Pirate's Cove

It’s a good question

Can Trump hold onto his supporters and allies in 2024?

He promised to put an American flag on Mars and to execute drug dealers. He joked about climate change and reminisced about his warm relationship with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

For former President Donald Trump — given to lengthy asides about yacht parties or toilet hydraulics — his 2024 presidential announcement was something of a relatively sober policy address, even if it included his typical litany of falsehoods, exaggerations and non sequiturs.

Most notably, Trump refrained from promoting lies about the 2020 election having been “rigged” against him. He had made backing of those claims an all but necessary condition for anyone seeking his support, and persisted in this even as most Republicans concluded long ago that the former president’s obsessive relitigation of his defeat to Joe Biden was only harming their party.

On Tuesday night, speaking mostly from prepared remarks, Trump showed a measure of discipline not seen since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when his regular briefings from the White House press room had about them a disconcertingly normal air, leaving some to wonder if the crisis had transformed him.

Obviously, this was written by a Typical Left Wing member of the Credentialed Media

Tuesday’s speech can thus be seen as an attempt to consolidate and win back support at a time when his support is fleeing — and also to energize his core supporters with the promise of a carnivalesque campaign that captures the renegade feel of his first maverick try at the White House. “I think it’s going to be very similar to 2016,” the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone told Yahoo News ahead of Tuesday’s speech. “Trump has never had trouble remaining interesting.” (snip)

“If President Trump continues this tone and delivers this message on a consistent basis, he will be hard to beat,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote on Twitter. Most reviews of the speech were markedly more negative, but praise from a senior Republican was a signal, however faint, that Trump was on the right track.

“Trump got his mojo back,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, once a GOP candidate for the presidency, declared.

But

There were far more detractors, however. The current governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, also a Republican, tweeted: “Trump is correct on Biden’s failures, but his self-indulging message promoting anger has not changed. It didn’t work in 2022 and won’t work in 2024. There are better choices.”

Let’s go to a big time detractor, a “Republican” with extreme TDS

“It’s very probable that that pattern will happen again here. They’ll all come back to him if the voters stay with him,” says Joe Walsh, R-Ill., the former congressman who hosts the “White Flag” podcast. In a telephone interview, Walsh estimated that about 38% of the Republican electorate is made up of “hard-core” Trump supporters who will follow him to the exclusion of any other candidate. Another 20%, he argued, are willing to entertain other options but will grudgingly back Trump if he emerges as the frontrunner.

Excitable Joe Walsh (he’s not the fun one) does have a point. The problem here is that it will be hard for Trump to pull that other 42% if he wins the primaries. And, beyond that, he won’t be able to pull the Independents, no matter how bad a job Biden does over the next two years. His mental health issues could grow a lot more, and people will still vote for Joe.

Let’s say you describe most of Trump’s policies to people without saying Trump’s name. Maybe attach them to a squishy Republican or Democrat. They’ll support most of them. Now, say they are Trump’s policies, and the voters want nothing to do with them, Because Trump. Sorry, he’s toxic. I love or like most of his policies, I love that he battles with the media and Democrats. But, this is politics, and you do have to talk electability. He surprised people in 2016. He won’t in 2024. Even without Democrat cheating, he probably cannot win. And, he may do his schtick where he talks shit about the other Republicans running, making them have a difficult time getting elected if Trump doesn’t win the primaries.