Trump 2028
Facing another self-inflicted humiliation in November, what will The Donald’s fourth consecutive reality TV run for president look like four years later? You’re watching it now.
By Mark Cromer
As Labor Day approaches it seems increasingly likely that an emerging majority of the American electorate is poised to turn the voting booth this fall into a national Porta-potty of sorts, dropping a deuce on Donald Trump in a repudiation of his floating stinker of a campaign.
A week after national Democrats handed Chicago back over to the indigenous progressive cannibals in Chi-town, those flesh-feeders who promptly resumed devouring the city’s carcass with their social engineering projects that keep career criminals on the streets and bloodied victims begging as business owners flee, Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled ahead nationally and is beating Trump in seven out of eight key states, leading him in Nevada, Arizona, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
In Georgia, Trump has less than an eyelash of a lead but the state is virtually in a dead heat.
But the even bigger tell of an impending electoral catastrophe for the Republicans can be found in the polling data emerging out of two deep blue bastions, California and New York, where according to polling maven Nate Silver’s exhaustive FiveThirtyEight model Harris is beating Trump by staggering margins: 31% in the Golden State and 17% in the Empire State.
Those fail-proof margins are literally the life’s work and legacy of so many activist progressive Democrats, who toiled for decades as the Left slithered, seeped and then surged into the cultural power centers as they were quietly surrendered by conservatives while the long-term demographic renovation continued at full bore courtesy of the sustained mass migration that the Republicans and Democrats engineered together.
The results of the Left’s long march through the institutions on the road to permanent power and the Republicans greed-fueled self-dealing retreat can be seen throughout those impenetrable margins in New York and California, two massive states now refitted as progressive battlewagons unleashing their broadsides of horrific street crime to explode across the crumbling cityscapes and into the suburbs. California and New York provide the pre-landing bombardment on the shoreline of the heartland as the homeless crisis amplifies and is attached to the mass influx of migrants into every manner of dwelling and other resources made available to accommodate them—accommodations never offered or afforded to the American indigent.
In California and New York there is simply no bottom to the bad. The quality of life in these states can now never become terrible enough to resuscitate the GOP as a viable governing entity and going political concern that can rival the Democrats.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2022 triumph over Lee Zeldin for the keys to the governor’s mansion in Albany demonstrated in real world terms that the era of George Pataki, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg had come to a permanent end and that no amount of wanton crime and brazen government malfeasance could stir enough voter revulsion to propel a ‘law and order’ candidate like Zeldin to victory. Hochul openly sneered at voters raising the alarm over crime and was rewarded for her rebuke by masochistic voters who turned out to provide her with a comfortable win over her Republican rival Zeldin, who had made ending the violent chaos the centerpiece of his campaign.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose personal net worth has reportedly cruised north of $20 million, can always be found flashing his Hollywood smile as he continues to deftly manage the destruction of the state, administering policies and initiatives like a cyanide infusion disguised as saline drip that saw Sacramento throw $24 billion into the homeless cauldron that exploded the spread of street zombies even further across the state. But burning a cool $24 billion to accelerate the homeless crisis isn’t even the half of it in California today, where Newsom and his progressive cohort in the legislature have released tens of thousands of hardcore career criminals and violent predators back onto the streets since 2019, when California’s Kingfish Jerry Brown handed the governor’s chair and pen over to Newsom.
Yet no matter how badly the quality of life decomposes in California, Newsom and his progressives have simply transcended the risk of electoral rebuke.
Newsom won in a landslide in 2018, crushed a recall effort at the ballot box in 2021 and smashed his forgettable Republican opponent in 2022. Newsom can absolutely shut the state down again and order mask mandates, social distancing restrictions, the closing of the government’s ‘schools’ and the arrest of any business owner or resident that dared to defy his edicts all while live streaming his proclamations from The French Laundry for a lark, his feet up on the Getty’s reserved table, smoking a Havana and savoring a $440 bottle of Pinot Noir Clos du Ciel and still waltz to reelection in 2026.
So, it should not have been surprising that Trump appeared on the Dr. Phil Show this week to declare that he would actually win California if the election results were accurately tabulated, a victory he is certain of in no small measure because of what he believes is his widespread support among the state’s Latino vote.
That and he said that he saw a lot of Trump campaign signs dotting people’s yards.
Trump’s reality-free bravado is not surprising because that sort of surreal declaration—sans any factual basis to anchor it in reality—is shaping up to be, once again, his campaign’s signature. Just as it was in 2020, Trump’s campaign in 2024 is being run as an unscripted television show that features him vamping for the camera and talking more about himself than the fate of the nation he seeks to lead once more.
While Trump can still pull out a victory in November, and a decisive one at that, his decision to program another season of The Trump Show instead of aggressively pursuing a detailed and focused line of attack on the policy positions of the two most radical Leftist candidates in modern American history means that he is on a trajectory that sees the election slipping through his fingers a little more with every passing day.
Trump should only be talking to voters about crime, mass migration, the cost-of-living and keeping the United States out of wars around the globe. He should describe in grim detail the progressive policies that Harris and Walz have promoted over their political lifetimes and offer equally detailed accounts of just how he is going to prevent their further spread and reverse them.
Burping cheap insults at Harris and Walz to the delight of his crowds are merely the belches of a dying campaign.
One only need to look at the numbers coming out of Texas and Florida, the two biggest reliable slices of the electoral pie for the GOP, to understand the true peril that Trump’s retreaded road show is now leading the Republicans. In Texas, Trump leads Harris by 5%, just outside the margin of error, and in Florida he doesn’t even have a 4% lead over her. When contrasted with huge margins that Harris can count on in California and New York, it’s clear Trump’s improvisational riffs for Dr. Phil’s audience are a jump-the-shark moment for his campaign.
Trump’s senior campaign advisors aren’t feeding him powerful lines of attack to employ relentlessly and to devastating effect on the stump, but rather they continue to feed his unquenchable ego with ever more fantastical morsels: Trump will win the black vote. Trump might win in New York. Trump may prevail in New Jersey. Trump can win in California.
These are the lies that Trump longs to hear and he loves to repeat them to the point of perhaps actually believing them.
So does Fox News Channel, where Laura Ingraham was so ebullient on her The Ingraham Angle show earlier this year that she was encouraging Trump to mount “a 50-state campaign” that would carry his MAGA banners from Oregon and Washington to Vermont and Massachusetts and throughout every blue state bastion in-between. Ingraham was fantasy role-playing that Trump can make Democrats fight desperately for voters in Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and Portland—all up for grabs according to Ingraham’s make-believe for TV assessment.
Jesse ‘Prime Time’ Watters has also indulged some bedtime fairytale telling for Trump, repeating his 2020 estimation that Trump was poised to roll up an unprecedented number of black voters, the likes of which the Republicans had not seen turn out for them since Reconstruction. The sweeping gains Trump will make among blacks, according to Watters, will provide the bedrock to a deep multiethnic coalition of voters that will lead the Republicans to new electoral heights and reshape the 21st Century political landscape in America.
But of course, an aggressive 50-state Trump campaign that’s fueled by a rapidly growing multiethnic voter base is the stuff fiction that sustains Trump’s staggering ego but propels his self-delusion.
Trump will once again lose something close to 90% of the black vote and likely more than 60% of the Latino vote in November. In 2016, Trump clocked 29% of the Latino vote and improved that to 32% in 2020, but losing two-out-of-every-three voters in any demographic is not a recipe for victory and relentlessly pandering to a demographic in which 90 out of every 100 voters will cast their ballots against you is pathetic.
Trump can still in fact win in November, but it’s an increasingly doubtful victory unless he focuses on his actual base of working-class white voters—that proletariat the media sniffs at as ‘rural voters’ without noticing they remain the single largest voting bloc in the nation—and expanding their turnout everywhere and particularly in the battleground states. The only path Trump has to return to the White House in 2024 is to restore his 2016 share of that sedated electoral giant and expand its presence at the polls by just several percentage points in the key states.
If he does that, he will win decisively.
But Trump still can’t seem to bring himself to concentrate long enough to ponder what that reality actually means, what conclusions he should draw from it and what course corrections—or in his specific case, behavior modifications—he should make in a last-ditch effort to salvage his gambit to be returned to the White House.
He is clearly dumbfounded and increasingly disturbed that an election that seemed in the bag for him a month ago is now slipping away a little more each day while the furor over the attempt on his life has disappeared from the public discourse almost as fast as his would-be assassin did from the planet courtesy of a Secret Service bullet train.
As The Trump Show goes on to what may not be a cliff-hanger ending this season, viewers will know what to expect if at the finale Trump loses once again: he will declare the results rigged and the election stolen before announcing his candidacy for 2028.
Who knows, he may even bring Omarosa back.
