OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion
One of the minds behind Bill Clinton’s comeback reelection effort was Dick Morris, who also happens to be a friend of Donald Trump as well as “extended family” member.
Morris was a secret, unpaid advisor to President Trump in 2020, and has been whispering in his ear ever since.
As a political consultant and pollster as well, Morris expresses his thoughts on Donald Trump’s possible bid for reelection in 2024 in his new book, The Return, just released.
“Our candidate in 2024 will be, and must be, Donald J. Trump. Accept no substitutes. Only he can put together the coalition that generated 74 million votes in 2020. And we don’t want a bleached-out, kinder, nicer, gentler Donald Trump, either! We want and need the same Donald Trump who won in 2016, increased his vote share in 2020 by eleven million votes, and in between, was one of our truly great presidents,” added Morris, a Newsmax analyst and host of Dick Morris Democracy.
“I have spoken with the former president dozens of times since he left office, and our conversations were always either about how he was cheated in 2020, or how he would get back in 2024. He has never, for a moment, taken his eye off the ball — getting back in the White House!” added Morris.
In The Return: Trump’s Big 2024 Comeback, Morris goes into what happened in 2020, how that affected Trump’s presidency, and what a possible strategy would be for Trump to return to the White House as President.
Morris doesn’t dismiss election fraud and how it undermined Trump’s reelection, but concedes that in the end, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, got more votes and that will be something to overcome going in to the next presidential election.
He maintains that states try to get back to pre-COVID voting rules.
Morris suggests that GOP voters elect Republican secretaries of state who set election rules, and that the GOP do a better job turning out the vote. Bigger votes, he wrote, are the future and the GOP has to deal with it.
He also allows that the Trump campaign and White House didn’t fully get the impact of the virus, as it was the early days of the crisis, and their anti-mask message.
Morris further states that the degree to which the liberal media was working overtime to take out Trump was severely underestimated.
“His most serious error was to incur the wrath of the media,” said Morris, who knows a bit about coming under media fire.
Morris now suggests reminding voters of the three issues that were handled successfully and well by Trump and his administration, the economy, illegal immigration, and surging crime.
These issues were well in hand, he states, when the Biden administration took over and implemented their own initiatives.
“Each of the three has the same unique feature: none was a problem under Donald Trump, and all emerged as serious issues on the day that Biden was inaugurated,” said Morris.
The GOP should then try to convince voters that Biden nor his team have figured out a way to change the direction of those issues, and won’t because they want to “transform America into a nation none of us will recognize by destroying social, cultural, economic, and political freedoms.”
Not one to sugar coat personalities, Morris also addresses Trump himself. He said the president is a bully and tough-talker, but nobody’s going to change that.
“Trump is Trump. Like it or lump it. He’ll never change, and I came to realize that his manner could not be divorced from his successful outcomes. Change one, and you would forfeit the other,” said Morris.
In 2020, he said, some voters disliked Trump’s style, but expressed satisfaction with his job performance.
Morris referred to other tough businessmen.
“If he [Frank Perdue]could persuade America that it took a tough man to make a tender chicken, perhaps we could make the point that it took one to make a good president.”
Therefore, Morris says, the answer is to work with Trump the way he is.
Morris predicts that Trump will build his base on white and Latino voters. In the last election, Trump did well with Hispanics, and even won border areas.
“Trump’s political power is rooted in his unique ability to attract, as no other American political figure can, two key groups of swing voters who became part of his core constituency: white high-school-educated voters and Hispanic-American patriots,” said Morris, laying out another element of the upcoming campaign strategy.
“Will he run in 2024? You bet he will. Will he be the GOP nominee? Absolutely. Will he win the election? Yes,” Morris writes in his quick reading strategy book provided to Secrets in advance of the book’s release.
“Can he win? Not only can he win, he will win, and nobody else can. As surely as he was our 45th president, he will be our 47th as well!” wrote Morris in his new book, reported by The Washington Examiner.
Source: The Republic Brief