Over the past eight-plus years, political analysts of all stripes have tended to give Trump the wrong sort of credit for the support he enjoys with voters. Leftists, in particular, marvel at former President Donald Trump's seeming ability to create positions with which so many Americans agree.
They are spectacularly wrong.
Trump has not created viewpoints among Americans; he has recognized and capitalized on strong sentiments that existed before his foray into politics, sentiments most other Republicans either failed to see or refused to act on.
(That's a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that the same Republicans who can't stand Trump — and have aligned with Democrats to undermine him — had been willing to throw their own voters under the bus time after time, on issue after issue. Which is why they are no longer in control of the Republican Party. Sorry, not sorry. Buh-bye.)
The Left's fundamental error explains why they have been so hell-bent on destroying Trump personally. According to their worldview, if they can just get rid of Trump, the ideas they think he is responsible for creating will go away.
For their part, establishment Republicans have also labored under the misimpression that removing Trump will allow them to return to business as usual. Nope. That ship has sailed.
But the Democrats are just as wrong about their problems with President Joe Biden. They are behaving as if Biden himself is the problem.
While it is true that he is in the grips of advancing senility and clearly incompetent to perform the duties of president of the United States, the Democratic Party's problems are far deeper — a fact that should be evident to them, given how little support they can drum up for literally anyone else in the party who is nationally known.
The battle in 2024 is not really about Trump versus Biden. It is a battle between two completely different views of what America should be.
It's about having a government whose powers are restrained by the Constitution, versus an exploding, all-powerful surveillance state regulating, censoring and controlling every aspect of Americans' lives.
It is about individual liberty tempered by personal morality, integrity and responsibility, versus unrestrained license reined in only by government control.
It's the desire for a society where religious faith is viewed as fundamental to human flourishing, versus one where it is mocked and marginalized.
It is the belief in a culture that protects the family, children's health and their innocence, versus one that attacks the family and indulges certain adults' pathological need for children's knowledge and approval of their sexual predilections.
It's the belief in entrepreneurial capitalism and the freedom to create enterprises that support families and communities and build a strong middle class, versus oppressive regulation, confiscatory taxation and increasing numbers dependent upon a welfare state.
It's about domestic energy production and common-sense environmental protection, versus dependence upon foreign and hostile regimes, and economically destructive regulations justified by hysterical and unsubstantiated predictions about "climate change."
It's about restoring the rigor to American education, versus trendy pablum, Marxist indoctrination and corrosive identity politics.
It's about legitimate scientific inquiry, versus frivolous "scholarship" and science captured and politicized by money and special interests.
It's about safe neighborhoods and protecting law-abiding citizens by punishing crime, versus excusing theft, condoning drug use in the streets and releasing criminals to offend again.
It's about a controlled process of legal immigration for those who can contribute meaningfully to America, versus open borders and the importation of millions upon millions of the world's poor in a thinly veiled effort at massive wealth redistribution.
It is about America maintaining its national sovereignty versus capitulating to globalism.
Trump voters see this. In fact, Trump's increasing support in 2020, and again during this election cycle (even before the shocking but predictable attack on his life last week), is proof that as more Americans witness the consequences of the Democratic Party's ultra-left-wing policies, larger numbers recognize this battle for what it is.
Those voters are moving to Trump, and they include every conceivable demographic.
Today's Democratic Party — and their shills in the media — already know that Americans don't want what they're selling, which is why they deflect attention away from their ultimate policy goals by confecting increasingly unhinged accusations about Trump, insulting his supporters and engaging in classic psychological projection.
It is not Trump but the Democratic Party in its current incarnation (and their old-guard allies in the GOP) who "threaten our democracy" with election laws that facilitate fraud and other interference, pointless wars and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars laundered through foreign countries, censorship and disinformation, the allowance of millions of illegal immigrants into the country, drug and child sex trafficking, soft-on-crime policies, massive retail theft, violent riots and urban destruction; homelessness, substance abuse, the sexualization of children and corrosion of our public education system; bloated, unelected and unaccountable regulatory agencies; a two-tiered injustice system and the politicization of law enforcement; demonization of ordinary American citizens as "domestic terrorists" and corresponding deprivation of their constitutional due process rights; not to mention government power grabs grounded in specious claims of "climate change," the imminent destruction of our energy, manufacturing and agricultural sectors, and the intent to relinquish our national sovereignty to a handful of global elites bent upon political and economic control worldwide.
Notwithstanding the years of propaganda campaigns designed to deceive and distract the public, every day more Americans see the consequences of these policies, and they do not want them.
Even if Trump were unable to run; even if Biden were to be replaced, it's too late; the battle lines have been drawn. It is the policies of the Left that ever-larger numbers of Americans are rejecting.
Changing the candidates won't change that.
Laura Hollis is an attorney and university professor who has taught courses in law and business for more than 30 years. Her legal publications have appeared in the Temple Law Review, Cardozo Law Review and the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. She is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work has been featured in dozens of print and online publications. Read reports by Professor Hollis — More Here.