Andrew McCarthy is an especially vicious Islamophobe, a right-wing polemicist, a contributing editor for the National Review and one of the most blatantly and consistently dishonest political commentators, even on the far right. He worked for Giuliani when he was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He’s also been a big Trump defender and wrote a ridiculous book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, claiming that Hillary and Obama tried to rig the 2016 election against Trump. He defended Trump almost to the end of his disastrous term, changing his mind about him around the time of the attempted coup, deciding Trump is a criminal who needed to be kicked out of office.
Yesterday, McCarthy devoted his column to warning National Review readers that Trump can’t win in 2024 and urging them to abandon him for the sake of his beloved Republican Party. He believes Trump’s legal problems are going to get worse and worse and that swing voters and even mainstream Republicans will not be able to bring themselves to vote for him. He understands that “The Dems’ best shot in 2024 is and has always been running against Trump— the same guy who won them the Senate in 2020 and held it for them in 2022. If he is the Republican nominee, they win going away.”
Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls showing Trump beating Biden— which Democrats are hyping because, for now, they want us to think he can win. He can’t. Don’t allow the intensity of Trump’s base supporters to mask how deeply unpopular he is with the country writ large. He had consistently low job-approval ratings as president— reaching 49 percent a couple of times but generally staying in the low 40s and going down to 34 by the time he left office (which actually seemed high under the circumstances). It was a statistical miracle that he won in 2016— with just 46 percent of the vote in, substantially, a two-candidate race. Trump could never again win a national election after the 2020 coup attempt, the Capitol riot, and his continued delusional insistence that reelection was stolen from him.
Moreover, the demagogic riffs that make MAGA crowds swoon— and that Trump doubled down on at this week’s Mar-a-Lago rally (because why wouldn’t an arraignment be the occasion for a rally?)— are exactly what most Americans find deeply disturbing about him. If he’s the nominee, the Democrats will retain the White House by ten points or more, with the tide sweeping the Senate and the House their way, too. Trump would have you believe he’s your crusader against wokeness. Down here on Planet Earth, he’s wokeness’s big chance to cement its reign.
Democrats have field-tested their plan. In 2018 and 2020, they backed pro-Trump congressional candidates over more-electable Republicans in GOP primaries, and then crushed those MAGA nominees on Election Day in November. It worked. And the apparent Republican response has been to take Trumpy candidates who have proven that they can’t win elections and put them in charge of state GOP organizations, ensuring more zany candidates . . . and more Democratic captures of what ought to be red seats.
The experiment has convinced the Left that the best way to get Trump nominated is to be in-your-face aggressive and unapologetically partisan in wielding law-enforcement powers against him. The Manhattan indictment of Trump has ignited his nomination bid in a way his lifeless announcement of that bid did not. He’s had his best week in years. No, I don’t mean by getting released on his own recognizance; I mean by zooming ahead of his (as-yet-undeclared) rival Ron DeSantis in early polling.
…The main event is going to be at least one indictment brought by Special Counsel Smith— which is why Trump spent at least as much time inveighing against him as against the Manhattan DA on Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago.
The New York indictment may be the most historic thing that happened in Trump news this week, but it wasn’t the most significant. That distinction belongs to what’s gone mostly unnoticed: Smith’s decision to subpoena agents from Trump’s Secret Service detail to testify before his Mar-a-Lago grand jury.
Understand: The executive branch and the Secret Service especially abhor the specter of security officials testifying against their protectees. It eviscerates the bond of trust the Secret Service must maintain to guard people effectively, which requires their cooperation. Prosecutors do not summon Secret Service agents to a grand jury unless they are very serious about indicting.
Nor does the executive branch typically waive executive privilege, as the Biden administration has done regarding not only the former president but top Trump officials as well— up to and including the vice president and chief of staff. By taking that position, the Justice Department, which is usually in court advocating for robust executive privileges and immunities, is instead eroding them to the detriment of Biden and future presidents.
…Smith got the court to compel testimony from Trump’s private lawyer, Evan Corcoran, about the misrepresentations that were made under oath to the grand jury and investigators in June 2022 — when Trump’s attorneys falsely claimed that the package of 38 classified documents that they’d surrendered that day were the only remaining ones at Trump’s estate. Two months later, a hundred more such documents were seized by the FBI in its Mar-a-Lago search.
If Corcoran is testifying, it must be because the prosecutors have decided that he didn’t lie; he merely passed on to the investigators what he’d been told by his client. That, clearly, is why Smith forced him to testify about his conversations with Trump — which he was permitted to do because a judge invoked the “crime–fraud exception” to attorney–client privilege, finding that Trump had probably carried out a criminal obstruction scheme. Like the Mar-a-Lago employees who were also questioned, the Secret Service agents are being called to testify about Trump’s activities and the movement of various documents in the weeks after the June meeting. That is, if Trump was handling documents marked classified after his lawyers had told the grand jury that he didn’t have any such documents, then the grand jury was intentionally misled.
The noose is tightening. Smith is going full bore on January 6, too. That’s why he’s getting testimony from Pence, just as he did from other top Trump officials. It will be tougher, for legal reasons, to prove a conspiracy to obstruct Congress’s ratification of Biden’s Electoral College victory, but Smith is pushing hard to make that case.
He won’t have to push that hard on Mar-a-Lago. Comparatively, it’s a slam dunk. If Democrats have decided that they can ride out the political firestorm of indicting Trump while insulating Biden— and the obstruction scheme, they believe, is their solution to that challenge— then an indictment is coming. Bank on it. If Trump supporters become enraged by the double standard, they’ll push even harder for his nomination. See how this works?
…A few months from now, ironically, Donald Trump will remember the week of his first indictment as the good old days. The accumulated weight of his legal woes— at least the ones we know of, so far— would eventually sink him even if Smith wasn’t preparing a torpedo. The question is whether he’ll take the GOP down with him. Are Republicans going to let Democrats provoke them into nominating the one candidate who is sure to lose to Biden?
Let’s be clear about one thing, the way most of the red states are gerrymandered, it doesn’t matter how badly Trump does at the polls— most Republicans will be reelected without breaking a sweat. The 6 red congressional districts all have PVIs between R+16 and R+33, while most of the state’s black voters are crammed into the 7th district, where the PVI is D+14. Arizona is getting less and less red but no Democrat will ever beat Paul Gosar, no matter how many members of his family testify against him. His district has a PVI of R+16, an automatic slam-dunk for a Republican NO MATTER WHAT. DeSantis personally intervened in the Republican legislature’s 2020 gerrymandering because it wasn’t partisan and racist enough. Members like Matt Gaetz (R+19), John Rutherford (R+11), Mike Waltz (R+14), Bill Posey (R+11), Gus Bilirakis (R+17), Greg Steube (R+10), Scott Franklin (R+13) and Byron Donalds (R+13) are completely protected from challenges. And those aren’t even the worst districts for Democrats. Imagine someone running in any of these utter mediocre members of Congress:
Andrew Clyde (GA-R+22)
Marjorie Traitor Greene (GA-R+22)
Russ Fulcher (ID-R+22)
Hal Rogers (KY-R+32)
Steve Scalise (LA-R+23)
Jason Smith (MO-R+28)
Adrian Smith (NE-R+29)
Patrick McHenry (NC-R+22)
Brad Wenstrup (OH-R+25)
Josh Brecheen (OK-R+29)
Diana Harshbarger (TN-R+30)
Nathaniel Moran (TX-R+26)
Ronny Jackson (TX-R+26)
Jodey Arrington (TX-R+26)
On the other hand, Trump at the top of the 2024 ticket could easily kill reelection prospects for swing district Republican incumbents like
David Schweikert (AZ-R+2)
Juan Ciscomani (AZ-R+3)
John Duarte (CA-D+4)
David Valadao (CA-D+5)
Mike Garcia (CA-D+4)
Young Kim (CA-R+2)
Michelle Steel (CA-D+2)
Maria Salazar (FL-even)
Don Bacon (NE-even)
Tom Kean (NJ-R+1)
George Santos (NY-D+2)
Anthony D’Esposito (NY-D+5)
Mike Lawler (NY-D+3)
Marc Molinaro (NY-even)
Brandon Williams (NY-D+1)
Lori Chavez DeRemer (OR-D+2)
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-even)
Monica De La Cruz (TX-R+1)
Jen Kiggans (VA-R+2)