Coming from a Republican senator who had twice voted to impeach him, it was a remarkable statement.
“I don’t know if he runs in 2024, but if he does, I’m pretty sure he wins the nomination,” said Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah.
If there was any doubt in what Romney meant, he made it crystal clear, adding, “I look at the polls, and polls show that among names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.”
That sets the stage for the former president’s first formal public appearance and speech at the annual CPAC convention on Sunday. This time in booming, wide-open Orlando, Florida, a state that has shunned lockdowns and is benefiting from a resultant economic boom and relative normalcy.
An aide to the former president tells Axios, Trump will speak “as the presumptive nominee.”
It comes a little more than a month into the new Biden administration amid growing concerns about policy direction and about the apparent frailty of the 78-year-old president himself.
“Look, I promise you, we are gonna together beat this. And I think that I, you know, but the idea that over 500 minutes, I have a card — I carry a card with me every day with the total number of folks who have been affected by the virus. As of yesterday, there are 500,071 people [who] have died from this,” said President Biden.
Occasional apparent confusion like that is coinciding with confusing policies. Even some staunch progressives are expressing frustration over blue state lockdowns and school closures that don’t appear to follow the science.
Author Naomi Wolf said, “There is no real science underlying a lot of these closures. It’s because autocratic tyrants at the state and now, then, the national level, are, are creating a kind of merger of corporate power and government power, which is really characteristic of Italian fascism in the 20s, and they’re, they’re using that to engage in kind of emergency orders that simply strip us of our rights — from property rights, to assembly rights, to worship, and all of the rights that our Constitution guarantees.”
Frequent Trump critic Romney cites a litany of early Biden missteps, from the proposed stimulus’s $15 minimum wage …
“Going to $15 an hour is such a huge leap that a lot of small businesses just won’t be able to make it. They just won’t be able to survive with those kind of numbers,” said Romney.
… to it’s $170 billion for schools …
“95% will be spent in the out years. That’s not COVID relief. That’s doing a favor for the teachers’ unions,” said Romney.
… to the massive increase in debt that COVID-19 spending is causing.
Adding Romney, “So if you load up on debt, during a time when the interest rates are low, when the interest rates come back to a higher number, they can come back and bite you.”
Still, Trump is bearing the scars of the Capitol riot. The bombastic style and aggressive talk that caused so many self-inflicted wounds during his presidency may show up at CPAC. Axios reports: “Trump is expected to go after the 10 House Republicans who voted to convict him … and the seven GOP senators who voted with Democrats to convict.”
A younger crop of ambitious Republicans are plotting their own potential runs, and many of them will speak at CPAC. One who stands out is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, already fighting back against what he says is Democrat overreach since the Capitol riot.
“I’m concerned that they continue to treat the Jan. 6 catastrophe that criminal riot as an excuse to seize power to control more power to step on people’s Second Amendment rights to take away their First Amendment rights. Now we’re hearing about a domestic war on terror. I mean, what’s that going to be an excuse to go rifle through the emails and bank statements and personal messages of law-abiding Americans? I mean, this is very, very frightening stuff,” said Hawley.
For all of Trump’s continued popularity among Republicans, he will be 78 years old in 2024, and he remains under active investigation by the Justice Department for tax fraud. The intervening years may produce unforeseeable events that can dramatically change who’s up and who’s down in the presidential sweepstakes.
