“It Feels Like ****ing 2016”
That quote is from an anonymous DeSantis strategist complaining about Trump sucking the air out of the GOP primary and giving his boss zero shot at the White House.
For once, we… agree with the DeSantis camp? We’ve been beating the same drum all year.
The media is stuck in the middle of the Trump Trap. It’s just like 2016, but even worse. The stories are even more deranged (the real probability that the GOP nominee has multiple indictments hanging around his neck). The rhetoric is even more depraved (did you see Trump called for WWIII on Easter Sunday?)
And still, the media is both-sidesing everything Trump does, giving him headline after headline and pretending he’s not what he is: an anti-democratic, neo-Fascist egomaniac who sees the presidency as his only way out from underneath all these criminal charges. He is doing what he is doing to capture headlines and cement his stranglehold on the nomination. It is working.
Repeat after us. Don’t normalize anything Trump does. Don’t accept anything Trump does. Treat Trump like the authoritarian criminally indicted serial liar that he is. Shine a spotlight on his actions – but don’t wash it out with coverage of nothing-burgers like breathless plane footage or analysis of whether he opens his own doors or not. (That’s actual CNN coverage from last week). Instead, point out that on Easter Sunday he called for World War III. This is not hard.
If we don’t do that, we risk running into the exact same trap that our country fell into in 2016. If some poor sap working for DeSantis can figure that out, surely we can get the message across to a majority of voting Americans.
Let’s rephrase that. We will get the message across to the majority of voting Americans. We beat Trump in 2020 and took down 17 of his hand-picked candidates in 2022 by using our playbook. That’s forcing Trump into bad mistakes and shining a massive spotlight on it for every pro-democracy voter to see. We’re already hard at work doing this every day, and we’d appreciate it if you could chip in and help us keep at it until we beat him in 2024.
-The Lincoln Project