Leftist reporters privately hope Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination because they think that with Trump at the helm, the Democrats will win the 2024 election and retake control of the House of Representatives.
If Nikki Haley wins the Republican primary instead (which is unlikely), then the Republicans are more likely to win the 2024 election, and more likely to regain control of Congress. When Trump was president, he not only lost reelection, but also lost control of Congress, which Republicans controlled when he first took office.
The Manchester Union-Leader is New Hampshire’s main newspaper. It is one of the few big New England newspapers that usually endorses Republicans, rather than Democrats — and one of the few papers to oppose more taxes and government red tape. On Sunday, it endorsed Nikki Haley in the 2024 presidential primary.
“If you can select a Republican ballot on Tuesday, we urge you to select Nikki Haley as your next president. New Hampshire is ready for a change. America is ready for a change. The world is ready for a change. We want a better option than we have had for the past eight years, and Nikki Haley is that option,” the Union-Leader says.
The Union-Leader describes the two most recent presidents as “dinosaurs” who “had their shot and nature selected them for extinction.”
“The dinosaurs from the last two administrations have indeed had their shot and Nikki Haley is the fireball from the heavens to wipe them out,” it says.
“Putting forward a rematch of the last election means putting an octogenarian in the White House and putting a less-than-capable vice president in the on-deck circle. Haley has not been shy with the fact that she has at least a quarter-century age advantage on those candidates and she has a good point. Nikki Haley is in her prime and selflessly willing to give that prime to the country her parents chose to raise their family in.”
“New Hampshire can prove that the independent-minded voters of the Granite State will not be told the election is a done deal,” the Union-Leader says. “New Hampshire can prove that nothing is inevitable and send Nikki Haley home to South Carolina with a head of steam and nothing weighing her down as she sets her sights on defeating the ‘inevitable,’ but very vulnerable, Democratic nominee,” Joe Biden.
Trump was just not that effective as president. He says many of the right things about fighting leftism, but in the White House, he typically failed to roll back liberal policies, and government spending grew faster than inflation. Trump left most of Obama’s bad regulations intact, and his attempts to rescind Obama’s job-killing regulations were so inept that around 90% of those attempted changes failed, a high failure rate due more to inept Trump appointees failing to comply with basic procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act than to Obama-appointed judges blocking the changes on the merits (although both were factors).
Business was at least happy that Trump, unlike Democrat presidents, wasn’t imposing a flood of new regulations and red tape — giving businesses the ability to get up to speed on their legal obligations. So Trump was better than Obama or Hillary Clinton would have been. (And Trump is definitely better than Joe Biden, who is a disaster). But, still, Trump was underwhelming. Other Republican presidents like Reagan have successfully rescinded many of their Democratic predecessors’ regulations, unlike Trump.
