The clichéd version of the everyday GOP big donor is the Wall Street fat cat, smoking a cigar between rounds of golf at a Greenwich country club. In point of fact, the boys and girls of the Republican fundraising machine are definitely successful, but they’re a various lot. Lots of them hail from Wall Street; additionally they run small businesses in Dallas, or are entrepreneurs living in Miami and on the lookout for the following recent thing.
And yet, based on my random polling of them in recent weeks, all of them have something in common: They don’t want Donald Trump to run for president in 2024. They are saying this not out of pure disdain. They loved Trump’s policies, the low taxes, fewer regulations and his anti-wokeism. They loved Trump’s willingness to fight.
Yet they fear, intensely, that even a feeble leader like Joe Biden, cowed by the left of his party on every policy matter, will win in 2024, and win easily if Trump is the nominee.
Watching the Biden administration in motion and what went down within the midterms, it’s hard to argue with their logic and fears. We’re not talking just higher taxes and the soft political correctness of Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama. In the course of the past two years, Biden has pushed the country further to the left than any president since perhaps FDR or LBJ.
Many polls show Biden leading Trump in 2024. Getty Images
He looks to forgive student loans, introduce wokeism to the military and spends money like there is no such thing as a end. Biden’s picks for key regulatory posts are a hodgepodge of academics and activists of the left. The lefty billionaire George Soros cheers how Biden is seeding the oversight of the US economy because Soros’s socialist fingerprints can often be found on nearly every selection.
Sounds dystopian, but because the country is forced to maneuver left, the GOP is rudderless to stop it, which is one other grievance of the donor class. Republicans underperformed within the midterms against a Democratic Party headed by a president who was possibly essentially the most intellectually feeble within the history of the republic.
Biden is widely mocked over his lack of mental acumen. His policies have disgraced the nation, from the border crisis, to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the trillions of dollars in unnecessary fiscal spending that spurred an inflationary spiral and a pernicious tax on the working class.
His approval rankings suck. And yet the Dems kicked some real ass, adding to their Senate majority and almost keeping the House. The GOP disaster was then capped off by the circus that surrounded the choice of Kevin McCarthy as the following speaker.
Is that this Donald Trump’s fault? The GOP donor class thinks so because while he stays powerful with a variety of GOP voters, he’s a supremely flawed national leader, as every election since he won the presidency in 2016 shows.
Biden has been slammed for his handling of the migrant crisis. REUTERS
What initially made Trump so appealing to the party, large swaths of the electorate and the donors was that apart from his policies, he was unconventional, an outsider, populist and original. He didn’t read from the establishment script.
What makes him so unappealing now: He has turn into all too predictably crazy and politically toxic.
After all, Trump all the time had some blind spots, including a habit of claiming whatever loopy thing flew into his head. Yet essentially the most recent vintage of The Donald is a person obsessive about doubling down on his fraught personality traits that won’t appeal to most voters, including those inclined to stop the progressives of their tracks.
Ron DeSantis leads Trump in almost every poll. Getty Images
Leadership vacuum
Recall, while the country was on the lookout for stable leadership in the course of the early stages of COVID, his meandering and sometimes inane press conferences. His economic prescription was to maintain throwing money on the economy even at the tip when it was probably not needed because the pandemic waned. A lot of those fraudulent government checks you’ve been reading about got here from the cash handed out in his last 12 months in office.
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Even worse, when the country was largely locked down and needed a pacesetter, he allowed a cipher like Joe Biden to fill the vacuum.
When he left the White House, he didn’t do much to alter the narrative that he was erratic and unfit for office. Trump immediately went on a bizarre jihad against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a rising star within the GOP as his recent re-election showed, all because Kemp wouldn’t endorse the fantasy that Trump won in 2020.
Don’s denialism over his own defeat, the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, his meetings with misanthropes like Kanye, his endorsement of all those terrible midterm candidates who lost, adds to GOP fundraisers’ belief that Trump’s too crazy and toxic to win in 2024, they tell me.
They’re also telling me an answer is at hand in Ron DeSantis. Like Trump, he’s populist (see how he took on Disney) but not a lot that he has alienated the Wall Street crowd, which he has been wooing for the higher a part of a 12 months. He even checks the one box that Trump doesn’t and might’t: He acts exceedingly normal.
In recent meetings with Wall Street C-suite executives and other donors, the Florida governor has clearly indicated he’s able to run for president, apprehensive that he might miss his window of opportunity if he waits. He also has suggested some hesitancy about moving into a nasty primary battle with Trump, I’m told.
Too bad, since the individuals who donate money — particularly from the GOP entrepreneurial class — don’t achieve this frivolously. They made their money spending when and where it mattered to create optimal economic gain.
And so they don’t wish to spend it on Donald Trump, I’m told, because even against Sleepy Joe in 2024, it’s probably a waste of cash.
