Presidential Race Takes a New Twist

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Two weeks ago it was looking as though the 2024 US presidential race would have two primary campaign issues:  the Democrats would focus on the rights of women to control their own bodies and healthcare decisions while castigating Republicans for trying to limit those rights (essentially a fight over abortion rights), and the Republicans would center their campaign on the rising numbers of immigrants trying to cross the southern US border.  Both of those issues are still in play, but the Republicans did muddy the water on their efforts to create an immigration panic when they suddenly declined to support a border-strengthening bill that they had essentially designed and promoted.  (Donald Trump told them not to try and fix anything so that he would have the "broken border" issue to campaign on.)

House Republicans had a very bad week after losing two key votes - one to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary in an effort to keep the southern border in the news, and another to provide military funding to Israel without also giving military funding to Ukraine.  

Their likely presidential nominee, Donald Trump, fared better than his party.  In a hearing yesterday before the US Supreme Court in which he challenged the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to keep him off of the ballot due to his involvement in the insurrection of January 6th, 2021, the US Supreme Court justices who heard the case seemed to indicate that they were skeptical of the Colorado decision - an indication that Trump will ultimately be allowed to stay on the ballot.

Trump had even more good news yesterday when Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report which found that Joe Biden did retain classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency and that he shared some of that material with others (a ghost writer working on Biden' memoirs), but the special counsel, a Republican, also concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.  That finding gave Trump some gas for bellowing to the winds that the country had a "two-tiered" justice system, and that he was again being persecuted.   (The difference between the two cases was that Biden admitted his actions, though he tried to  share the blame with his staff, and willingly returned the documents in question to government control, while Trump lied and played hide-and-seek with the documents that he took.)

But the special counsel, Mr. Hur, provided another political gift to Trump when he went beyond his basic findings and editorialized regarding Joe Biden's age and mental acuity as factors in his not pursuing charges against the President.  His remarks in the report characterized Biden as an elderly gentleman whose memory was "significantly limited," and every remark that Hur made regarding the President's mental capabilities will become part and parcel of the 2024 campaign.

Trump, of course, is also an elderly person who has had mental lapses of his own, one of the most recent being a couple of weeks ago when he confused his GOP political opponent, Nikki Haley, with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for several minutes during one of his public rants.

Age is going to be a big issue in the 2024 US presidential race - it just is.   The egos of both candidates will keep them from stepping aside and letting someone younger and more mentally alert have the nomination, and the political parties, even if they had the desire to seek alternative candidates, would never have the political courage to actually do it.    

It should never have come to this.