Over the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump has accused President Joe Biden of stealing cocaine, shared some incoherent thoughts about boat batteries and sharks, and touted an idea in which migrants would be pitted against one another in a ring for Americans’ entertainment.
He also became the first modern major-party presidential nominee to demand dramatic cuts to education investments, abandoned some of his previously held positions after private chats with rich people, vowed to punish schools that try to protect children from communicable ailments, called on businesses to fire executives who fail to endorse him, pushed a “deranged” economic policy that would replace income taxes with tariffs, and met with a group of prominent CEOs who came away convinced that the former president “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
In a healthy political environment, a mature and responsible political party would see these very recent developments and begin a quiet conversation about replacing their unraveling 2024 nominee before it’s too late.
In our current political environment, Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty saw these developments and wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed — which argued that Trump represents a “return to normalcy.”
Joe Biden never used the phrase “return to normalcy” in 2020 as Warren G. Harding did a century earlier, but that was the basis of his presidential candidacy. Four years later, the tables are turned. Donald Trump is the candidate of normalcy.
To bolster his case, the Tennessee senator raised a variety of concerns about President Joe Biden, accusing the Democratic incumbent of prosecuting Trump, trying too hard to help young people with student loan debt relief, being responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan, helping Iran, and causing inflation.
Hagerty’s piece never got around to explaining how, exactly, Trump would restore “normalcy,” but readers were apparently supposed to conclude that defeating the incumbent president would necessarily result in something resembling normality.
There are, however, a couple of problems with the GOP senator’s case.
First, there’s literally no evidence that Biden was involved in Trump’s prosecutions in any way; trying to help young people struggling with student debt relief is a good thing; blaming Biden for Putin’s invasion continues to be ridiculous; U.S. policy in Afghanistan in 2021 was far more complicated than Hagerty seems to realize; Trump did far more to help Iran than Biden ever did; and when it comes to inflation, the U.S. economy is leading the world with the strongest growth and lowest inflation of any major economy on the planet.
The junior senator from Tennessee appears to have overlooked all of this.
But just as notable is Trump’s vision for a prospective second term. We are, after all, talking about a White House candidate who’s raised the prospect of building new detention camps, creating a temporary “dictatorship,” cracking down on the free press, and seizing control of the federal appropriations process.
Those looking for a “return to normalcy” should probably look elsewhere.
