Who holds the trump card?

WITH crucial US mid-term less than 90 days away, the political temperature is approaching boiling point, with all the prospects that ex-president Donald Trump will run again – amid early but rising anxiety over against who.

Until and unless any change is announced (between now and November) any Republican candidate will go up against incumbent Joe Biden, the nation’s oldest President, who’s still less than halfway through his first four-year term.

The President has indeed hit the hustings in full form, addressing old and outstanding and mounting new issues occasioned by domestic and international conditions, from inflation and recession to climate change and social justice – and prospects of war.
He’s condemned the US Supreme Court judges’ reverse of the popular Roe v Wade amendments that now bans abortion; he recently got the biggest climate change bill passed in Congress; and the latest job creation figures are very positive and encouraging.

But economic costs of almost US $100 Billion funding for Ukraine weapons and pending costs for the upgrading US military presence in the China Sea following the visit to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi against the background of the hasty and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago, will all eventually feature as election issues ahead of November when current economic conditions do really start biting voters harder.

There are growing calls from within his Democratic Party for Biden not to run for a second term, but not yet loud enough to register on the pre-election national political decibel scale.
It’s to be expected that should Biden not run (for any reason), Vice-President Kamla Harris would be the natural choice, but it’s also very hard to believe she would have no strong challenges for the most powerful job in America.

Trump is out-at-large consolidating his post-election control over his GOP, endorsing winning candidates for November while being urged to declare his candidacy sooner than later.

He won an ace card earlier this week when his backers in Wyoming booted out three-term representative, Liz Cheney, but the rebel Republican daughter of ex-Vice President, Dick Cheney, who co-chaired the January 6 Hearings Committee, has vowed to prevent her former leader from ever getting even near the White House, ever again.

The battered and bruised Cheney was routed at the polls in Wyoming, where Trump got 70 per cent support in 2020 and she was defeated by a Trump-supported candidate with over 37 per cent more votes – a very bad showing – at a time when the ex-President was ahead of Biden in pre-November polls at 50 per cent.
But it’s not the end of the road for the former VP’s daughter, whose father was Defense Secretary during the war in Iraq before becoming Number Two at the White House, alongside George Bush.

VP Cheney’s Baby Doll daughter, who’s rejected the Trump claim that his victory was stolen as the proven Big Lie that it truly is from the very beginning, never got to a stage of being able to challenge Trump for the GOP’s leadership, but she’s out to get him and may even run as an Independent Republican in 2024, which would draw at least the many Republican voters silently uncomfortable with Trump — and thus reduce the party’s vote in November and Trump’s (should he be the candidate in two years’ time at 82).
But as the election clock ticks, at age and time are on neither man’s side: Biden was 76 last June and Trump will be 80 in November.

The Donald isn’t faring well at the legal table either, facing at least four sets of legal investigations ranging from his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol assault, seeking to overturn the 2020 Atlanta election results, legal questions about his private business activities and taking home allegedly sensitive ‘top secret’ and ‘national security’ documents belonging to the White House.
Florida’s Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, also has both eyes set on the race to the White House – and there are signs and sounds that Vice-President Mike Pence and ex Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, may also very well both be shaping up to be front-runners in and for the ultimate race to Washington’s 16 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2024.

Trump supporters claim the FBI raid on his self-described “beautiful home” in Mar-a-Lago has only strengthened his support base, but his critics don’t see how he can escape all the legal nooses hanging over his head.

The White House, Justice Department and FBI are being accused by the Republicans of colluding and conspiring to legally disqualify Trump from running, but the ex-President, while eating his earlier remarks that only guilty persons plead the Fifth Amendment, continues to play victim after invoking it countless times in one legal heating.
Trump and Biden continue to be their respective parties’ leading elections trump cards, leaving the race to the White House still wide open — and voters with at least two years to decide which to bet on.

But it isn’t expected to be business as usual in the new American political norm, as they senior Cheney, who supported her campaign against Trump’s handpicked Wyoming candidate, is expected to stand with, by and behind his battle-weary daughter’s declared long-term bid to keep Trump at bay.

Liz Cheney says she put “country above politics and party” and was defeated simply because she rejected Trump’s Big Lie and accused him of turning GOP supporters into “a personality cult”.
But she also insists that Trump will only win if he runs in 2024 “over my dead body”, in the process writing off her Wyoming whipping by citing that “Abraham Lincoln lost bids for the House and Senate” before winning his big presidential victory.

Ms Cheney isn’t a Hillary Clinton and her dynastic roots aren’t any-less-deep in US political culture than Trump tried to make his from 2016 to 2020, but her determination as one of only two Republicans on the committee presiding over the January 6 hearings not only revealed her determination to continue to reject the Big Lie that most pro-Trump Republican voters still believe, but to continue to politically pin-prick the ex-President in every what-way, before November and over the next two years thereafter.
Against that background, the natural question in this abnormal time in US election politics is: Who holds the trump card?