Nine months to the day after the January 6th insurrection by a pro-Trump mob at the Capitol, I received nine statements by e-mail from the former President via his Save America Political Action Committee. In them, he attacked the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, for “folding to the Democrats, again,” by agreeing to not allow the U.S. government to default on its debts. He sent news articles about bad ratings numbers for CNN and bad polling numbers for President Biden. He complimented “the great Sean Hannity” and claimed that the “Fake News” refused to focus on the new Administration’s many screwups “on Afghanistan, Russia, Taiwan and China, the Border, inflation, and a failing economy.” But, these days, Donald Trump most of all has a message about the 2020 election—and the insurrectionists who tried to stop his defeat from being made official. His point, which he put bluntly on Wednesday, is this: “the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6th.”
The mob was actually at the Capitol for the purpose of “protesting the Fake Election results,” Trump informed me. The House select committee investigating the events that day is the new “Witch Hunt,” he claimed, and the real evil was not the attack on Congress by a violent horde of Confederate flag-waving Trumpians but the “rigged” election, which illegitimately installed “weak and corrupt leadership” in the U.S. In fact, because of this terrible new regime “we may very well end up in a war with China who no longer respects the USA.” The “Radical Left Democrats” are “destroying our Nation,” he added. “Our Country is in big trouble—we better get going fast!” And this was all on a Wednesday in October when nothing much was going on.
I understand and sympathize with the impulse to believe that Trump is done and over with, even if he has refused to go off into the largely silent retirement from public life embraced by his predecessors. Time marches on; he’s already seventy-five years old. He’s talking about running again, but maybe—probably, hopefully—he won’t. (And loser Presidents, Grover Cleveland aside, never actually succeed in coming back.) When a new Pew Research Center poll, released this week, showed that forty-four per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted Trump to run for President again in 2024, the Republican former representative Barbara Comstock, a rare Never Trump holdout, tweeted, “Most Rs realize Trump is a once and future Sore Loser. Stop fearing this dangerous and delusional man.” If only that were the case.
You can dismiss Trump as a joke, a poor sport, a clown, and a fool. “The former guy,” as President Biden memorably described him some months back, is undoubtedly all of those things. What he is not, however, is irrelevant. Sure, Trump is banned from Twitter and rarely on TV, except for a few reunions now and then with friends from…
Read More: The Battle of January 6th Has Just Begun