‘US election: Donald Trump 7/4 favourite for White House return.’
That was the headline at the United Kingdom’s Ladbrokes’ betting emporium —in July of last year! I have to think the line there is moving in Donald Trump’s favor every week. President Joe Biden isn’t exactly a ‘dead candidate walking’—he was a 2:1 bet in the same bookie forum at the same time—but between the Wall Street Journal and Fox News polls this week, you have to love 45’s odds over 46.
I think Trump enters ‘mortal lock’ territory if he picks a ‘normie Republican’ as his running mate. People simply don’t vote for the second name on the ticket, but they do factor it in, especially when the contrast will be with Vice President Harris. If Trump picks Senator Tom Cotton, Senator Joni Ernst or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—all veterans, all disciplined campaigners and serious voices on national security—I think Trump can order the drapes for the Oval the second time. Give the establishment GOP, the RINOs, the independents and even the old school Democrats who believed in national defense something to cling to and Trump wins most of them. These three are all conservative but they are conservatives with whom most ‘normies’ are very comfortable.
The issues are set and they favor Trump. An easy way to remember them is with the mnemonic AABCDEII: Afghanistan and appeasement, border, crime, ‘DEI’ and inflation. You could add another ‘E’ for ‘education’ and make it AABCDEEII, but some folks remain queasy over ‘school choice.’
I don’t. ‘Choice’ is established and working in Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, but is still blocked in Texas. I think ‘school choice’ is a winner with parents, but haven’t heard much yet from the former president on saving kids from broken public schools where the expansion of administrators at the expense of classroom teachers is mind-boggling.
There is also the endless ‘lawfare’ being waged against Trump, and any fair-minded American is repulsed by it. The absurd circus in the New York civil ‘fraud’ case alerted the center-right and center-left voters that the Empire State is no place for Republicans or even moderate Democrats to do business if they fall afoul of the political interest of that state’s Attorney General Leticia James and end up in the courtroom of a judge from the left. That charade was bad for every business in New York.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is about to increase Trump’s lead with Bragg’s joke of a criminal prosecution. Listen to former Southern District of New York Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy’s podcast, ‘The McCarthy Report,’ to get the honest-to-goodness assessment of this ridiculous prosecution. Now, I don’t think Trump can get a fair trial from the presiding judge there either or from the Manhattan jury pool, so I expect a conviction unless one courageous juror with a brain gets on the jury and simply refuses to be part of this Big Apple witch-hunt.
But I also don’t think a conviction in Manhattan will in any way hurt Trump. Legacy media is betting everything on a conviction arriving on the bizarre theory Bragg cooked up actually hurting Trump, but they don’t get out much from their Blue Bubbles. ‘Normies’ know what’s going on here. And they don’t like it, no matter how often NBC and MSNBC hosts and ‘analysts’ scream at them that they must DQ the former president if he’s convicted, even if it is a show trial in a kangaroo court. They are all lefties—all of them—and they don’t understand that the public generally understands—and loathes—’lawfare.’
7-4 is a good line for Trump right now. I suspect it will even be better in May and then pop more with his VP choice. Which leads to the key question.
When do Democrats panic (if they haven’t already?) The obviously infirm president who can’t even do an interview with Stephen Colbert without former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton flanking him and propping him up, is fading in real time. But no one has stepped out yet asking for an ‘open convention’ which will be the ‘Go!’ signal to California Governor Gavin Newsom and many others in the wings. (The GOP’s nightmare is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as the Democratic nominee, with VP Harris sticking in the #2 position.)
The polls are great for Trump and awful for Biden. The cake seems baked absent some extraordinary event and a Manhattan show trial isn’t going to be such an event no matter the result.
Democrats gavel in their Chicago convention on August 19. I don’t know if Ladbrokes has opened a line yet on whether somebody other than Biden is the actual Democrat nominee come, but if I was in England, I’d be stopping by to place some quid on ‘somebody else’ right now.
Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.