Trump's Future, The Midterms, And COVID

On Sunday, I mentioned that I'd found an opinion piece that made some productive observations about Trump, COVID, and the disastrous year 2020, but I hadn't been able to locate it again. I finally did, it's by David Srrom at Hot Air, which has greatly improved with the departure of Allahpundit. Strom expands on those insights in this piece from Thursday, Trump's Achilles' heel?

Lots of arrows will be fired at his vulnerable heel. Some are likely to hit.

The target? Trump’s response to COVID was simply awful. He did exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, pushed all the worst Establishment folks to the top of the policymaking heap, and actively aided them in destroying his chance to get reelected. Trump was forced to choose between good policy and bad, courageous leaders and bureaucrats, and he chose wrongly. It was his undoing in 2020, and could be his undoing in 2024.

He quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Justin Hart:

When Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign Tuesday, he didn’t apologize for the lockdowns or even mention them. I supported him in 2016, and during his tenure he did much to dredge the political swamps, but his decision to approve and extend drastic Covid interventions should disqualify him for a second term.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, put the Constitution into an induced coma. Mr. Trump’s decision to adopt Chinese Communist Party tactics and close down the country gave license to states to amplify and extend these terrible policies, to governors to wield unprecedented executive powers, and to school districts to shut students out for months or even years.

The COVID-related electoral revisions, including universal mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, also contributed to Trump's defeat later that year, and they probably had an impact on Republican underperformance in 2022. Strom continues.

The Declaration of Emergency that Trump put into place in 2020 has been extended into 2023, and in all likelihood will be extended again. This time around some Democrats stood up to stop it, but the Left had made clear that they will be punished. Emergency powers for the president will extend indefinitely–powers Trump first put in place.

Trump didn’t just make bad choices during COVID, he actively attacked those such as Governors Kemp and DeSantis for making the correct ones. Unsurprisingly he took shots at both men before and after the midterm elections, and I would be surprised if his vulnerability on the COVID issue didn’t play a role in his decision to do so. He took particular aim at Sweden, one of the only places in the world where they got things right.

. . . Trump didn’t quite make Anthony Fauci on his own, but he did make him a czar with power over my life and others’. That is hard to forgive, and I suspect it may cost his his shot at the presidency for a second time.

My feelings, at least for now, are closer and closer to Strom's. My current sense is that Trump will fade before 2024, although there is a risk that if Biden uses the FBI and the Justice Department to pursue Trump politically, it could enhance his status as a cult martyr and damage Republican unity going into the election. On the other hand, I simply don't think either Biden or the Democrat leadership is smart enough to develop that subtle a strategy, and it's probably more likely that they will simply pursue an exclusive anti-Trump focus and ignore the rise of a more effective 2024 Republican candidate.

What I've been seeing, though, is a tendency for neoconservatives to emerge from the woodwork, who have generally been aligned with the Never Trump movement in the past, and as I've been saying, figures like Secretary Blinken and Anne Applebaum have advocated an activist anti-Russian Ukraine policy that's hard to distinguish from the classical neoconservatism at the Institute for the Study of War. So far, Trump has continued to make public statements that distance himself from such a policy, and the Republican right continues to insist that Ukraine aid is being diverted by corruption there.

It's too early to tell how this may impact the alignment of the Democrats in the 2024 election, or indeed if rhe Ukraine war and the Russia problem will have been quickly solved by then -- but I donk't think the Russia problem in particular can be disposed of so easily, I still think Trump's issues have been overtaken by events, and the political environment will be different in 2024.