Joe Biden's Useful Idiot: Are The Democrats Tricking Republicans Into Nominating Trump?

Mod: If Putin can use Traitor Trump, why can't pro-Americans as well?

Are Democrats Tricking Republicans Into Nominating Trump? Conservative elites driven to madness by DeSantis’s collapse (New York Magazinelink): A fact that has somehow become even more obvious over the last few months is that Republican voters truly adore Donald Trump. At the beginning of the year, there appeared to be a strong chance the party’s voting base could be weaned off its cult-worship relationship with the 45th president and reattached to a more reliable, coherent, and less criminally implicated presidential nominee like Ron DeSantis. 

As that prospect has waned, despair has set in especially deep for a specific cohort: the anti-anti-Trumpers— conservative Republicans who desperately wish Trump were not their party’s leader, but if he is, will ultimately devote most of their energy to attacking his critics.

The anti-anti-Trumpers dreamed that their yearslong humiliation of having to run interference for a man they loathed was about to end. Now they must face up to the likelihood of devoting at least the next 15 months, and possibly more than five years, to insisting Trump’s multitudinous crimes are no worse than things done by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and so on.

Who would force them once again into such a mortifying position? Many of the anti-anti-Trumpers have identified the culprit for Trump’s hammerlock on the primary. It is the Democrats.

Here are half a dozen examples of anti-anti-Trumpers arguing, with varying degrees of explicitness, that the Trump nomination is being foisted onto the Republicans by the party’s enemies.

Rich Lowry’s July 23 column, headlined, “Trump’s enemies pursue more and more indictments — to ensure his 2024 nomination,” argues that the multiple prosecutions of Trump have not only the effect, but also the intent, of making him the party’s nominee:

“Donald Trump and his adversaries … are seeking the same thing — Trump as the Republican nominee, either so he can sweep to victory (Trump’s view) or be beaten again and pay the price for his crimes (the Democrats’ view). …

Consider this thought experiment: If the Justice Department and the other prosecutors knew that the indictments guaranteed a Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott nomination, would they still go through with them?

If they thought they made Trump a stronger general-election candidate and the favorite to beat Joe Biden, would they still pull the trigger?”

The same day, National Review’s Dan McLaughlin complained Republican voters supporting Trump were “being played for marks,” without saying directly who was tricking them or why.