Trump 2024?

Could Trump come back and win again?

That’s the question everyone is asking, right? And that’s at the heart of what’s really going on with the latest version of Trumpeachment, isn’t it?

What if he comes back? (gulp!)

Look I have no idea if Trump will be back, or if he does come back, if he can win, but there is something I see going on out there that I think will be very important in 2022 and 2024.

After Trump’s surprise win, there were a ton of navel-gazing pieces in the Coporate and Liberal press about how it could have happened and how they got it so wrong. Most Americans, those who are honest anyway, agreed that Hillary Clinton missed something fundamental that was happening to working class blue collar America, something that Trump saw and capitalized on. And there was a lot of honest conversation about how the Democratic Party could do a better job of selling itself to those voters in future elections.

But what actually happened in 2020? Did the chastened Democratic Party reform itself and tailor its message to those disaffected men and women in the rust and bible betls?

It seems to me that they did not. The Biden campaign was not a strategic effort as much as it was a tactical one. I think we can all agree that if not for the Pandemic, the lockdows, and the economic crash, that Trump would’ve cruised to victory. I don’t think the Democrats had any idea how to derail that train… but when the Pandemic came, they took a very smart tactical approach to the campaign… which was to use the fear of the virus to drive things like mail-in voting (which favors Democrats) and as cover for keeping Biden in his basement where his obvious mental decline would not freak out the normies. And of course they made everything about Trump’s personality and character (which were not great), rather than his policies (which were pretty good).

But even with all that, the plan still barely worked. The election was a butt-puckering squeaker and relied on something that will probably never happen again, a record level of turnout both in terms of raw numbers and in total percentage.

But crucially, the questions at the heart of Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat have still not been addressed, much less solved. Blue collar America is still suffering from addiction, wage stagnation, joblessness and hopelessness… and Biden, so far anyway, seems like he has no interest in addressing those concerns in any significant way. His first move out of the gate was to kill thousands of skilled blue collar jobs on the Keystone Pipeline and then send his minions out into the press to tell those men and women “whoops… learn to code, hick.”

Can Trump come back and take advantage of that? Yeah, maybe. I think he’s probably too toxic at this point, but there is a huge working class coaliton out there that is still suffering and still angry. Those hollowed out small-town Main Streets we saw in Michigan, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana back in 2016 are even more hollowed out now (Thanks COVID!!). And whichever GOP hopeful can pick up the Trump torch and run with it has to be considered the prohibitive frontrunner in 2024.

See you in ’22!