Many Democrats seem to have quietly accepted the strong possibility that former President Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election.
They are looking at the polls, which consistently show Trump leading in many of the so-called “battleground” states. They are following news of Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, where prosecutors are failing to convince the public, or the anti-Trump television pundits, even if they do manage to convince the jury.
They are watching the antisemitic riots on college campuses, which are a disaster for Democrats.
Biden claimed that he ran for president because of the neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville in August 2017. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, Biden said there would be even more violence if Trump was reelected. In his Inaugural address, Biden used the word “unity” eight times. And he promised to rid the America of the scourge of “systemic racism.”
Now there is chaos on dozens of campuses, with scenes — as Biden likes to say of Charlottesville — out of the 1930s.
At some universities, authorities allowed masked pro-Hamas activists to patrol the boundaries of their “encampments,” setting up checkpoints and excluding anyone visibly Jewish, or anyone who professed to be a “Zionist” (i.e. someone who believes the State of Israel should exist). They assaulted journalists, vandalized buildings, and demanded snacks.
The thuggery is sure to continue if Biden is reelected, largely because he has done nothing to stop it.
He offered a few words of condemnation, but peppered with words of sympathy for the protesters. His Department of Justice failed to intervene or to investigate the organizers and funders of the protest, despite earlier pursuing parents who had dared to show up to school board meetings to challenge radical ideologies like transgenderism and Critical Race Theory.
Moreover, university administrators have often capitulated to the pro-Palestinian “encampments,” offering them meetings to discuss investment policy; cutting off Israeli “study abroad” programs; and agreeing to drop pending disciplinary charges against students.
The pro-Palestinian movement — including Hamas terrorists, who applauded the “encampments” — has now learned that breaking the rules works, and that there is no penalty for antisemitism.
The protests — directed partly against “Genocide Joe” — are a sign that Biden is losing support among young voters and “progressives.” At the same time, the protests are alienating suburban voters who had turned to Biden in 2020, yearning for stability.
The protests are just one more example of a problem that Biden is unable, or unwilling, to control — from the mess at the border, to the big spending that kicked off inflation in 2021 and is driving up the national debt.
Democrats still appear to be counting on Trump’s many criminal trials — state prosecutions in New York and Georgia, federal prosecutions in D.C. and Florida — to put the former president behind bars, or at least to tarnish his image.
But the New York case looks like a sham; the Georgia prosecutor faces severe ethical problems; the Florida case has been postponed indefinitely; and the D.C. case may fall apart if the Supreme Court throws out one of the key charges.
So Democrats are starting to face reality. Rather panicking, as they did in 2016 when caught by surprise, they are preparing for battle. In California, Attorney General Rob Bonta is preparing lawsuits to stop Trump policies. In D.C., left-wing think tanks are planning to fight conservative policies they believe Trump will enact.
The campaign is just beginning, and with vote-by-mail, there are no guarantees. But to some Democrats, it may as well be over already.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
