Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce his third presidential campaign.
But, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board suggests Democrats may be the ones who are the most excited.
“Trump seems to be barreling ahead with an announcement Tuesday night that he plans to run for President again. The irony is that more Democrats than Republicans will be elated because they see him as the easiest candidate to beat one more time,” the editorial board wrote.
It continued, “Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him to hold off at least until the Dec. 6 Senate runoff in Georgia. But Mr. Trump is announcing now, long before he needs to, for two reasons. The first is to try to clear the Republican field of potential competitors, especially Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin, who have shown they can win in competitive states.”
"more Democrats than Republicans will be elated because they see him as the easiest candidate to beat one more time."https://t.co/7rRX9MwYYp via @WSJ
— Debra J. Saunders (@debrajsaunders) November 15, 2022
The column noted he “had many policy successes: taxes and deregulation, energy security, judges, the Abraham Accords, correcting illusions about Iran, among others.”
“But his character flaws—narcissism, lack of self-control, abusive treatment of advisers, his puerile vendettas—interfered with that success. Before Covid he was headed for re-election. But the damage from his shutdown of the economy combined with his erratic behavior in that crisis gave Joe Biden the opening to campaign for normalcy. Mr. Trump lost a winnable election,” the board added.
It went on to suggest Trump might be “poised for a comeback” if he accepted his 2020 election loss. But instead, the column argued he “contested the outcome well past any reasonable limit,” and now the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol will “forever stain his legacy.”
“Last week’s elections showed that clinging to 2020 election denial, as Mr. Trump has, is a loser’s game. Republicans who took this line to win his endorsement nearly all lost. The country showed it wants to move on, but Mr. Trump refuses—perhaps because he can’t admit to himself that he was a loser,” it added.
While Trump won in 2016, the editorial board argued Americans “voted in 2018 and 2020 to stop the daily turmoil” and it is “hard to believe they’d vote in 2024 to do it all again.”
The column then took aim at so-called Never Trumpers and “the left” who it accused of refusing to accept Trump’s win.
“They didn’t trust democracy, even as they pretended to be protecting it. Instead of trusting voters, they cheered on FBI subterfuge in 2016, the Russia collusion fraud, opposition to nearly all Trump nominees, impeachment, and the Mar-a-Lago raid,” it charged.
But those decisions the column argues actually helped the former president politically.
“The real restraint on Mr. Trump has been the voters who gave him his chance in 2016. Then they checked him by ousting a GOP House in 2018, defeated him for re-election, and last week trounced nearly all of his hand-picked candidates in swing races,” the editorial board argued.
The column concluded by stating the country and the Republican Party would be “served if Mr. Trump ceded the field to the next generation of Republican leaders to compete for the nomination in 2024.”
“If Mr. Trump insists on running, then Republican voters will have to decide if they want to nominate the man most likely to produce a GOP loss and total power for the progressive left,” it added.
