Is Trump Still The Best Chance For 2024?

First a quick admin note. In a couple of days my wife will be having her second knee replacement operation. I, of course, will be taking over running the household. I managed that 4 years ago, but there will still be a re-learning curve. Posting may be sparse for a while. We’ll just have to see.

Now, just a quick follow-up regarding Trump and our constitutional order.

Stephen Presser is a former professor at Northwestern University’s law school. I’ve read his articles over the years, always with appreciation. Today at American Greatness Presser argues that Trump remains America’s best chance to MAGA:

Who Is in the Best Position to Restore American Greatness in 2024?

Donald Trump still represents the best chance we have to reclaim a government committed to the restoration of the rule of law and the sovereignty of the American people.

The basic argument that Presser presents is common sensical—Trump is independently wealthy. He’s the only guy capable of making the run who can’t be bought and owned. Read it. All I want to do is quote Presser regarding corruption and America. My impression is that most Americans have a tremendous faith in the goodness of America. Corruption, in their minds, is something that happens in a few big cities, but for the most part America is the incorrupt Camelot compared to the rest of the world. The reality is that the federal government is massively corrupt—it’s just that in the federal rules based order what most people would call corrupt is legal.

So, Presser:

What do Trump’s enemies fear, and could this be an indication that Trump may still be the best candidate for the Republicans in 2024? 

Those of us who supported Trump in 2016 did so for a variety of reasons, but it is undeniable that he actually performed as we had hoped, and that objective historians will credit him with extraordinary success in his first term—he transformed the Supreme Court by the addition of three justices committed to interpreting the Constitution according to its original understanding; he succeeded in reducing unemployment for all Americans, particularly minorities; he made the country energy independent; he reduced the flow of illegal immigration; he eased the regulatory and tax burden on American businesses; he renegotiated trade agreements on a favorable basis; and he avoided additional military entanglements. These were all goals traditional conservatives had advocated for years, accomplished by Trump. 

But the Biden Administration and its fellow travelers in Congress fear something different.

Donald Trump is the only prominent Republican who has acknowledged the extraordinary level of corruption in the United States, and it is the beneficiaries of that corruption who may fear him the most. 

As spoken by a pretty sober minded law professor, that bears repeating: “the extraordinary level of corruption in the United States.”

Corruption—the turning of the government from a servant of the people to a kleptocracy involving a favored class of officials, bureaucrats and cronies—was what our framers feared most, and what they believed to be the too frequent and perhaps unavoidable fate of republics. The original constitutional structure, one where power checked power, and where no one branch of government could run amok unchallenged by the others, has all but disappeared in the last generation as real power in our government has come to rest in the federal administrative agencies, and in the executive branch agencies, in particular. Trump understood this, and his railing against the “deep state” was his way of suggesting that the federal Leviathan was now running things for its own benefit rather than for the benefit of the people.

As we have learned from works like those of Peter Schweizer, powerful American politicians such as the Clintons, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and many others are masters at the art of growing rich using their connections and political influence. Small wonder, then, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the ultimate source of the infamous Steele dossier, which resulted in the first independent counsel to investigate President Trump; that Joe Biden’s Justice Department now torments Trump; and that Mitch McConnell denied essential campaign funds to Trump-endorsed candidates for the Senate.