The Long Read: 2024 is an election about 10/7, not 1/6

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : Trump will again turn to the Federalist Society for suggestions of excellent appointees to the federal bench.
57% : If and when Trump secures the GOP nomination, I hope he will immediately name a running mate from the list I've already posted earlier this week in Fox News Opinion: Sen. Tom Cotton, Gallagher, Sen. Joni Ernst, Pompeo, O'Brien or Sen. Dan Sullivan.
57% : IF Trump gets the nomination and IF he wins the election, he will take office on Monday, January 20, 2025.
50% : I expect Trump will pay much closer attention to appointees everywhere in the executive branch, and will also blanket the town with pardons for the extraordinary prosecutions we have seen from a deeply politicized Department of Justice.
49% : This is the political and constitutional equivalent of fantasy football, and a vigorous league for such speculations does indeed exist inside editorial pages and Beltway and New York City "think tanks," but that is not what happens in the real world.
48% : The panic merchants are concerned that Trump will govern constitutionally and effectively pursuant to his objectives as he lays them out in the months ahead.
47% : Playing yet another encore set doesn't, however, amuse people who have an abiding faith in the strength of the Constitution, because these cries of havoc and "Trump is coming, hide the children" are all based on the idea, always implicit and sometimes explicit, that a second Trump term would be lawless and Trump in a position to govern outside the law.
46% : A second Trump term will be more effective than the first in advancing the former president's avowed and legitimate political objectives, such as ridding the administrative state of career employees who act contrary to the direction of their political appointee masters.
46% : They may have deep aesthetic objections to Trump, but on the whole, they would like the country to survive and their children and grandchildren to live in freedom and prosperity.
44% : All of these platforms have published alarmist cri de coeurs about the return of Trump since December.
44% : The hysteria among the folks on whom Donald Trump casts a full spell of despair would be amusing -- indeed it is already amusing to some -- if it wasn't both predictable and boring.
44% : CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPWe need to focus on the real threats to this country -- the alliance of China, Russia and Iran -- and the collapse of the border, much of public secondary education and almost all of elite institutions of higher Ed.
42% : Trump is a political actor.
39% : It seems like Jack Smith has concluded Trump didn't cause the riot and the vast majority of Americans seem to agree with that.
38% : Trump would yield that office four years hence, but the Never Trump won't give up theirs, no matter how foolish they appear in the rear-view mirror.
38% : They are really worried that there will be a whole lot more of Pompeos and many fewer Navarros, as Trump now knows who gets stuff done.
36% : They are afraid, in short, of Trump not being buffaloed a second time by the permanent administrative state and its heels-dug-in-bureaucrats.
32% : Well, no one actually said or wrote that guillotines are being sharpened, but that specific red light warning may have simply not made it past the editors of the river of op-eds warnings about the return of Donald Trump appearing in recent weeks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Hill or The Atlantic.
31% : There is no reasonable argument that Trump would refuse to comply with any ruling against him.
31% : They are concerned that Trump will finish his wall on the border (and that it will in fact prove to be very effective in greatly curbing illegal immigration).
30% : By contrast, lots of people quit when they disagreed with Trump.
30% : The GOP has at least overwhelmingly rejected the idea that Trump is culpable for the riot.
29% : "But what if Trump does 'X' and the Court doesn't stop him?"
29% : That's not illegal under the Brandenburg test because they lack the ability to move public opinion to immediate violence, of course, but will they agree to at least stipulate that, if Trump wins wholly, they failed to persuade?
27% : Trump did not do that.
26% : Nostradamuses of doom are overflowing the Acela corridor as frightened residents of the Beltway contemplate a second term of President Trump.
26% : Every bit of conjecture to the contrary is pure pulp fiction, fiction that is never specific as to what Trump would do that is lawless and why courts would allow such lawlessness if it actually happened.
24% : The doom-criers are actually not concerned about Trump winning and setting up some sort of Gestapo.
23% : The "people" may indeed be wholly sick and tired not of Trump but of Manhattan-Beltway media elites telling them that what they think and their sincerely held views are illegitimate.
22% : The alarmists have been willing to suggest for three years now that Trump should have been tried for inciting the riot.
21% : Fool him twice, shame on Trump.
19% : If anyone genuinely believes that Donald Trump is a "threat to democracy" they have either drunk the Kool-Aid or spilled it on their copies of the Constitution.
18% : And their alarm about Trump refusing to leave after one more term is simply idiotic.
16% : Will the alarmists concede or go the full route of those Congressional supporters of Al Gore in 2001, John Kerry in 2005 and Hillary Clinton in 2017 and file objections during the counting of the votes of the Electoral College or have Democrats now decided that is bad form and a "threat to democracy?"My request: Will those who will refuse to agree to the peaceful transfer of power back to Trump if he wins, please stand up right now and tell us what they plan on doing?
14% : And the folks indulging it now in their faux frenzies over a hypothetical nomination and subsequent election of Donald Trump are simply caught up in make-believe dramas that have as much to do with reality as "The Hunger Games.
13% : Trump won't be setting up a secret police, but he will be dismissing Christopher Wray and everyone else at the top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
11% : Rebukes of presidents by the Supreme Court that have been acquiesced in quickly by presidents have happened under President Biden (the student loan forgiveness fiasco), President Trump (the census questionnaire affair), President Obama (his illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board) and President Bush (decisions concerning the due process rights of prisoners at Gitmo.)
9% : Trump is going to thrash President Biden and 2.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.