By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on October 31, 2021
On August 2, 2015, I published an article predicting that Donald J. Trump, who entered the Republican primary two weeks earlier, would win his Party's nomination for president and the presidency itself. Political pundits thought I had lost my mind. They quickly dismissed my prediction as sheer fantasy.
History proved that I was right and other presidential forecasters wrong. Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
Five years later, I predicted that Donald Trump would lose his re-election bid in 2020 due to his gross mismanagement of America's response to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying from COVID, with no end in sight. Trump's response was: "It is what it is."
My prediction was right, again. Democrat Joe Biden won the presidency in November of 2020 by seven million votes. To be clear, Biden won the election solely because he was the "default" candidate for independent voters who turned away from Trump in six swing states. Without COVID as a factor in the race, Biden would not have won the presidency.
Joe Biden is Likely a One-Term President
Today, Joe Biden is sinking in a number of national polls. At the rate Biden is sinking, he is likely to be a one-term president like Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican George H.W. Bush.
Biden's Afghanistan troop withdrawal debacle in August cost him dearly in the polls. Furthermore, Biden does not have the political resolve necessary to get two new pieces of critical voting rights legislation passed in Congress. Additionally, Biden lacked the leadership necessary to pass much of his highly touted $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill. A scaled down $1.75 trillion version of the "Build Back Better" legislation still has not passed in Congress.
As Biden approaches the end of his first year in office, it is clear that he has diminished charisma, energy, and credibility. Biden's immigration policies are incoherent. He has filled only a fraction of the 4,000 political positions that serve at the pleasure of the president. On most days, Biden seems lost unless he is reading from a teleprompter.
Most Democrats seem to be as frustrated with Biden's "leadership" abilities as are Independents like me. Biden is a marshmallow politician whose time on the Washington scene has come and gone.
Trump is the De Facto Leader of the Republican Party
Donald Trump is the de facto leader of the Republican Party today, even though he is out of office and banned from Facebook and Twitter. A recent poll in Iowa showed that 90% of Republican voters favor Trump should he run again in 2024.
Most Republicans in Congress, in state governorships, and in state legislatures still worship Trump as the Party's leader. None of them seem to care that Trump continues to lie about his 2020 election loss, which he attributes to widespread voter fraud that no one has been able to prove in more than 60 court cases, endless post-election contests, and election outcome audits.
Beyond Trump, none of the other Republicans has enough stature or voter appeal to be selected as the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nominee. They are all miniature clones of Trump, but without Trump's flair for non-stop drama.
Barring divine intervention from God, Donald Trump will be the likely Republican nominee in 2024. If Joe Biden runs again, I predict that he will lose to Trump. If Biden foregoes re-election and Kamala Harris runs for president, I predict that Trump will rout her in the November 2024 general election.
Factors That Favor a Trump Victory
Several factors favor a Trump victory in 2024. All of them have racial underpinnings.
First, Trump is a known political commodity to his base of voters. He understands the primary motivation of his voters and he plays to it. Trump's voters are overwhelmingly white conservatives who live in fear that whites will soon become the "minority" population in America. They want what conservatives call "stability and cultural continuity of the nation." In street language, they want white folks to continue running the political, economic, and cultural affairs in America.
Based upon 2020 Census data and demographic trends over the last 50 years, whites will become a "minority" population by 2030. Their birth rates have plummeted since 2008. The 2020 Census showed, for the first time, that more whites died than were born during the past ten years. Furthermore, of the children born in America during this period, the majority were of Hispanic and African-American ethnicity.
Second, whether it's publicly acknowledged or not, racial animus drives all politics in the Republican Party. As FOX talk show host Tucker Carlson explains in his endorsement of the "great replacement " conspiracy theory, Democrats are replacing white Americans with nonwhite immigrants in order to increase their vote tallies. This is a patently false assertion that plays well in Republican circles. What is more, it has produced waves of racist voter suppression laws that America has not seen since the Jim Crow era (1896 to 1965).
Race animus is also driving unprecedented levels of gerrymandering in legislative redistricting plans enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures. Additionally, race has driven legislation that authorizes Republican-controlled legislatures to essentially nullify any presidential election results in their states that they do not like.
Third, Trump knows that, in the eyes of his voters, the political ends the Republican Party seeks justify the means that Trump and his acolytes deploy. For example, Trump and his supporters believe that the constitutional right to abortion must be nullified or overturned because too many whites babies are being aborted at a time when white birth rates are already plummeting. Also, Republican support for police officers is "great" when officers are abusing and killing black unarmed suspects. However, this support was sorely lacking when uniformed police officers tried to stop armed white insurrectionists from invading the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a violent effort to block the certification of Biden as president.
Furthermore, open borders were fine in America when the migrants, both legal or illegal, were whites who came from predominantly white European countries. This is why the United States openly recruited white European immigrants to come to America from 1862 to 1986 under the Homestead Act of 1862 and gave three million of those who responded to the call a minimum of 160 acres of free land (with mineral and timber rights included). It did not matter to the U.S. government whether these white migrants came through Ellis Island in New York, or through California, Washington state, or Oregon, or through America's open borders with Canada or Mexico.
In fact, Donald Trump's paternal grandfather, who was a criminal in Europe, came to America during this open recruitment period. Once he was on U.S. soil, Trump's grandfather continued and expanded his criminal enterprise. He later took his ill-gotten gains back to Germany and tried to repatriate the family. However, Germany refused to return his citizenship and demanded that he leave due to his violations of German law.
Fourth, Trump has voter permission to trash any Republican who crosses him. Trump's rhetorical castration of Jeff Sessions, his former Attorney General and a popular four-term U.S. Senator from Alabama, is a classic example of this treatment. Sessions was the first Republican U.S. Senator to endorse Trump's 2020 run for president. When Trump won, he appointed Sessions as Attorney General. Three months later, Trump was publicly bashing Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Trump called Sessions an "idiot," a "traitor," "mentally retarded," and a "dumb Southerner." Trump even made fun of Sessions' Southern accent and denigrated his legal education at The University of Alabama. Despite Trump's unabated bashing of Sessions, "dumb Southerners," and The University of Alabama, he won Alabama by a 20% margin in 2020.
Fifth, from a white, conservative voter perspective, Donald Trump is the only proven Republican candidate who will say and do whatever is necessary to stop or slow the "browning of America." Nothing else seems to matter to his hardcore base of voters. The rest of the presidential candidates are light-weight, dollar-store imitators.
Epilogue
The outcome of the 2024 election will boil down to five or six swing states, again. I do not think Biden can win re-election. At this juncture, Kamala Harris does not appear to be a politically viable stand-in as the Democratic nominee.
It does not seem that Congress will pass Biden's new voting rights legislation to protect his traditional base of voters of color. What is worse, President Biden simply does not have the political will or muscle to get it done.
Meanwhile, the arch-conservative, politically-motivated, U.S. Supreme Court continues to engage in unabashed judicial activism to gut the rights of voters of color between now and the 2024 election, using any and all means necessary. The Court seems hell-bent on returning America to the Dred Scott era (1857 to 1896) when it proudly announced from the bench in Washington, on a 7-2 vote, that blacks in America, whether enslaved or free, "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect."
Joe Biden's Department of Justice appears to be too weak and timid to protect his base of Democratic voters from the resurgence of Jim Crow era voter suppression and nullification measures at the state level. Republicans in state government have seized control of the electoral process, from setting voter registration requirements, to saying how, when, and where people can vote, to nullifying election results. They are prepared to do whatever it takes to install a kleptocratic form of white "minority rule" in American politics.
