Pre-match: Can't believe it took this long for this thread, the 2024 Presidential election thread!

He is running!!! Yeah!!! The shit show goes on!

Donald Trump has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in 2024.

 

Holy Fuck!!! I listened to about 5-7 min and had to switch off. Lie after lie after lie...

 

It's just amazing - the world he lives in is most definitely not the world I live in.

Apparently scientists only think the sea levels will rise by 1/8" in the next 200 years. Wow, had no idea it was such a small increase

 

Well? Where is everybody?

 

Putting kids to bed.

 

Just listened. He barely said anything about 2020. I was shocked. If he maintains that, he takes the primary comfortably.

 

Curled up in a ball in the corner of the room with the lights out, hoping it was all a nightmare and that it won't happen again.

 

He is absolutely assuming that he will not be indicted as long as he is "in politics" and there is no chance he wins the presidency.

 

Too busy hailing Grimes!

Hail Grimes!

 

HAIL GRIMES!!!

 

Tim O'Brien knows Trump as well as anyone out there and makes great points here.

Timothy O’Brien: “It would matter, of course, if Trump managed to seize the powers of the US presidency again. But in terms of gauging the influence he wields inside the Republican Party after a midterm election in which voters rejected most of the rodeo clowns he endorsed, his press conference was just performance art. I suspect he engineered his prime-time gala for one main reason: He wants the GOP and the public to know he isn’t going away. And he’ll try to devour any Republican who gets in his way.”

“It has always been thus with Trump. He needs the spotlight and affirmation like others need air. There was no chance he would let his last national political act be a midterm train wreck that left him roundly labeled as a loser…”

“Trump has a firm grip on the hearts and minds of about a third of Republican voters. A majority of Republicans identify as MAGA, and an abundance of GOP voters want Trump to run for president again. Trump will swing that loyalty like a cudgel against party elders who are considering abandoning him. They may sincerely want to court moderate Republicans and independent voters to avoid repeating the midterm debacle when the 2024 election rolls around, but Trump will start to attack them for it soon enough.”

 

1968 GOP Primaries

Nixon - 684 delegates
Rockefeller - 278
Reagan - 155

1976

Ford - 1187
Reagan - 1070

Not sure when why Desantis should be any more afraid of initial failure than was a previous governor from a sunshine state.

 

Anyone surprised?

A real quote from Trump's campaign launch speech: "The total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold. They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024 it will sadly be much worse." https://t.co/10GUyhX5lg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 16, 2022

They learned over the past six years that they can conspire against the U.S. with hostile foreign powers, cheat in elections, extort U.S. allies, steal US secrets, participate in an insurrection and they will not be held accountable; treason has been normalized. https://t.co/k8khHvsksZ

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) November 16, 2022

 

Stealing this from a different site...This guy nailed it. This is the conundrum for De Santis or any other GOP contender.

" I don't buy this. I think this is another case of reporters listening to Republican strategists and not reading the room, just like they did in covering the election.

I'll reiterate something I posted last night... For as much as conservative pundits and elected officials have groused over the past few days about Trump, I still don't see DeSantis able to hold rallies where he gets that non-college, white shithead vote as excited to come out with their "******** Biden" flag on their pickup truck or boat to the same degree as Trump.

And at the end of the day, the one thing Trump understands is that the conservative base is motivated by spite, and what he says may turn off voters in the middle (i.e., hence the number of midterm voters that voted against crazy Republican candidates) but it's a reflection of where Republican voters want to go if they're being honest with themselves. Trump just says it out loud, and conservatives eat it up.

And that's going to be the problem in the primary for DeSantis and other Republicans. Their own base wants to be crazy, because they're the ones that voted people like Kari Lake and Blake Masters and Don Buldic out of primaries. Democrats didn't trick them into nominating nuts. They did that themselves because that's the people who said what they like to hear.

So when Trump goes where the base wants to go with the stupid, is DeSantis just going to race him to the bottom in seeing how low he can go too? And when that happens, at that point Trump can argue he's the more authentic version of crazy to the Republican base."

 

Effectively, the battle for the GOP nomination is whether Republicans rally behind the candidate who most excites them, or the candidate whom they think will most interest people who are not like them, thereby winning the general election. Democratic voters faced a similar decision in 2020 and overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden. They wanted to win, first and foremost. We shall see whether Republican voters behave the same.

 

Because there’s losing, and then there’s losing because Trump bullied you and took away your dignity and manhood.

Like, IMO Ted Cruz knows he can never be president because he sucked up to Trump after Trump called Heidi ugly.

 

That's not a bad test for wannabe Presidents. Reagan would not have been bullied that way. If DeSantis is so weak that he can't stand up to such attacks, then he probably would not become President under any conditions.

 

And we all know that being the uber bully is the most appealing trait to GQP voters...

 

“I paid for this microphone!”