Political consultant and pollster Dick Morris, who played a key role in former President Bill Clinton’s 1996 comeback reelection effort, is spilling the beans on his long-time friend former President Donald Trump in a new book out tomorrow, The Return.
“Will he run in 2024? You bet he will. Will he be the GOP nominee? Absolutely. Will he win the election? Yes,” Morris writes in his quick reading strategy book provided to Secrets in advance of tomorrow’s release.
“Our candidate in 2024 will be, and must be, Donald J. Trump. Accept no substitutes. Only he can put together the coalition that generated 74 million votes in 2020. And we don’t want a bleached-out, kinder, nicer, gentler Donald Trump, either! We want and need the same Donald Trump who won in 2016, increased his vote share in 2020 by eleven million votes, and in between, was one of our truly great presidents,” added Morris, a Newsmax analyst and host of Dick Morris Democracy.
More than most Trump insiders, Morris knows what he’s talking about. Not only is he a member of the Trump “extended family,” but he was a secret unpaid adviser to the president in 2020 and has continued to be a key political whisperer.
“I have spoken with the former president dozens of times since he left office, and our conversations were always either about how he was cheated in 2020, or how he would get back in 2024. He has never, for a moment, taken his eye off the ball — getting back in the White House!” added Morris.
In The Return: Trump’s Big 2024 Comeback, Morris reviewed what went wrong in 2020 and what the 2024 strategy will be for Trump’s return.
For example, he doesn’t dismiss election fraud and how it undermined Trump’s reelection, but concedes that the bigger issue is that President Joe Biden just got more votes, something Trump has to overcome.
He suggested that states try to get back to pre-COVID voting rules, that GOP voters elect Republican secretaries of state who set election rules, and that the GOP do a better job turning out the vote. Bigger votes, he wrote, are the future and the GOP has to deal with it.
He also said that the Trump campaign and White House didn’t fully get the impact of the virus and their anti-mask message or the degree to which the liberal media was working overtime to take out Trump.
“His most serious error was to incur the wrath of the media,” said Morris, who knows a bit about coming under media fire.
But working for Trump are the trifecta of issues that helped in his 2016 election: the economy, illegal immigration and surging crime. And he suggested a theme of reminding voters that they were all in check when Trump handed over the keys to the White House to Biden.
“Each of the three has the same unique feature: none was a problem under Donald Trump, and all emerged as serious issues on the day that Biden was inaugurated,” said Morris.
The GOP should then try to convince voters that Biden nor his team have figured out a way to change the direction of those issues, and won’t because they want to “transform America into a nation none of us will recognize by destroying social, cultural, economic, and political freedoms.”
In his book, Morris also addresses the elephant in Trump’s White House. He said the president is a bully and tough-talker, but nobody’s going to change that.
“Trump is Trump. Like it or lump it. He’ll never change, and I came to realize that his manner could not be divorced from his successful outcomes. Change one, and you would forfeit the other,” said Morris.
His advice: Work with Trump. In 2020, he said voters expressed a distaste for Trump’s style, but satisfaction with his job performance. The answer: “We looked to Frank Perdue for guidance. If he could persuade America that it took a tough man to make a tender chicken, perhaps we could make the point that it took one to make a good president,” said Morris in a hint of the 2024 strategy.
And he suggested that Trump will build his base on white and Latino voters. In the last election, Trump did well with Hispanics, and even won border areas.
“Trump’s political power is rooted in his unique ability to attract, as no other American political figure can, two key groups of swing voters who became part of his core constituency: white high-school-educated voters and Hispanic-American patriots,” said Morris, laying out another element of the upcoming campaign strategy.
“Can he win? Not only can he win, he will win, and nobody else can. As surely as he was our 45th president, he will be our 47th as well!” wrote Morris.
