Trump Is Back

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign.

Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.

“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back."

. . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.

Now, I'm not quite sure what qualifies as a "lie" here. Let's take another well-known example:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.

Is this a lie? I would call it rhetorical hyperbole.

One Republican talking point, independent of Trump, has been that the circumstances of 2020 temporarily legalized ballot strategies that indeed favored Trump's opponent, and the For the People Act that died in the Senate last week was a failed attempt to make those temporary strategies permanent. There can be no disagreement that electoral reforms in states like Georgia, which President Biden has specifically and angrily denounced, were implemented to eliminate the advantage the 2020 temproary electoral changes gave Democrats.

Even if detailed reviews of ballots showed no irregularity under unique 2020 conditions, it doesn't mean that temporary loosening of ballot requirements didn't influence the election's outcome -- Biden's own objection to Georgia's electoral reforms in the wake of the election argue persuasively for that conclusion. If Trump says he "won twice", it seems to me that's allowable in this context.

In addition, Trump voters are overwhelmingly acting as though the election was legitimate, at least under the conditions at the time. There have been no armed insurrections contesting any local, state, or federal 2020 election. (Get serious, the Januatry 6 Capitol demonstration was not any such thing.) The Trump voters are beginning to organize to exercise legal and constitutionally protected redress in upcoming congressional elections. This alone is a recognition of the process's legitimacy.

The Atlantic article strikes me as disingenuous in its implication that a coup is somehow in the works:

Now that the midterm season is fully underway, Trump will be out and about more often, hosting rallies and stumping for the any Republicans desperate enough to lie about the election in exchange for his support. He will in some ways be reintroducing himself to the country: Here I am, America, back after a stolen election, ready to win by any means possible.

I asked a group of older attendees if they were excited to see Trump run again in 2024. They all were. Two of them argued about whether he could take office before 2025. "It's not possible," a retiree named Michael, who declined to give his last name, said. "I think it is!" a retiree named Susan Higgins said. "The military has to come in, and take [Biden] away."

By the end of the evening, Trump was having trouble pretending that he isn’t actively running for president. He previewed his lines of attack on Biden over Afghanistan, immigration, and inflation, recited a litany of policy changes a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to make, and promised that “in 2024, we are going to take back the White House.” Sam and Dave’s “Hold on I’m Coming,” played as he exited, and the song sounded like a promise.

Trump himself is not quoted as making any remark that implies he intends to do anything but support candidates in the midterm elections who in turn support his agenda, and it's generally recognized that he will be a kingmaker in the 2022 midterms. In 2016, his nomination came as enough of a surprise that there could be no organized effort to reform the rest of the Republican party along his lines, and that was a disadvantage that limited his effectiveness during that term.

At this point, his period out of office is beginning to look like an opportunity.