Fox News Is Reportedly Poised To Kick Trump To The Curb And Go All In On Pumping Up Ron DeSantis

[MarkD]

I'd really like it a lot if Fox would do some extensive reporting of the crazy/absurd things Trump was saying on January 2nd and 4th of 2021. Specifically, Trump said that he "won every single state," and that Trump even said, on the 4th, that Fox News had somehow, some way, reported that Trump did not win ONE state.

In this audio tape, go to approximately 7:20 and listen for about 20 seconds.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html

Then in this video, go to approximately 1:17:00 and listen/watch for about 20 seconds. In this clip he seemed to have literally accused Fox News of reporting that he did not win any states at all.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?507634-1/president-trump-campaigns-republican-senate-candidates-georgia

Was he talking specifically about swing states (claiming he really won them all but they reported he didn’t)? That’s the only non-completely insane, even by Trump standards, way I can think of this.

You are right that the only way for Trump to not be deserving of a check-in to a loony bin is that he probably MEANT to say "swing state" every time he simply said "state." If so, then the dunderhead forgot, a total of seven times, to say "swing state" during the two respective sets of 20 second excerpts in the two recordings I linked. Instead of saying, on 1/2/21 (during the phone call to Raffensperger):
As you know, every single swing state. We won every swing state; we won every swing statehouse in the country. ... But we won every single swing statehouse.
And instead of saying, on 1/4/21 (during the campaign rally in GA):
'Cause there's NO WAY we could have won every single swing state - and for Fox, not one swing state - this is one of many. We win every swing state, and they're going to have this guy be president?
He merely said "state" or "statehouse," without the word "swing," seven times.

Literally speaking, of the seven times he should have used the word "swing," if he wanted to sound half-way intelligent, he didn't do it once. Zero for seven.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Trump isn’t going to win this war.

He beat them once.

Which is no guarantee that he'll do it again.

Somehow, Trump is at his best when he has less institutional support. Otherwise he gets lazy.

You miss one key point: a decent chunk of Trump's win was because he could position himself as an outside, untainted by Washington corruption.

He can't do that anymore. He has the stain on him.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If enough of Washington/the establishment is against him, he can feasibly portray himself as an outsider.

From my perspective, Trump still has a great deal of outsider appeal (rhyme not intended).  If anything, there's the impression that he was an outsider who didn't get a chance to "finish the job" during a second term. 

[OSR stands with Israel]

Trump isn’t going to win this war.

He beat them once.

Which is no guarantee that he'll do it again.

Somehow, Trump is at his best when he has less institutional support. Otherwise he gets lazy.

You miss one key point: a decent chunk of Trump's win was because he could position himself as an outside, untainted by Washington corruption.

He can't do that anymore. He has the stain on him.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If enough of Washington/the establishment is against him, he can feasibly portray himself as an outsider.

From my perspective, Trump still has a great deal of outsider appeal (rhyme not intended).  If anything, there's the impression that he was an outsider who didn't get a chance to "finish the job" during a second term. 

Which is really not even exactly true  given that Trump in 2017-18 used his political capital to basically try to push through Paul Ryan’s agenda. Like other than executive orders and ”tough guy” rhetoric Trump really never tried to push through anything on immigration while he did spend 9 months of political capital on trying to repeal Obamacare.

The problem though is pretty much any Republican elected in 2016 other than maybe Kasich would have tried to repeal Obamacare as well including a President DeSantis if you magically made him president in Jan 2017.

[PSOL]

The thing is Trump is too old and deplatformed from Twitter to make much of the same impact as in 2016. Trump looks physically worse now, and is less physically fit to do the rallies that turned people up to him. His absence from Twitter makes him less able to get attention to help rile up his supporters.

It also doesn’t help that he’s burned a lot of bridges these past few years. He’s pissed off many of his prior supporters and the intelligent crop of staffers, as seen here by even DT and LT souring on him, going for DeSantis. At some point his team is going to be traumatized, bleeding, and defecting thoroughly enough that I doubt he can make it even before campaign season starts again.

[I Will Not Be Wrong]

While I would love to see Trump kicked to the curb, I will not be happy that the 2024 GOP nominee will be to the right of Mike Pence on fiscal issues. No expended Medicaid even in Florida.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Hope they do. I could see Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and possibly Mark Levin backing DeSantis over Trump. Hannity on the other hand is a Trump shill.

I think Carlson is the single least likely to back DeSantis pre-nomination.  DeSantis is way too libertarian for him.

I think you might be giving him too much credit for actually having any principled beliefs. He'll gladly abandon "populism" and rebrand himself if that's the way the winds blowing just like he opportunistically embraced pseudo-populism in the first place.