White House and Reagan Conservatives Wage Battle to Shut Out Trump

Donald Trump is back and this time they take him seriously. Paradoxically, he has less attention than before, but only because the United States has already understood that media attention is his lifeblood. Many do not even dare to say his name. President Joe Biden calls him ‘the guy from before’ and his potential rivals prefer not to mention it.

The media have understood that it is their ‘Frankenstein’. They created you. Trump would not have been president without the 2 billion free publicity they provided him echoing his outrageous statements. The dilemma is how to ignore a new campaign by the man who became president and almost killed democracy with the most serious coup attempt the North American country has suffered in its history.

“We just have to make sure he doesn’t come back to power using every legitimate means in our Constitution to prevent him,” President Biden said when asked about it. It sounded simple, but it’s not. Biden is an old-fashioned politician, a faithful follower of a country that has ceased to exist. One where the people believe in democracy and put the nation before their personal interests. In which Democrats and Republicans can negotiate together for the common good and the majority respect public servants who dedicate their lives to the institutions.

The president is convinced that if many Americans did not vote for his party in last week’s legislative elections, it is because they do not know how many things he has done in these two years to improve the lives of his citizens. With the firm conviction that it is only a communication problem, in a society with so much background noise, his team of advisers addressed the Twitter account hours before Trump formally announced his decision to run for the third time in the elections. . The strategy, ‘facts’ against hoaxes. Its premise: the truth always triumphs.

Talk in front of results

The first video of his campaign for 2024 was titled ‘The difference between talking and delivering results’. It was about 23 seconds that contrasted the image of Trump at the microphone, promising large investments in infrastructure, to that of Biden signing the investment of one billion dollars. More than two million people have seen it on Twitter. Trump was still in the middle of his very long speech, of more than an hour, when the Biden team released another multimedia hit called ‘Donald Trump failed America’. With a soundtrack of a Hollywood ‘trailer’, the succession of images and television ‘clips’ recalled his intention to dismantle healthcare and incitement to violence against the Capitol. “If that requires pardons, we’ll give them,” he promised. More than 900 people are facing the courts for crimes committed during the January 6 insurrection. If Trump returns to the White House, they can count on a presidential pardon. Rome does not pay traitors but it encourages loyalty and needs its army.

This time Trump is not alone. He accompanies the magician movement of the red caps with his ‘Make America Great Again’ (Returns to make the USA great again). Die-hard supporters who account for between 30 and 40% of the Republican Party base. With them, he can easily win the conservative party’s primaries, where the rest of the Republican voters will be divided among several candidates, potentially including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Vice President Mike Pence and former CIA director and former secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The more applicants, the more likely to win the title.

Winning the primaries will be the easy part. Many Conservatives fear he will because they don’t think he can win the general election. That is why on Tuesday they saw a much more restrained and soporific Trump, who avoided even whipping the press. He spoke of the common good, mocked Biden and avoided, in his own way, being the center of the universe. With this he hopes to reach those who remember his mandate as a time of prosperity set against the current rampant inflation.

Republicans Against Trump

Joe Biden’s White House is not the only entity that had the ads ready to fight back. There Anita Dunn, one of the president’s main communication strategists, and the deputy to the chief of staff, Jen O’Malley Dillon, are in charge of hammering out their message on social networks. On the conservative side, the Lincoln Project, which emerged from the ranks of the Republican Party to prevent Trump’s re-election, used the same emotional weapons as the former president in his first announcement: “Donald Trump is back. Pissed off, vengeful, ready to take over the White House again and destroy America again,” said the voice-over with gloomy music. “And who’s going to stop him? These faint-hearted? The businnes men? They’re going to get down on their knees and write you a check. The media? They’re going for the show.” The ad minute to air on FOX News is a call to those Americans who are “ready to put country over party.” How many left?

In the next two years, the US will be the battlefield between the two factions, between the people against Washington and the ‘establishment’. Trump plans to make Mar-a-Lago his campaign headquarters and present himself as an ‘outsider’. “America or Trump”, according to the Lincoln Project. The former president has the toughest advisers in his government, such as Steve Miller, Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon, and the Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who will lead the Political Action Committee to raise funds. His campaign is anticipated to be smaller and more controllable by the only one who can tell him what to do: himself. The prospect of a rematch with Biden motivates him as much as he bores Americans.

The ‘rematch’ is so served that even Attorney General Merrick Garland himself has taken it for granted by appointing a special prosecutor for judicial investigations against Trump. Those who accompany him on the trip will no longer be able to turn to his daughter Ivanka or his son-in-law Jared Kushner to control his tantrums and impulsiveness. “I will do everything I wanted to do from the beginning and not …”, he stopped himself before the National Rifle Association. “But this time I won’t care.”