Trump's Trial Is About Winning in 2024. It's on GOP Voters If They Fall for the Dems' Ploy | Opinion
Democrats and the media will never get over the fact that Hillary Clinton ignored the state of Wisconsin for 106 days during the 2016 election. What I mean by that is, they will never accept her loss, or that their gamble in giving Donald Trump five billion dollars in free media on his way to securing the nomination—which would have otherwise been a sure fire general election loss—didn't pay off.
The media and Democrats strategically elevated Donald Trump in 2016, which backfired spectacularly. They then spent the next four years, at the direction of Clinton-world, focusing on "fake news" and "disinformation" and tying the country up with Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, which stemmed from the now debunked Steele Dossier, and then an impeachment leading into the 2020 election.
They did the same with MAGA candidates in 2018, and during the 2022 midterms, keeping Trump front and center with the extended January 6th Committee hearings, which, magically, wrapped up right after the midterm results, and a much publicized pre-election August FBI raid on Trump's home at Mar a Lago in Florida.
Now, with Donald Trump seeking a second term, they are engineering the 2024 election in very much the same way, this time with a fundamentally weak criminal case in New York City, care if a sitting District Attorney of Trump's opposition party who ran on bringing such charges against the former President.
Legal experts on both sides of the aisle are in almost unanimous agreement that the 34 charges Trump now faces in Manhattan are tediously inadequate for crossing this kind of political line, the first time in United States history.
But the criminal case in New York Trump finds himself in is not about the actual case itself, nor is it about the facts at hand. It's simply a signal to other prosecutors—in Atlanta, and in Washington D.C.—to get the ball rolling and make Trump the central focus of the 2024 election.
Trump is not due back in court in New York City until December, a month before the first likely GOP primary debate. Those debates will not focus on the central issues facing the country, but rather the legal problems swirling around the former president. Candidates will be forced to address their relationship to the former president and where they stand with him, and not much else.
The goal here is to once again engineer an endless news cycle oxygen suck and it's being engineered by the Biden White House, the DNC, their allies in mass media, and even Trump himself, who is often times a willing participant driving all of the noise.
The Biden White House believes, just as they did in 2022, that if Trump is the central focus and main character of American politics, then they stand to keep benefitting from that. Evidence suggests they aren't far off. Joe Biden is known for flapping off at the gums at any question any reporter throws at him, but so far on Trump's indictment, he offers silence and goofy grins, almost as if to say, "I can't believe they are falling for this all again."
Ultimately Trump's fate will not be decided by a Soros-backed prosecutor in New York, or one in Georgia, or by Jack Smith, who is attempting to build and obstruction case against Trump. The point here is not to "serve justice" but to prolong and publicize, and thereby block out any other candidate that may pose a stronger opponent to the current President.
Trump's fate will be decided by GOP primary voters. They can choose to rally around Trump and ride him into the general election, with the backing of the Democrats and the media, or they can finally decide the drama and the chaos are all too much, and turn the page.
Trump's fate, and the fate of 2024, is ultimately only up to them. It just depends on how much they love or hate the show the media is putting on for them, once again.
Stephen L. Miller has written for National Review, The Spectator, the New York Post and Fox News, and hosts the independent podcast Versus Media on Substack.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
