McCarthy: GOP, Beware!
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So unabashedly political was this leveraging of law-enforcement power against the Democrats’ archnemesis that even progressive commentators have misgivings.
For now, though, the plan is working like a charm. As I’ve been contending since Joe Biden took office, the savviest Democrats know that they have a very weak president whom they won’t be able to nudge aside without exposing a host of problems. The incumbent, for all his flaws, papers over the deep intramural divides and woke nuttiness that a nomination fight would spotlight, to say nothing about the heiress-apparent problem posed by Kamala Harris. The Dems’ best shot in 2024 is and has always been running against Trump — the same guy who won them the Senate in 2020 and held it for them in 2022. If he is the Republican nominee, they win going away.Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls showing Trump beating Biden — which Democrats are hyping because, for now, they want us to think he can win. He can’t. Don’t allow the intensity of Trump’s base supporters to mask how deeply unpopular he is with the country writ large. He had consistently low job-approval ratings as president — reaching 49 percent a couple of times but generally staying in the low 40s and going down to 34 by the time he left office (which actually seemed high under the circumstances). It was a statistical miracle that he won in 2016 — with just 46 percent of the vote in, substantially, a two-candidate race. Trump could never again win a national election after the 2020 coup attempt, the Capitol riot, and his continued delusional insistence that reelection was stolen from him.
Democrats have field-tested their plan. In 2018 and 2020, they backed pro-Trump congressional candidates over more-electable Republicans in GOP primaries, and then crushed those MAGA nominees on Election Day in November. It worked. And the apparent Republican response has been to take Trumpy candidates who have proven that they can’t win elections and put them in charge of state GOP organizations, ensuring more zany candidates . . . and more Democratic captures of what ought to be red seats.
The experiment has convinced the Left that the best way to get Trump nominated is to be in-your-face aggressive and unapologetically partisan in wielding law-enforcement powers against him. The Manhattan indictment of Trump has ignited his nomination bid in a way his lifeless announcement of that bid did not. He’s had his best week in years. No, I don’t mean by getting released on his own recognizance; I mean by zooming ahead of his (as-yet-undeclared) rival Ron DeSantis in early polling.In the Georgia case, a judge has given District Attorney Willis until May 1 to respond to a Trump motion to quash the investigative grand jury’s report. There is no way the court will grant that motion, but Willis could moot the issue by forging ahead with the indictments that have seemed imminent since the report was published in redacted form a few weeks back. The grand-jury forewoman who went public in the election-tampering case strongly implied that Trump would be charged.
But like Bragg’s case, the state case in Georgia is a preliminary. The main event is going to be at least one indictment brought by Special Counsel Smith — which is why Trump spent at least as much time inveighing against him as against the Manhattan DA on Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago.
The New York indictment may be the most historic thing that happened in Trump news this week, but it wasn’t the most significant. That distinction belongs to what’s gone mostly unnoticed: Smith’s decision to subpoena agents from Trump’s Secret Service detail to testify before his Mar-a-Lago grand jury.
Understand: The executive branch and the Secret Service especially abhor the specter of security officials testifying against their protectees. It eviscerates the bond of trust the Secret Service must maintain to guard people effectively, which requires their cooperation. Prosecutors do not summon Secret Service agents to a grand jury unless they are very serious about indicting. -
Hard to disagree with anything there except the weirdly expansive idea that “the left” indicted him in NY when it was actually the Manhattan DA.
(Can anyone imagine him saying a year ago that “the left” refused to indict him for campaign finance violation, as opposed to the DoJ?)
