By One of former President Donald Trump’s strange powers revolves around how he manages to drive his opposition so crazy that they act like he does, which only helps him.
In 2016, during the height of the Republican presidential primary, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who was considered the dream GOP candidate back then, weirdly tried to take Trump’s schtick of giving nicknames to his opponents, in this case, labeling Rubio “Little Marco.”
Senator Rubio, wrote NBC News at the time, “unleashed an array of sharp attacks on Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, jabbing at his ‘small hands’ and ‘spray tan.’
‘And you know what they say about guys with small hands,’ Rubio said with a smile, prompting stunned laughter from the crowd.”
As always, Trump used the comments against the Florida senator.
Fast forward eight years, and now Obama’s chief political consultant is begging Democrats not to fall for the similar, though much more dangerous, tactic regarding the radical move of responding to Trump’s claims of the 2020 election being “rigged” by “rigging” the 2024 election.
Former top Obama adviser David Axelrod warned Friday that a court decision removing former President Donald Trump from the primary ballot “would rip the country apart,” reports The New York Post.
“I have very, very strong reservations about all of this,” Axelrod said on CNN on Friday.
“I do think it would rip the country apart if he were actually prevented from running because tens of millions of people want to vote for him.”
Axelrod said that the Democrats’ best bet on beating Trump is in the polls.
“I think if you’re going to beat Donald Trump, you’re going to probably have to do it at the polls,” he continued.
Axelrod isn’t the only Democrat who has realized that liberals are playing with fire by taking such anti-democratic stances toward Trump’s ballot access.
The Hill reported that Rep. Jared Golden, a Democratic congressman from Maine, “criticized the decision by the Maine secretary of state to bar former President Trump from the primary ballot, saying he should only be left off if convicted of a crime.
The moderate Democrat said he believes Trump is responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, but that he should still be on the electoral ballot.
‘I voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection. I do not believe he should be re-elected as President of the United States,” Golden said in a statement. ‘However, we are a nation of laws, therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should not be allowed on the ballot.’”
The Wall Street Journal lambasted the Democrats in Maine and Colorado for giving Trump a “huge in-kind contribution” through their radical moves to keep the former president off the ballot.
The newspaper writes, “Ms. Bellows’s administrative ruling largely tracks the opinion last week from the Colorado Supreme Court, except she blows through all the knotty legal questions in a breezy 34 pages. Section 3 was passed after the Civil War to stop Confederates who “engaged in insurrection” from retaking government posts. Applying it to Mr. Trump and the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, involves a series of dubious legal propositions.
Was Jan. 6 an “insurrection”? She says yes and accepts a definition that might encompass all sorts of political lawbreaking. Did Mr. Trump “engage” in it? This question “is a closer one,” she writes. But by “a preponderance of the evidence,” she finds that Mr. Trump’s actions were “incitement of insurrection,” which in her view is enough to trigger Section 3.
Skepticism of this legal daisy chain is not a defense of Mr. Trump. After filling up his supporters with falsehoods about a stolen election, calling a Jan. 6 rally, riling up the crowd, and urging it to march on the Capitol, Mr. Trump is responsible for what happened. His apparent reluctance to call off the mob or help a besieged Congress, as he watched the violence on TV, was a dereliction of the highest order.
A statesman driven by the public interest, instead of personal vindictiveness, wouldn’t have played with this fire. But lengthy Jan. 6 investigations have produced no evidence that Mr. Trump was privately communicating with the rioters or knew in advance what the vanguard in the crowd was going to do. Jan. 6 was not the Civil War or even the Whiskey Rebellion.”
The newspaper noted that Bellows is likely making her move in a desperate attempt to win higher office, but is also “giving Mr. Trump another chance to tell Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election before the voting begins.”
Some have argued that Democrats are making their moves to purposely “elevate” the unpopular former president because he’s the only Republican Joe Biden has a chance to beat, a move similar to what Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But as Axelrod and many others have noted, liberals hoping to choose the Republican nominee should be careful what they wish for.
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