Ok, so, everyone in the DC Swamp still hates Donald Trump. If you watched the Soviet-style kangaroo court proceeding televised by the networks last night, that’s the main takeaway from it. If you’ve been paying a smidgen of attention to the proceedings of San Fran Nan’s completely illegitimate Jan. 6 committee for the last year - and that is honestly all the attention I’ve been paying to it - you heard nothing new.
They all hate Donald Trump, and are desperate to prevent him from running for the presidency again in 2024, so they’re using this farce to smear him one more time - what is this, about the 30th smear campaign they’ve mounted against him since 2015? - and hoping against hope they can damage him enough to convince him to stay out of the race. If they have to force Merrick Garland to concoct charges against Trump and put him on trial, no one should doubt they will do that, too. They’ve been talking about doing that since, well, since 2015, and have been unable to find anything to hang their hats on yet.
But make no mistake about it, they will do that if push comes to shove.
Personally, I hope Trump stays out of the 2024 race, too, though if he becomes the GOP nominee I will support him once again, if only because the Democrat/communist alternative will be too awful to contemplate. Trump will be 78 in 2024, the same age Biden was when he was [sort of] elected in 2020. He’s too old to be president - if we have learned nothing else from watching Biden shuffle around wondering where he is for the last 16 months, we should have learned that by now. Yes, I know that Trump is more robust today at near-76 than Biden was at that age, but I know from personal experience how rapidly the aging process occurs in any human once you turn 60.
The presidency is a complex and difficult job that just is not for old men - or old women, to the extent we can define what a woman even is at this point. As much as I loved Ronald Reagan, I admit his decline while in office went from noticeable during his first term to shocking and concerning in his final two years in office. Reagan, if you remember, was 77 when he left the presidency, and clearly too old to handle the rigors of the job.
There is nothing wrong with growing old - it happens to us all, doesn’t it - but we have to recognize it in ourselves as it happens and understand the limitations it inevitably imposes on us. Frankly, this is the shame of Joe Biden, that he has imposed his obvious rapid decline and infirmities on the entire country. He’s made his personal burdens our burdens. Hell, they’re the world’s burdens at this point. That is wrong, and if Trump runs, Republican voters should not allow him to do the same thing out of spite.
The GOP has at least one better option to Trump for 2024, which is a welcome change from 2016 and 2020.