Donald Trump plans to announce on Tuesday, November 15, that he is running for president, despite urging from many supporters, including key confidant Jason Miller, to delay until after the Georgia runoffs on December 6.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former President Trump, says he’s encouraging Trump to delay an announcement about a possible 2024 White House bid until after the Senate runoff election in Georgia next month.“Of course, President Trump had said he’d be making an announcement on Nov. 15, next Tuesday. I’m advising the president to hold off until after the Georgia race,” Miller, who worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, said on Newsmax.“Priorities A, B and C need to be about Herschel [Walker] right now,” Miller added. “This is bigger than anything else in the country. We’ve got to show the focus is on Georgia.”
Against this backdrop, it’s worth noting that support for Trump appears to be slipping among Republicans.
A new national poll gives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a 7-point edge over former President Donald Trump in a potential presidential primary battle, the first survey of the 2024 cycle to do so — and the first poll since February 2016 to point to a weakening of Trump’s GOP dominance.The YouGov poll, released Friday, found that 42% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents prefer DeSantis over Trump as the party’s 2024 standard-bearer, while 35% of those surveyed remain in the 45th president’s corner.The results were a reversal of the numbers that YouGov found in October, three weeks before the midterm elections.
There is an emerging split among Republican voters over Trump, as evidenced in the comment sections of these recent Legal Insurrection posts:
You can read one of my comments here, regarding the conspiracy theories being pushed about DeSantis.
The dispute is not, as some portray it, as being “pro” or “anti” Trump, or being “establishment” or whatever. There are a lot of people, including I suspect most Legal Insurrection readers, who are “pro” Trump, and who feel he was an excellent president who was miserably undermined like no other president before him, with the full force of a corrupt media and Big Tech married with the FBI, DOJ and intelligence community to bring him down. All of that is true.
But for many people who otherwise support Trump, the issue is whether we are going to fight the last war, or the next one. As unfair and unjust as it might be to an individual politician, it is critical to win. And there are doubts that Trump is the one this time around.
One staunch Trump supporter who recently joined the chorus of people saying it’s time to move on is Don Surber. I’ve interacted with Don occasionally since the early days of Legal Insurrection, though I don’t think I’ve ever met or spoken with him.
Don is as pro-Trump as they come. He’s written books favorable to Trump, including Trump the Press: Don Surber’s take on how the pundits blew the 2016 Republican race and Trump the Establishment: The Elitists Never Learned in 2016.
If you are pro-Trump and you think there is some cabal of big business establishment GOPe globalists conspiring to take down Trump and install supposed puppet Ron DeSantis (which is what is being pushed by certain conspiracy websites and pundits), you need to read what Don Surber says in his blog post, Life After Trump.
Here is an excerpt:
“I was in a bubble this year. Tuesday’s election busted it.Hope is the thing with feathers. We were plucked.We can talk about cheating and the fix being in and mail-in votes. We can go on and on about the deep state and the media. We can spend months in denial but the fact is, Americans do not want Donald John Trump to be their president.He did not save the Republican Party. He spent it….The truth is not a warm puppy. It often is a snowman standing on a glacier. This is one of those times.Governors Kemp, Sununu and DeSantis showed how Tuesday would have gone for Republicans without Trump. Republicans needed to gain 5 House seats. DeSantis delivered 4.Dr. Oz showed how it went with Trump. That’s how poisonous he has become in purple America. We, his fans, see the good in him and the evil in his enemies. But the majority doesn’t and never will. It is a sale that cannot be made. There will be no second term from The Donald.It breaks my heart to see this. I wrote three books on the man. Looking for someone else — likely DeSantis — will cost me readers. As I said about the covid vaccine, you do you.But Trump failed. He cost America the red tsunami we need to rein in Democrats….That is evil. That is unfair. That is the world we live in, for like Sarah Palin, our enemies turned Trump into an albatross. He came so close to bringing Washington down that they now will destroy him, ruin his children and salt his fields because he threatened them. He came ever so close….You learn from history. United we stand. Divided we wind up with a Democrat president and Congress.Everyone makes mistakes. I made one this year. You can either learn from your mistakes or you can keep making the same mistake over and over again.Other bloggers will tell you what you want to hear. I will tell you what you need to know. I was disappointed last night and thought it was a cheat. I woke up this morning and realized I was wrong.Wake up.The good news is Trump softened the field.The better news is Florida is now redder than any state, including West Virginia.”
Surber still likes and supports Trump. He wrote a follow up post, Thank You, Donald Trump:
“Trump like Palin fought. Unlike Palin, he won. He killed Roe v. Wade through the Trump Triplets he put on the Supreme Court. They will also give Justice Clarence Thomas the votes he needs to strike down the insult to the Constitution we call affirmative action.The embassy in Jerusalem is magnificent. His Abraham Accords brought peace and the formal recognition of Israel by five Muslim nations.He kept us out of war. He tried to negotiate peace with Kim Jong Un. He kept us out of the Paris accord and TPP. He woke the world up to the threat of Red China.But above all, President Trump took one for the team — Team MAGA. And by one I mean hundreds. The daily harassment, legal threats and flat-out lies would have broken a lesser man.Critics say he has a large ego. Well, you need something to serve as a buffer from the constant attacks. Given that he helped save New York, built a billion-dollar empire, wrote best-sellers, had a top-ranked TV show and won the presidency on his first try for public office, I would say he earned bragging rights on many, many fronts.Donald Trump indeed brought us to the dance.But if you think it is easy for me to say Change Partners, you don’t know me very well.”
It’s hard for a lot of people. As Surber says, Trump went through attacks the likes of which no other politician has gone through, and serves as a proxy for the brutalization anyone who vocally opposes the regime goes through. It was “cancel culture” on steroids. I don’t know if any other Republican candidate could withstand it.
But that’s not the issue, as Surber notes. The issue is not the last war. At least in Surber’s estimation, and I think in the estimation eventually of the majority of Republicans, Trump is not the general for the next war.
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