Where Do Things Stand?

I suppose I have to take Jonathan Turley seriously, but I've expressed my reservations before: he's a generational member of the Establishment, and he isn't going to rock any boats. As well, he's speaking to Fox News, which clearly likes what he's saying:

It is an extremely damning indictment. There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence. There are some indictments that are just bare bones. This is not. The special counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way.

This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions. It’s overwhelming in details. And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline.

The problem with this view is that we're talking about Donald Trump. Most recently, Trump gave a town hall on CNN that went so unpredictably badly for CNN that it fired its CEO six weeks later, almost certainly as a direct result. Trump's already been impeached twice, but so far he's the clear front runner for the 2024 nomination. He's survived epsiodes like the Access Hollywood tape that people thought was a political kill shot at the time, but have faded into history as trivial footnotes. It's a major error to underestimate Trump.

There's another factor, which is that the Republicans have a number of credible replacements for Trump, while the Democrats don't have equivalents for Biden. November 2024 is still a long way away, and anything can happen to Trump, who is 76, irrespective of any indictments. The ideal situation people have put forward is that Trump makes DeSantis his 2024 running mate, he wins that election, and DeSantis then succeeds him for a solid eight years. Well, hey, I could win the lottery tomorrow, too.

The problem for the Democrats is that anything can happen to Biden, who is 80 and vunerable to falls, as is anyone of that age, but if he's unable to run for reelection, the Democrats have only bad choices to fall back in, primarily Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. And this brings up the basic Democrat problem, that Biden is the last credible Democrat who represents anything like tne old New Deal coalition of the working class; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; minorities; Ivy League gentry; and Southern segregationists, which Biden originally was as a Delaware Democrat himself.

If Biden is out of the picture, the parlor leftists, greens, reparations hustlers, radical queers, and prison abolitionists will be at each others' throats, and nobody like Newsom or Harris will be able to unify them, especially against potential third-party candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr or Joe Manchin.

So the basic problem for 2024 is that the Democrats have to run the table with a Biden who must stay healthy and avoid serious scandal, while the Republicans can recover with DeSantis or another candidate if they lose Trump for any reason. Beyond that, I think it's way too early to make any call on Trump's prospects.

On the other hand, I note this story at RedState on Biden's performance yesterday in North Carolina:

Let’s start with how the Handler-In-Chief looked when she was supposed to be introducing Biden during a military event at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg). He was nowhere to be found at first, and she jokingly commented to someone who wasn’t in the video that “we forgot those two.” Though she nervously laughs throughout there was an undercurrent of tension clearly visible at the start of the video and when she stepped up to the podium.

. . . Most alarmingly however was how Joe Biden looked after (presumably) posing for pictures with a group that was on stage. Watch as Biden looks as though he’s about to lunge at someone, moving his head to the left and right confusingly at one point as though the people around him are speaking a foreign language, before someone comes over and rescues him from disaster by whispering in his ear, apparently telling him which way to go.

I'm not sure if this is necesarily mental deterioration, but it's likely general aging, a slow recovery from his fall in Colorado Springs, and his own laziness and sense of emntitlement, which he's displayed all his life. He's President of the United States -- why should he have to pay attention to which way he needs to turn, where to stand, or with whom to shake hands? The biggest problem is that this likely drives all his political decisions, and indeed, decisions on where he should be spending his limited time.

He's complacent, while Trump is lucky. I don't expect the current situation to last.