Donald Trump gave his strongest hint yet at a speech to CPAC conservatives Saturday that he plans to run for president in 2024.
“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” Trump said. “We’re going to be doing it again, a third time.”
The longer Joe Biden is in office, the more palatable Trump looks to voters who rejected him in 2020.
But as assorted grifters peddle alleged access to the former president at Mar-a-Lago for candidates desperate for his endorsement, his judgment will be on the line at the midterms. The success or failure of his chosen candidates will likely play a part in Republican calculations about 2024.
Also factored in will be the Democratic ticket in 2024.
After an expected midterm shellacking, Biden will be pressed to announce he is not seeking a second term at age 81.
And, as preposterous as it sounds, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Hillary Clinton is the matchup to watch, according to former Democratic strategist Dick Morris.
Ticking all the boxes
The wunderkind behind Bill Clinton’s electoral success in the 1990s, Morris contends that the Democratic establishment will first get behind Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose command of $2 trillion in patronage and jobs via his portfolio gives him an advantage in campaign contributions. On the identity politics card, which is the prerequisite for any Democratic candidate, he ticks the “gay” box, but Morris says that won’t win him black votes.
Instead, a black candidate like Cory Booker will enter the field.
While Kamala Harris ticks two boxes, “female” and “black,” her intractable unpopularity and poor performance as vice president would see her drop out of the primaries before Iowa, as she did in 2016, unless she is a masochist.
The vacuum she leaves will set off “momentum for a woman [candidate] that will benefit Hillary’s candidacy.”
The Democrats’ progressive wing will back AOC, the heir to Bernie Sanders, who ticks two boxes: “female” and “person of color.”
AOC conveniently turns 35 on Oct. 13, 2024, three weeks before the election, meaning she will be constitutionally eligible to be president.
“They will realize it’s either Hillary or their own woman AOC . . . the progressives will rally behind AOC [and] say the reason we lost in ’22 was we didn’t go far enough left [so] we have to go further to the left.”
Cue Hillary Clinton. “She will come into this race as the savior of the Democratic Party,” Morris told listeners to his WABC radio show last week.
The primary contests “will fuse Hillary as the hope that will save us from the extreme left.”
As the primaries drag on, the contest will come down to Hillary and AOC, Morris contends. The grassroots momentum will be with AOC, just as it was with Sanders, and then the establishment will have to decide whether to snatch the presidential nomination from the left, as it did in 2016 and 2020, and hand the nomination to Hillary.
AOC and her supporters are less likely to accept being stiffed without a fight.
Morris is reviled by Democrats for turning on the Clintons and embracing Trump, but his insight into his former comrades is worth considering.
And both Hillary and AOC are everywhere at the moment, showcasing their wares.
The day after Russia invaded Ukraine last week, Hillary weighed in with her best Secretary of State gravitas to blame the Republicans in an interview with MSNBC on “Morning Joe.” She headlined the state Democratic Convention in New York earlier this month, walking onstage to rapturous applause and the song “Unstoppable.”
‘The queen of projection’
If you think Hillary might be stopped by the current drip-drip from the Durham investigation of her scandalous frame-up of Trump as a Russian agent, forget it. Judging by past performance, the liberal media will ignore Durham and no one voting in the Democratic primaries will know or care, just as Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal was kept from voters.
Hillary is the queen of projection, saying last week: “It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get.”
AOC, meanwhile, is on the cover of New York magazine this week and features in a gushing new biography, “Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC,” which compares her to FDR and JFK.
With her baby voice, vacuous ideas and social media narcissism, she seems impossibly unpresidential, but the domestic climate in 2024 may suit her.
Her stint working as a bartender gives her enough credibility to claim membership of the outsider working class, despite the fact she grew up in affluent Westchester suburb.
And with a new cohort of Gen Z voters coming on stream in 2024, brimful of COVID resentment, the chance of a backlash against geriatric candidates is high.
Hillary will be 77 on election day. Trump will be 78, the same age as Biden was when he became president.
There is a rational school of thought that says the older generations have outlived their welcome and screwed up everything royally. Gen Zs had their education and career prospects ruined for a virus that didn’t affect them and have lost respect for selfish elders who betrayed them through the pandemic.
They will drive generational change at the 2024 election, if they have a candidate who speaks their language. Enter AOC, promising free tuition, free health care, climate alarm and indulging the grievances of youth.
President AOC sounds like a joke but so did President Trump.