Trump triumphant as Biden descends into a deepening crisis

DONALD Trump will pull off his greatest feat yet as Joe Biden confronts his darkest hour.

The ex-president, 78, will accept the Republican nomination Thursday, advancing one of the most stunning comebacks in political history after his bid to steal the 2020 election, an unprecedented criminal conviction and an assassination attempt.

Biden, 81, is meanwhile being rocked by a Democratic rebellion. Concerns about whether he can again defeat his 2020 opponent have boiled back up amid lawmakers’ concerns about his health and cognitive state and despair over his chances of blocking the extreme possibilities of a second Trump term. Sources told CNN Wednesday that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently told the president that polls show he can’t beat Trump and could crush Democratic hopes of winning the House if he stays in the race.

A White House race that slumbered for months has suddenly erupted over a momentous three weeks bookended by Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance and the attempted assassination of Trump – a whiplash of events unseen in half a century.

The 45th president’s comeback will only be fully realized if he becomes the second one-term president to win a return to the White House in November. But his rebound to this point may be even more unlikely than his unexpected win in the 2016 election. His return to the top of the GOP ticket means it is now clear that Trump was not simply an aberration, but is becoming a historic political force who has utterly transformed his party and could do the same for the nation, for better or worse, if he comes back to White House on January 20, 2025.

Events play into Trump’s election strategy

In a race Trump has cast as a contrast between strength and weakness, the optics are better than the Republican can have dared hope less than four months before Election Day.

Republicans are lionizing a nominee who escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet and rose, bloodied, to raise his fist with a vow to “fight.” Biden, by comparison, retreated from the campaign trail Wednesday to his Delaware home with a case of Covid-19.

Trump just choreographed one of the most remarkable shows of dominance in any political party of the modern age, requiring his vanquished primary foes to pledge fealty in front of a primetime television audience at the convention on

Tuesday. Biden is, meanwhile, losing control of his party, clashing heatedly with lawmakers who warn he’ll cost them the White House, Senate and the House and as party grandees — like California Rep. Adam Schiff — publicly say he should step aside.

The electoral map reflects the diverging fortunes of the two candidates. Trump leads most national polls and has the advantage in battleground states. And while the situation is not yet unrecoverable for Biden, most analysts believe he has a limited path to 270 electoral votes through Blue Wall states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. His campaign insists it’s not given up elsewhere.

Presidential elections are won by votes of millions of Americans in the fall – not snapshots of the relative fortunes of campaigns in July. And Trump’s apparent momentum may have been inflated by a convention that is showcasing a party he has stripped of all dissenting voices in an eight-year political purge. The ex-president remains deeply unpopular nationally and millions of Americans disdain his personality cult, record of racially inflammatory rhetoric and his authoritarian instincts. But that’s one reason why his campaign is pulling its punches on Biden in the hope he stays in the race.

The growing threat to Biden’s campaign is not being driven by pundits; it’s coming from deep inside his party by lawmakers and donors who fear a GOP landslide in November.

As the Democratic Party threatens to tear itself apart, the Trump GOP has shown rare discipline and unity — underpinned by a growing belief by delegates here in Milwaukee that the former president is headed back to the White House.

After Trump escaped the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, his campaign has leveraged the aftermath to reshape his image. It has also portrayed his four years in power as an idyll of peace and prosperity. His team is seeking to dispel memories of the chaos, acrimony and assaults on constitutional order that characterized his presidency, which culminated in his attempt to destroy democracy to stay in power and the mob riot by his supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that led to his second impeachment.

The GOP is painting a picture of a nation that is broke, beset by crime and an invasion by undocumented migrants, and economic blight disrespected in the world. The picture is highly subjective. Americans are still suffering from high prices, but inflation isn’t as high as it was, crime figures are coming down and unemployment has been near historic lows. The economy is outpacing other developed countries and Trump thwarted a bid to ease the immigration crisis by torpedoing a bipartisan bill that could have addressed the border. And in perhaps the most daring bait-and-switch, the party led by a man who constantly genuflected to President Vladimir Putin is accusing Biden – who reinvigorated NATO and confronted the Kremlin’s onslaught on Ukraine – as weak on Russia.

The image making was taken to new levels by Trump’s new vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, in his address to the GOP convention Wednesday evening.

The Ohio Republican senator wove a parable of national redemption from the horrific scenes in Pennsylvania when Trump fell to the ground but reemerged wounded but unbowed.

“Go and watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life,” Vance told a spellbound crowd of delegates. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump. And then look at the photo of him defiant – fist in the air. When Donald J. Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood up with him.”

“Donald Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what – if lost – may never be found again.”