Political Observer grows impatient.

MAY 3, 2023

The last few Politico commentaries on Trump, by Lowry, read as if it were written by a Trump advocate/apologist/tactician. The latest is no exception:

Headline: Opinion | Trump’s Election Denialism Is Already Winning

Sub-headline: It’s up to Republican opponents to make it a vulnerability rather than a strength

Presidents of the United States who have lost elections generally don’t go on to dominate their parties and win the office again.

Donald Trump has found a work-around, by denying he was defeated in 2020. This effort has been overwhelmingly successful among its target audience of Republican voters and has tilted the playing field of the 2024 nomination battle in his favor.

Trump has made himself the incumbent in exile, the sitting president in the hearts and minds of his supporters, the martyr of shadowy forces (so shadowy, in fact, that they can’t be readily identified) and the true heir chiseled out of his rightful throne by an unscrupulous pretender.

This creates a terrible dilemma for Trump’s opponents: How do you run against a defeated president without noting the highly relevant fact that he was, ahem, defeated?.

This followed by polling data, an abundance of political speculation, and ending here:

Give Trump this: He doesn’t necessarily accept public opinion as it is but tries to shape it. Although there’d be widespread Republican doubts about the 2020 election no matter what he said, the belief that it was stolen wouldn’t be as deep and pervasive without his persistent (and deceptive) advocacy. He’s changed the landscape in his favor, and his opponents simply accept it at their peril.

For Trump to lose the nomination, what should be his chief vulnerability needs to be a vulnerability — and his Republican opponents must try to make it one.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/04/trump-election-denialism-winning-00095194

What never occurs, within Lowry’s imaginative political speculations, is what Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson might offer to the American electorate: that might render the myth of the ‘stolen election’ moot, or at the least tangential, or even irrelevant, in the face of four more years of Senile Old Joe: AIPAC groveler Kamala Harris, and her bloodthirsty Neo-Con political allies, a clear and present danger to what remains of The Republic?

Political Observer