Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has had a different campaign strategy than all the other Republican candidates. Everyone of them knows they can’t beat Trump and that the only way to wind up as the nominee is if he dies, makes a deal with the Feds that includes not running or goes to prison. All but Youngkin have wanted to position themselves as the obvious alternative should any of that happen. Youngkin figures the serious candidates like DeSantis, Pence, Haley, Scott would wind up being painted as a Trump enemy and win up on the MAGA enemies list. He’s just holding back and waiting for Trump to be unable to run before he jumps in as the party savior. It would be hard to imagine Trump losing the primary. DeSantis has now fallen below 20% in every single poll taken since July 19—from the fake Republican Rasmussen posters (13%) to mainstream pollsters Morning Consult (16%). The right-leaning polling aggregator, Real Clear Politics shows the national horse race pretty definitively:
Trump- 52.4%
DeSantis- 18.4%
Ramaswamy- 5.4%
Pence- 5.2%
Haley- 3.7%
Scott- 3.0%
Christie- 2.3%
Hutchinson- 0.7%
Burgum- 0.6%
Suarez- 0.0%
DeSantis has serious negative momentum and although Ramasamy and Pence have crept up slightly, neither of them will ever be nominated by a party dominated by MAGAts. In fact, over the weekend, Trump demanded that all the other candidates drop out and support him— or face his wrath. AP reported that he’s also threatening congressional Republicans who don’t bend to his will— impeaching Biden.
In Erie on Saturday he said it was time for DeSantis-- “If the election becomes a referendum on what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, we are not going to win”-- to give up and he referred to his opponents as “clowns… Every dollar spent attacking me by Republicans is a dollar given straight to the Biden campaign… [and] wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans should be using to build a massive vote-gathering operation.”
At the rally— held in a former Democratic stronghold that Trump flipped in 2016, but Biden won narrowly in 2020— Trump also threatened Republicans in Congress who refuse to go along with efforts to impeach Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this past week that Republican lawmakers may consider an impeachment inquiry into the president over unproven claims of financial misconduct.
Trump, who was impeached twice while in office, said Saturday that, “The biggest complaint that I get is that the Republicans find out this information and then they do nothing about it.”
“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaries and get out— out!” he told the crowd to loud applause. “They have to play tough and ... if they’re not willing to do it, we got a lot of good, tough Republicans around ... and they’re going to get my endorsement every singe time.”
…At the rally, Trump also called on Republican members of Congress to halt the authorization of additional military support to Ukraine, which has been mired in a war fighting Russia’s invasion, until the Biden administration cooperates with Republican investigations into Biden and his family’s business dealings— words that echoed the call that lead to his first impeachment.
“He’s dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the very same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all of these millions of dollars,” Trump alleged. “In light of this information,” Congress, he said, “should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles ... the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family’s corrupt business dealings.”
When Trump sycophant Marjorie Traitor Greene offered an amendment to cut off funding for NATO last week— which is what Trump and Putin want— it was defeated 347-83 with 137 Republicans voting with all the Democrats against her typical anti-American lunacy. Just 83 Russo-Republicans backed her, the usual suspects like Biggs, Boebert, Brecheen, Comer, Crane, Davidson, Donalds, Emmer, Gaetz, Gosar, Jordan, Massie, Ogles, Perry, Roy, Rosendale… the whole repulsive, traitorous crew. Naturally, George Santos, whose campaign was financed by the Kremlin, voted yes as well.
Neil Vigdor, reporting from the poorly-attended event in Erie for the NY Times, wrote that “In a litany of grievances about his deepening legal woes and the direction of the country, the twice-indicted former president cast GOP holdouts as meek during a rally in Erie, Pa., criticizing their response to what he described as politically motivated prosecutions against him. ‘The Republicans are very high class.’ He said. ‘You’ve got to get a little bit lower class.’ With Trump as its standard-bearer, the Republican Party has watched Democrats in Pennsylvania secure high-profile victories in the last year, including flipping a U.S. Senate seat, holding on to the governor’s office and gaining control of the statehouse.”
Erie County, a swing county, went for Trump in 2016 with a plurality of 48.01%. In 2020 the plurality winner was Biden with 49.66%. Trump’s fully owned congressman in the area is corrupt MAGA nut Mike Kelly, an election denier, an insider stock trader, a conspiracy theory nut, a crook who took $970,000 in loans— later forgiven— for his used car lots as part of PPP, a homophobic maniac and a traitor who was at the center of Trump’s fake elector scheme. He’s a member of the Republican Study Committee which is working to end Social Security and Medicare.