I'm Just Not Sure About Received Opinion Here

Ann Coulter this past week:

The endless stream of preposterous charges against Trump only helped him.

So why not launch another ridiculous accusation to help him get the nomination? That’s exactly what they did in last year’s GOP primaries, supporting Trump’s nut-bar candidates, knowing they would go on to lose the general election. By boosting Trump’s candidates, Democrats managed to pull out a historic midterm victory for Biden.

And now, they’re doing it again, trying to trick Republicans into choosing the worst possible presidential nominee. Guess what? It’s working! New GOP motto: unable to learn from the third kick of a mule.

In response to Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, all conservative media swept aside news of out-of-control crime, chaos at the border, fentanyl overdoses and the looming recession. Their No. 1 job became: SAVE TRUMP! A major conservative talk radio host even suggested DeSantis stand down and endorse Trump.

In this case, Ms Coulter is echoing William Barr -- don't be deceived, he's saying, Trump is a loser, and she agrees. But Barr, for whatever reason, nevertheless chose to serve as Trump's attorney general, and if it was just to undermine him as an establishment mole, that says more about Barr than it does about Trump. In 2016, Ms Coulter published In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, and in 2018, she published Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind. Since that time, for whatever reason, she's completely reversed her view. What will she publish next year? Who knows?

And her characterization of Biden's performance last November isn't a "historic midterm victory" -- if it were, it would be comparable to Dubya's in 2002. More accurately, the Republicans underperformed but still eked out control of the House, which has allowed them to pursue an anti-Biden legislative agenda without the need to control the Senate. Nobody ever predicted the Republicans, with or without Trump, woud gain a veto-proof majority in either chamber. Short of being able to defeat a Biden Supreme Court nominee, the Republicans did about as well as they could have done with a Senate majority as well.

In 2015, Rush Limbaugh made it plain that he intended to be neutral over the 2016 Republican nomination, although his listeners sometimes became uncomfortable when he made too many favorable references to Trump.

Consider a caller on Tuesday’s show. Ted Cruz is someone who has proven his conservative character over years, the caller said, whereas Trump is “an overnight thing.”

He told the talk radio host, “I'm a character guy, which I believe that's who you are.” But the caller was beginning to have doubts about Limbaugh’s earnestness. Is the positive coverage he’s given Trump due to genuine faith in the candidate’s virtues? Or is Limbaugh boosting the insurgent campaign for entertainment value?

This was a story from August 2015, when a good many commentators were in fact calling Trump a temporary blip. (I recall Michael Medved calling Trump a combination of Mussolini and the Music Man. He lost his syndication a couple of years later.) Up through the 2016 primaries, as the link above suggests, the "serious" candidate for conservatives was Ted Cruz, but my sense of things at the time was that Limbaugh was leaning increasingly to Trump. I recall him suggesting strongly on his show in the spring of 2016 that yes, if you wanted a down-the-line conservative, Cruz was your guy, but if you wanted someone who could win, it would be Trump.

I remember Limbaugh also favorably quoting Robert Reich, who said Trump was far more dangerous to the left than Cruz, because Trump had the flexibility to change his strategies, while Cruz would be a predictable conservative on any issue. But true to his promise (and his established policy), Limbaugh never endorsed Trump before he won the nomination.

The 2023 equivalent to the 2015 Trump vs Cruz is Trump vs DeSantis. I've spoken favorably here on DeSantis's positions on key issues from COVID to transsexualism, and Ann Coulter's position in the link above would be the equivalent to the 2015 view that Trump isn't so much a conservative as a self-promoter, and what we need is a conservative. But so far, rank-and-file Republican opinion doesn't match this view:

Former President Donald Trump gained ten points of support among Republicans since his arrest on Tuesday, expanding his lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), according to a hypothetical Republican primary poll.

The Ispos/Reuters poll conducted after Trump’s arrest in Manhattan for a case many conservatives have dubbed “politically motivated” finds that 58 percent of registered Republicans want him as their nominee. DeSantis, who has not announced a candidacy for the race, secures second place with 21 percent of support. No other candidate eclipsed five percent of support[.]

I think the Barr-Coulter theory that the Democrats are pursuing criminal cases against Trump to stampede Republicans into nominating a loser violates the law of parsimony, "a principle according to which an explanation of a thing or event is made with the fewest possible assumptions". To assume Tuesday's arraignment is actually a sleight-of-hand to distract Republicans from nominating a better candidate is simply too complicated. A more reasonable assumption is simpler: Democrats think Trump is the most dangerous for their agenda, something people like Robert Reich have understood from the start, and voters are picking up on that signal.

What happens in April 2023 has very little predictive value for anything that may happen any time in 2024, but one thing we've learned about Trump as a public figure is that voters already know eveything there is to know about the guy. There are no more October surprises to spring on him -- even if some new Playboy bunny comes out of the woodwork to allege this or that from 1997, it's already factored in. The same applies to the series of criminal cases they're trying to bring against him in Florida, Washington, or Georgia -- they're all of a piece, all clearly political, and none would be brought against a Democrat.

The public -- that is, that part of the public that isn't aligned with the one percent, the gentry, the sexual fringe, or the urban criminal class -- has already factored this in, and each subsequent indictment will simply increase Trump's popularity as the single candidate who's dangerous to the Democrats and who'll act in the plebs's overall interests. Neither the Democrats nor the Barr-Coulter types have figured this out yet. But Trump himself certainly has.