In the wake of Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump, the question: does the Democratic Party want the former president to win the Republican nomination?
It seems far-fetched at first blush, but so much of what we see in contemporary politics starts out that way—Trump’s supposedly impossible 2016 victory, the corrupt fallaciousness of Hillary’s Russian dossier, Anthony Fauci as a Covid enabler—ends up becoming an eventual truth.
If entertaining the idea that the left (and liberal intelligentsia, such as it is) wants to face Trump in the general, you have to factor in two truths about this alleged Democrat game plan. You have to believe that they know that the case against Trump isn’t grounded in sound constitutional or legal principles. That they understand that it’s an illegally cobbled-together smorgasbord of state and federal law, containing charges for which the statute of limitations has long run out. That it was brought primarily to rile and expand his right-wing base, securing for him the nomination. It strikes some as shallow, but you have to believe that they believe that a Trump trial will serve as a Pavlovian goad, prodded against the right to ensure a Trump-Biden election.
Contrary to the accepted narrative, that the left fears Trump can win, and is throwing everything they’ve got, however groundless, at stopping him, in the theory above, Democrats flip the script. They’re convinced their best shot at retaining power and continuing the ruinous Biden/Harris lurch into global socialism is to face Trump.
It follows then that the man they really fear is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has unofficially declared his candidacy, raising money and traveling around the country. It doesn’t stop there. By theoretically conspiring to make Trump a martyr and thereby inflame the right on his behalf, the Democrats are in effect admitting that they may fear any Republican candidate other than Trump.
In order to believe the theory that the Democratic Party wants Trump as the Republican candidate, it’s necessary to believe that they understand that their policies, governance, ideologies, platform, objectives, and core values are so at odds with a majority of the national electorate, that just about any good Republican candidate has a chance against Biden’s decrepit administration, and that facing a battered Trump is their best bet.
It makes for interesting conjecture, but I’m sticking with the first narrative, that the left knows that their worst nightmare, a second Trump term, is possible. The Bragg indictment makes it far more possible.