Was Trump Really an Exception?Republican strategy should be focused on playing up Democratic scandals before their adversaries start the mudslinging. The hell with striking a “positive note”!
By Paul Gottfried
January 16, 2022
In considering whether conservatives should welcome another run by Donald Trump, Roger Kimball observes the following:
I think it likely that, should Trump be the nominee, and should he be reelected in 2024, the forces arrayed against him will suffer a nervous breakdown that will make the anti-Trump hysteria of 2016-2020 look like an Oxford Union debate.
This warning led me to thinking about whether nominating another Republican with populist proclivities, say Ron DeSantis, would produce less of a leftist backlash than occurred during Trump’s run for the presidency. Would the mainstream media, the woke academy, Hollywood, and the rest of the cultural Left behave less belligerently if the Republican nominee and possibly next president avoided being “controversial”?
According to Kimball, what made Trump so divisive was at least partly owing to the invectives unleashed against him by the media and Democratic politicians. Without the Steele dossier and the bogus charge of colluding with Russia, Trump’s presidency would not have aroused as much contention as it did. Trump raged so often because he was responding to serious defamations.
Still, we are left with the question: Could a “nicer” Republican running for the presidency or sitting in the Oval Office have avoided these complications? Perhaps in some significant way Trump’s uniquely pugnacious demeanor did contribute to the anti-Trump hysteria of 2016-2021. If that is the case, then Trump’s conduct could have an explosive effect if he became his party’s nominee again. But perhaps we shouldn’t exaggerate the impact of this factor. Vicious assaults on Republican presidential nominees did not begin when opinion leaders declared war on Trump. They have been going on for decades, no matter how non-confrontational Republicans have been.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/16/was-trump-really-an-exception/
