Trump has them on the run

“Inside the Terrifyingly Competent Trump 2024 Campaign.”

Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair unleashed the oddest take yet on President Trump’s stunning electoral buoyancy. Sherman postulates that while Democrats have succeeded in keeping The Donald away from campaigning by tying him up in phony prosecutions and frivolous lawsuits, the strategy has backfired because it has given his campaign staff free rein to win the election for him.

Sherman wrote, “Trump’s 2024 campaign has already demonstrated Trump can run an effective operation. ‘This campaign is locked down,’ a Republican close to Trump said. In previous cycles, Trump populated his campaigns with huge egos like Roger Stone, Kushner, Ivanka, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale, among others. In 2024, Trump’s inner circle is made up of heads-down operatives Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Miller, and James Blair, who don’t play their agendas through the media. ‘You have experienced people who don’t leak,’ longtime Trump confidant Stone said. Trump trusts his senior team to do their jobs. In the past, Trump worked the phone constantly, soliciting advice from a wide circle of friends, family, Manhattan business associates, and media personalities. Trump’s style of pitting staffers against one another created an incentive to leak. ‘The side whose opinion lost would run to the media,’ a 2020 campaign veteran explained. ‘This time, he’s not talking to randos.’”

It helps having a campaign manager who isn’t married to the man who most wants Trump to lose.

Sherman delved into the low point of Trump’s presidential era, writing, “November 2022 was a particularly brutal month. Many Trump-endorsed candidates were wiped out in the midterms. A week later, Trump launched his 2024 campaign with a low-energy speech that even Ivanka skipped (she released a statement announcing she didn’t want to be a part of his campaign). Meanwhile, Florida governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by a crushing 19 points. Billionaire Republican donors like Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman declared they would support the 44-year-old governor over Trump. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post splashed DeSantis on the cover with the headline ‘DeFuture.’”

Things got worse the next month with Trump doing the attention-getting craziness that drives supporters away. Inviting Kanye West and some guy named Nick Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago was disastrous.

Sherman wrote, “Inside Trump’s tight inner circle, it was time to stage an intervention. ‘He heard from people he cares about that he was screwing up,’ the campaign adviser said. Trump claimed he hadn’t heard about Kanye West’s anti-Semitic controversy and didn’t even know who Fuentes was. Friends and advisers argued that it didn’t matter: A presidential candidate needed to screen who he associated with. ‘After that, he did get religion,’ the adviser said. The campaign empowered body man Walt Nauta to act as a gatekeeper. Trump had grown especially close with Nauta, a 41-year-old former Navy cook who served as Trump’s White House valet. Nauta has been indicted along with Trump in the Florida federal case and has pleaded not guilty. ‘If the president’s tie ever gets even a drop of water, Walt exchanges it for a new one. I don’t think King Charles has anyone this good,’ the campaign adviser said. Nauta was part of a new cadre of loyal aides staffing the 2024 campaign. It is a professionalized operation focused on one thing: winning.”

And it is.

DeSantis is staying in Tallahassee where he belongs. Nikki Haley is working on her Orange Man Bad book which ironically will question his loyalty. Chris Christie is eating a donut. And Biden is desperately trying to provoke World War III to save his political career.

I don’t know if it is a made up quote or not, but Sherman said a Republican close to Trump said, “He’s so distracted with the legal stuff, that’s why the campaign is smooth.”

Now all this is well and good and if it makes Vanity Fair’s readers feel smug and happy, what is the harm? They seem like nice people who listen to NPR and have transgendered children. They are a superstitious people who believe SUVs cause climate change, earthquakes and solar eclipses. Telling them that Trump succeeds only by luck soothes them like a hot toddy. Make that a non-alcoholic hot toddy. They’re liberals.

On the other side of the ocean, Dominic Green of the Telegraph told his readers, “Biden is set on turning his opponent into an underdog — and we all know how America feels about them.”

Green wrote, “This presidency resembles Wyle E. Coyote, sprinting off the cliff edge. It is a Looney Tunes convention that the careering Coyote only falls to earth when he realizes that there is no ground beneath him. Biden, a man who can trip over his own shadow, sustains the delusion that his feet remain on the ground by wearing anti-trip lifestyle sneakers. No one is falling for it.”

The most out-of-touch regime in American history is installed in Washington. Custer understood the Indians better than Obama’s puppet and his merry band of chest-feeding DEI hires understand the American people.

Green wrote, “The Democrats delude themselves that GDP growth on paper and a reduction in the rate of inflation equate to affordable basics in real life. This is mere wonkery. It invites the Republicans to pose as the party of reality. While Biden and the grassroots partied at Radio City, Donald Trump attended the wake of Jonathan Diller. A New York City police sergeant, Diller was murdered at a traffic stop by a career criminal. Diller leaves a widow and an infant son, and a peerless opportunity for fundraising on Trump’s private social media site, Truth Social.”

Green summed the situation well, “The Republican base could have picked Ron DeSantis, a conventional politician with a strong legislative record. Instead, they picked Trump.

“The Democrats are determined to squander that gift by using the courts to administer what they hope will be a judicial kneecapping.”

The indictments postponed the presidential ambitions of DeSantis by four years because once Democrats went there, we had no choice but to stand athwart the lynch mob and say no more.

In Sherman’s piece reassuring readers that luck not pluck were behind rebound, he wrote, “The criminal charges helped solve Trump’s messaging problem. Prior to the indictments, Trump was a one-line artist singing a tired tune that the 2020 election was stolen. But the dozens of felony counts gave him new material. He cast himself as a political martyr being prosecuted by the Biden White House. And there was the added benefit that his defense lawyers took up a large part of his schedule, leaving less time to stoke new controversies.”

It was the mugshot that did Democrats in. Americans saw themselves in it because we know, if they can do it to him, they will do it to us.

Sherman cannot bring himself to admit that so he concocted some sort of nonsense about the political persecutions help President Trump by keeping him from saying things the press will fold, spindle and mutilate.

The good news is Trump is off to a better start in 2024 than he was in 2016 or 2020.

The better news is the left is terrified.