by Ned Ryun
Former President Donald Trump should announce his election bid for 2024 on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Here’s why.
Trump is an asset—and not, as beltway insiders like to assert—a liability on the campaign trail, especially in key Senate and gubernatorial races. Donald Trump revitalized a crumbling, corporatist Republican Party and began making it his own America First party, which reinvigorated it. He turned it into a party that welcomed the working class, Hispanics, black Americans, and Asian Americans. Now these groups are voting red, or at least leaving the Democratic Party, in staggering numbers; there’s a reason a million voters have changed parties in the last year from Democrat to Republican. It’s not because of anything Mitch McConnell or most other top Republicans have done. It’s Trump and his policies which finally reshaped the GOP.
Without Trump announcing, the face of the midterms would be McConnell and other mainstream and uninspiring GOP types. Leaving McConnell’s occasional good works on behalf of Republicans aside, in the last year he helped sell out the American people on sweeping gun control legislation and bragged about his central role in pushing Biden’s incoherent Ukraine strategy, costing American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. His sense of what works and inspires voters is dated. A Trump announcement helps remind Americans what it was like when his America First vision was in power. For example:
- Peace broke out all over the world. His strong but restrained foreign policy led to massive improvements in the Middle East. Problematic world leaders were too nervous to invade other countries within the United States’ sphere of influence. China was beginning to be taken on as the economic adversary it is. Most amazingly, no new wars began.
- When he left office, inflation was an average of 1.7 percent.
- Gas prices were an average of $2 per gallon and our domestic energy was a net exporter.
- Unemployment fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest since 1969.
- The border wall and his approach on immigration were moving our porous southern border in a more controlled direction.
- Constitutional judges were appointed to the Supreme Court that were instrumental in deciding the Dobbs case and other favorable decisions on gun rights.
Trump’s announcement and presence during the last two months of the midterm campaign would be a stark reminder of what was compared to what is and his message would be that it is time to start taking our country back now and we’re going to do it this November.
We’re going to see a red wave the size of which we’ve not seen for over a decade, maybe even in a generation, that could very well set up Republicans for another landslide victory in 2024. But this can only happen if we maximize November 8 and we need Trump to energize the independent working class voters needed for a Republican electoral tsunami.
The complaints most have about Trump concern his style, not the substance of his presidency. Plus, when one considers the number of accomplishments, despite four years of relentless attacks, what he was able to accomplish is nothing short of phenomenal.
Announcing his bid before the midterms also controls the narrative following the elections. Republicans will win back both the House and the Senate this November, and in all likelihood hundreds of state legislative seats as well as key gubernatorial and other statewide offices. After the rousing wins in the midterms, should Trump wait to make his announcement after these wins, the corporate propagandists who loathe him will immediately start the narrative of, “Well Republicans won in 2022, but now they’re saddled with Trump.” Even now they’re begging him not to announce prior to November.
Trump needs to get ahead of the narrative and an announcement shortly after Labor Day will guarantee the midterms will ratify the fact he is more of an asset than a liability. It will remind people of how life was under him and how we can return to that once again with a second Trump presidency.
What we are seeing right now with the January 6 show trials is an attempt to disqualify Trump from running and ostracize his voters from the body politic. That cannot be allowed to stand. Furthermore, even though the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling on the illegality of unsecured ballot boxes and other revelations about the manipulation and outright defiance of state laws and constitutions in the 2020 elections are all coming to light, corporate media are claiming questions about election integrity are without merit. There is no other Republican standing up as vehemently to these lies, the two standards of justice, and the weaponization of institutions against the Republican Party like Donald Trump.
If there is to be a stunning rebuke to those who manipulated and rigged the 2020 elections, those who are currently weaponizing the law against Republicans, it can only be Trump in 2024. A win for him in the 2024 presidential election would be a massive step in the direction of setting things right in this country. And it would be a bold step against the coordinated political and media campaign to take Trump off the playing field.
– – –
Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority. You can find him on Twitter @nedryun.
