"Donald Trump Was The True Winner"

Even the legacy media is acknowledging, as Newsweek did, that Donald Trump was the true winner of the January 6 commemorations.

After the storming of the U.S. Capitol, GOP insiders told The Intelligencer they had lost patience with Trump, whom they predicted would face waning influence within the party. Trump's closest allies also feared that his role as the riot's catalyst would hurt his legacy and the party.

However, Civiqs' daily tracking polls have shown that following the tumultuous 12 months since the riots, Trump's standing among Republicans is largely unchanged.

Just before the insurrection, 83 percent of registered Republican voters surveyed said they had a "favorable" opinion of Trump. That rating stayed above 80 percent every month until August 2021, and was still as high as 76 percent by the end of December.

CNN went a little farther and acknowledged that the problem isn't just with Republicans.

It was only a little more than a month ago when President Joe Biden, asked about another head-shaking revelation regarding his predecessor, seemed to balk at a mere mention of the man.

"I don't think about the former President," he claimed, pausing for dramatic effect before walking offstage at the White House. But on Thursday, it was evident Biden has actually been thinking quite a lot about Donald Trump.

. . . As he prepares to enter the second year of his presidency, advisers say Biden is still adamant about not allowing his predecessor to overshadow his administration. But on the one-year anniversary of a historic day, Biden not only signed off on the fiery tone he brought to his speech marking the occasion at the Capitol, he also helped write some of the lines himself.

The Babylon Bee was even more incisive:

As a dismal job numbers and economic data were released this week, many are regretting Buffalo Guy didn’t manage to body-slam Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and seize the presidency.

The superviolent insurrection on January 6th was initially met with disdain by a majority of Americans, but though they may disagree with the methods, they now find themselves wishing Biden was not the president.

. . . Experts agree that in addition to creating more jobs, Buffalo Guy would have restored a sense of grace and dignity back to the White House.

We're in an odd set of circumstances. On one hand, there's so far not much evidence that the 2020 election was actually stolen. And on the whole, most voters are behaving as though it was legitimate and are trusting their ability to work through the political process to resolve the issues.

On the other hand, the result on the ground of the 2020 election has been, as I've been saying, a quiet constitutional crisis notwithstanding its apparent legitimacy. This is the subtext of the Babylon Bee story: if the crazies who surged into the Capitol had actually taken over, maybe things would even have turned out better than they have with Biden, Harris, and Pelosi.

It's plain that the unspoken issue is that a year after the election, Donald Trump hasn't gone away. As Rush Limbaugh would have put it, Trump is living rent-free in Biden's head. As of now, Trump is the overwhelming favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination, and will likely defeat either Biden or Harris if either is the 2024 Democrat candidate.

Indeed, the whole intent of the January 6 commemoration was to cook up some sort of consensus that Trump must be made somehow ineligible to run. It that, it failed, and it even unintentionally focused even closer attention on the failure of Biden's leadership.