Orange You Glad He's Back

After the weekend's rally in Des Moines, it's painfully clear that The Former Guy™ is now the Only Guy for the GOP, whether they want it or not.

Nine months ago, Republicans were questioning Donald Trump’s place as the lead fixture of their party. Saturday night provided the clearest evidence yet that they want him right there.

Not one year removed from surviving a second impeachment, the former president rallied before thousands of his most loyal supporters across the Iowa State Fairgrounds on a balmy Midwestern evening. He regaled them with his stories from the White House, his falsehoods and complaints about the 2020 election results, and his criticisms of the Biden administration on everything from immigration to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The bulk of Trump’s speech was devoted to his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen — a false belief that was supported by the crowd, who broke out into chants of “Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!”

But the notable elements were not what was said by Trump, but who was there with him. Appearing alongside the former president was a who’s who of influential Republicans in the Hawkeye state, including Sen. Chuck Grassley and Gov. Kim Reynolds, Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann.

Trump has held rallies since leaving the White House. But never have elected Republicans of such tenure and stature appeared with him. And the presence of Grassley in particular signified that whatever qualms the GOP may have had with Trump are now faded memories; whatever questions they had about the direction of the party have been resolved.

Trump himself seemed to recognize as much, as he focused intently on relitigating the results of the 2020 elections even while admitting his own party members wished he would just move on.

“Sir, think to the future, don’t go back to the past,” Trump said some Republican members of Congress have advised him.

“I’m telling you the single biggest issue, as bad as the border is and it’s horrible, horrible what they’re doing they’re destroying our country, but as bad as that is the single biggest issue the issue that gets the most pull, the most respect, the biggest cheers is talking about the election fraud of the 2020 presidential election,” Trump said.

It was not that long ago when there was more uncertainty about Trump’s future within the party. Back in January, Grassley offered a stinging condemnation of Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election — the type of statement that, at its heart, suggested a desire to rid himself of the messiness.

“The reality is, he lost. He brought over 60 lawsuits and lost all but one of them. He was not able to challenge enough votes to overcome President Biden’s significant margins in key states,” Grassley said in a statement offered after voting against Trump’s second impeachment. “He belittled and harassed elected officials across the country to get his way. He encouraged his own, loyal vice president, Mike Pence, to take extraordinary and unconstitutional actions during the Electoral College count.”

But Grassley is in a different place now. He recently announced, at age 88, that he is running for an eighth term. And with it, Trump has gone from nuisance to needed.

This week, Grassley and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report that claimed Trump’s reported pressure on the Department of Justice to change election results was not just overblown but consistent with the commitments of the office of the president to uphold the Constitution. And on Saturday night, Trump brought Grassley on stage to offer his “complete and total endorsement for reelection.”

“If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart,” Grassley said.

Going forward, Republicans have to run with, towards, and cheering Donald Trump. Nothing has changed for the GOP heading into 2022. Trump's ego was always going to eventually mean he was going to take the spotlight and pick just about every eventual primary winner. They're all going to be loyal to Trump, they're all going to try to get away from "The election was stolen" but Trump won't let them, and neither will the majority of Republican primary voters.

And they may actually find a way to lose in 2022 because of it.

Everyone they run in the next 13 months is going to be Trump. Some of them will win House and Senate races.

But not all of them. The one thing that could sink their midterm hopes is happening as we speak. And Trump's going to remind everyone why he lost in 2020, along with a whole lot of GOP candidates. He won't be able to help himself. The networks and cable shows will cover every word of his racist rallies and people will suddenly have a very clear comparison to Biden.

That's good, because "Joe Biden is in real trouble!" is a meme that's not going away.

W. Mondale Robinson spent a large chunk of last fall in clubs and bars and concert venues in Georgia, trying to convince disenchanted Black men that casting a ballot — in the 2020 general election, then the Georgia runoffs for the U.S. Senate — could finally mean real change in their communities.

But Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, thinks the case would be a lot harder to make now. He remembers the exact moment his optimism that President Biden would be different began to fade: when Democrats in May said they were willing to significantly weaken a policing reform bill to get Republican support.

More disappointments followed. Robinson was dismayed that Biden did not push for filibuster reform to enact a $15 minimum wage. He was upset that the president did not try to halt a raft of voting restrictions passed by Georgia’s GOP-led legislature.

“I think the frustration is at an all-time high, and Biden can’t go to Georgia or any other Black state in the South and say, ‘This is what we delivered in 2021,’ ” said Robinson, whose group believes it reached 1.2 million Black men in Georgia. “Black men are pissed off about the nothingness that has happened . . . Does it make the work harder? It makes the work damn near impossible.”

After an initial burst of support, Biden has seen his approval ratings fall significantly in recent months. A Washington Post average of polls since the start of September shows 44 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s job approval, while 49 percent disapprove.

And polls suggest support for Biden has sunk notably among key Democratic constituencies — Blacks, Latinos, women and young people. Pew Research Center polls found Biden’s approval rating among Black Americans fell from 85 percent in July to 67 percent in September, while also falling 16 points among Hispanics and 14 points among Asians.

Interviews with nearly 20 advocates, activists and politicians in the crucial state of Georgia — which Biden won narrowly, in large part due to support from Black voters, after decades of Republican dominance — give a sense of the sentiments behind those numbers. At the center are Black and other minority voters who helped fuel Biden’s victory, but who now see what they consider unfulfilled promises and dwindling hope for meaningful change.

In some sense, the “benefit of the doubt” portion of Biden’s presidency is over. While the president gained initial goodwill among many from simply not being Trump, especially when it came to the coronavirus, now those who supported him are demanding results, and his lack of a devoted base is starting to show.

“If midterms are about enthusiasm and turnout, who do you think is excited to vote on November 2 at this moment?” said Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, which has registered more than a half-million voters. “Because it ain’t Democrats. It ain’t Black folks. It ain’t young people.”

 

It's not 100% Biden's fault. He's getting stabbed in the back (and the front) daily by President Joe Manchin and Vice President Sinema. Biden's not the one blocking filibuster reform or removal. But the Republican plan for an overwhelming midterm win requires Donald Trump to not be in the news daily, either.

 

Don't get me wrong, the headwinds against Biden and the Dems are still overwhelming. It'll take a miracle to keep Congress.

 

Perversely, that miracle may just have shown up, is what I'm saying.