Picture This: The 2024 GOP Dream Team
Decoy Murdock for Townhall
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
NEW YORK — President Joe Biden’s total collapse of leadership makes former President Donald J. Trump look better by the hour. Those who voted him out of office because they didn’t like his Twitter feed should burst with pride. They should be thrilled with what they bought with their lack of focus on public policy and obsession with personality quirks:
•A strategic, diplomatic, and humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan
•The erasure of the U.S.-Mexico “border”
•An attendant invasion by (so far) 1,035,352 illegal aliens — many of them with COVID-19 — on Biden’s watch
•A surge in homicides, assaults, and other violent crimes in Democrat-run cities
•The sudden and deliberate rejection of American energy independence
•The resurrection of 1970s-style inflation
•The imposition of society-splitting Critical Race Theory
•And much more — nearly all of it dreadful
If the November 2020 face-off were held today,Trump would trounce Biden 43 percent to 37 percent, according to an August 18 Rasmussen Reports survey.
“Among voters who say they voted for Biden in last year’s election, 12% now say they regret their vote,” Rasmussen explained via Twitter. “By comparison, only two percent (2%) of Trump voters now regret their vote.”
If Trump seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, it almost surely will be his for the asking. I proudly will support him in that effort, especially after Biden’s Afghan mega-disaster confirms that having a reputed bully in the White House sometimes comes in handy.
But what if Trump, who will be 78 at the next presidential election, bequeathed the GOP standard to a new generation of Republican leadership? If so, visualize this 2024 Dream Team:
•President of the United States – Governor Ron DeSantis (R – Florida)
•Vice President of the United States – U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R – South Carolina)
•Secretary of State – Robert C. O’Brien (former National Security Advisor)
•Secretary of Defense – Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R – California) (House GOP leader)
•Secretary of the Treasury – Steve Forbes (Veteran free-market advocate; 1996 and 2000 GOP presidential candidate)
•Attorney General – John Yoo (U.C. Berkeley law professor; DOJ alumnus)
•Secretary of Veterans Affairs – John Ullyot (Former spokesman for VA and NSC)
•United Nations Ambassador – Dr. Monica Crowley (Conservative national security scholar and Treasury Department alumna)
•Director of National Intelligence – Ric Grenell (Former Acting DNI)
•Director of Central Intelligence – K.T. McFarland (GOP foreign-policy luminary)
•Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation – Ted Ullyot (Former DOJ chief of staff)
•Federal Reserve Chairman – Larry Kudlow (Legendary free-market economist)
•Director, Office of Management and Budget, Steve Moore – (Free-market advocate, economist, and scholar)
•White House Press Secretary – Candace Owens (Conservative firebrand)
•Speaker of the House – Donald J. Trump (45th President of the United States)
This line-up would generate America First policies while somewhat limiting the Left from foaming at the mouth over Trump’s eccentricities.
DeSantis is much like Trump — conservative, intrepid, and combative — but without the distracting Twitter blasts. He also is the highly successful and popular governor of Florida, which likely spins the über-swingy Sunshine State and its 30 Electoral College votes into the GOP column.
This likely would place the Republican nominees 11.11 percent of the way toward the 270 electoral votes that spell victory. This also would let Team GOP devote vital cash and talent to other battleground states.
Tim Scott’s Palmetto State is non-swingy. As reliable GOP ground, Scott’s home address adds little on the road to 270.
That said, if the Republican ticket includes a well-respected and accomplished black running mate — whose Reaganesque response to Biden’s State of the Union won widespread plaudits — the Democrats’ “Racism! Racism! Racism!” Klaxons will sound hollow, absurd, and laughable. And if the Democrats lose their “Republicans are racist” truncheon, they’ve got nothing.
Scott’s stirring personal story and presence on the ticket could win Republicans perhaps 15 percent of the black vote, just three points above the 12 percent that Trump won last fall. If DeSantis-Scott actively stump in black neighborhoods, and the GOP builds on Trump’s much-welcome outreach to black voters, Republicans reasonably could win at least 20 percent of ballots cast by black Americans.
This would be curtains for Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, or virtually anyone else who carried the Donkey banner. And those same black citizens who pulled the Elephant lever for president might do so down ballot.
This development would be smashing for GOP candidates for Senate, House, governor’s mansions, and state legislatures. Democrats know this and are terrified by this prospect.
Their despicable defense mechanism: Push Critical Race Theory, cleave America along racial lines, scare blacks with spooky tales about white-nationalist bogeymen, and hope that this will send them screaming into Democrats’ evil arms.
Revolting.
Making Kevin McCarthy Defense Secretary would place a competent and poised leader atop the Pentagon. This also would reward and challenge him for his seven years of service as chief House Republican.
This also would create a vacancy that Trump could fill. The former president either could run for a safe seat in the House or simply get elected as speaker by a majority of House members, presumably Republicans.
There is no constitutional requirement that the speaker be a member of the House, although electing a non-congressman to that post would be unprecedented. No other ex-president has served as House Speaker, although Massachusetts voters elected former President John Quincy Adams to nine terms in the U.S. House, from 1830 to 1846.
This strategy would allow Trump to steer the DeSantis-Scott Make America Great Again agenda through the House.
Speaker Trump also could direct GOP House committee chairmen to investigate Democrat corruption and grotesque incompetence — from the finances of the Biden Crime Family to Biden’s reckless retreat from Afghanistan.
At long last, the House might get to the bottom of Obama-Biden-Hillary’s swap of uranium to Russia in exchange for $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation.
And America finally might learn which members of the Deep State broke the law in their deranged and demented attempt to persecute Trump as a Russian agent and portray his White House as a Kremlin outpost.
Speaker Trump also could leave far-Left House Democrats paralyzed with rage, every time he grabbed the gavel.
Just imagine how hard it would become for representatives Jerry Nadler, Ilhan Omar, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Maxine Waters to get out of bed in the morning knowing that they would have to watch Speaker Donald J. Trump preside over the U.S. House as a turbocharged Republican majority sent their socialist bills down to ignominious defeat.
Yes, please!
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Bucknell University’s Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.