situation now? Vastly worse. This huge Time-documented conspiracy only half-expected to get away with stealing the election from Donald Trump. They discovered unexpected allies in three vital places: First, the courts, including the Supreme Court, refused to hear a single case of election fraud on the merits. They dismissed all the cases for lack of evidence or standing, which was much safer than letting the plaintiffs present their evidence in court.

Second, the Department of Justice was happy to say they’d found no evidence of election fraud, without drawing attention to the fact they hadn’t been looking. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any investigation at all: How many of you are aware that it was the relentless pressure of private citizens in Yuma, Arizona, who provided photographic evidence that the Justice Department couldn’t ignore, which led to indictments (so far two public) for vote fraud in the 2020 election? But even as the government was forced to charge the little people who were getting paid to collect ballots and cast them illegally, they assiduously refused to investigate where that money came from. Perhaps it came from a well-funded cabal of powerful people?

But third, and most important by far, the thing that ultimately renders our elections meaningless is people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. They are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections, precisely because we expect them to be fighting on our side. Fraudulent elections cost Republicans seats—cost Republicans the presidency—so why wouldn’t the most powerful people in the Republican Party be fighting just as hard as they could to expose fraud and pass laws requiring in-person voting with ID?

Here’s the secret answer: These people hate you. Sure, they’re willing to pay lip service to America as a great nation, to churchgoing values, and so forth. But they’re really just Democrats with different special interests: They want to funnel all your money to military contractors instead of environmentalists. People like Donald Trump interfere with that. People like you interfere with that. Because you want the government to mind its own [*expletive deleted*] business. And, on that issue, Mitch McConnell is united with Senator Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) against you.

These people live for power. They exist for the pleasure of spending your money to retain that power. And, now that they’ve managed to separate that power from public accountability by legalizing mail-in, no-ID, drop-box, multiple-ballot, and similar voting practices, you think they’re going to give all that up?

There is no solution to this problem short of a Constitutional Convention that restores our elections to their original format: Voting on election day, and in-person. Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one. That is precisely what the Mitch McShumer crowd wants you to do: hope. Hope is an excuse not to act. Don’t take it.

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Your Vote Won’t Count

By Dan Gelernter October 12, 2021

By Dan Gelernter
October 12, 2021