As with RFK Jr. on the other side, the entire machinery of the Swamp is all hands on deck to remove Trump from consideration for the White House by whatever means necessary.
All of the vigorous anti-establishment energy at the moment is on the grassroots right, CNN knows this, and so Trump has been their primary target of attack for years now since he first started dominating the GOP primary field back in 2015-16.
(This anti-establishment movement, by the way, is widespread across the West because it is a universal reaction to the multinational technocracy, driven by globalization, being erected not just in the United States but across Europe, to the north in Canada, and in Oceania.)
Unfortunately for GOP leadership, the horses on hand in the stable are lame. One of them is morbidly obese. None of them are attractive to voters.
Delusional fringe candidate Chris Christie appeared at a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, criticized Trump in the sort of abstract, banal terms characteristic of the corporate state media, and got some feedback from the audience.
Christie, like everyone else with any political sense, understands well that there is no chance in hell he will win the nomination under any circumstances whatsoever, barring a simultaneous mass die-off of every other more popular candidate.
What he’s doing — what his handlers have dispatched him to do — is to viciously attack Trump from a nominally Republican orientation and, if and when Ron DeSantis strays too far from the confines of the accepted narrative (as arguably happened on the foreign policy front with his prior comments about the Ukraine War), to move on him too.
Recently, another establishment proxy, Gov. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.), also declared Trump’s candidacy DOA on CNN.
This is by far not the first corporate state media round that the governor has embarked on for the sole purpose of demeaning and demoralizing the Trump candidacy.
“Your whole strategy now when it comes to 2024 is to make sure that Trump is not the Republican nominee,” Dana Bash gives away the game at the start.
Imagine a politician’s whole political strategy explicitly consisting of defeating the candidate in his own party who’s most popular with the base, yet still maintaining the fiction that he represents and serves the people.
Sununu then runs through his routine claims that Trump can’t win, Trump is a drag on the down-ticket races, MAGA candidates don’t perform in general elections, etc.
For self-professed patriots, there is something deeply unseemly, if not treasonous, about going on CNN to read Trump’s political obituary after all the lies the network has peddled over the years in service of interests that are fundamentally opposed to that of the average conservative.
Alas, CNN, MSNBC, et al. are the media outlets willing to give a platform at any time of day to any Republican of note who has declared his or her opposition to Trump and the populist movement that he represents, so that’s where the likes of Christie and Sununu go.
The anti-Trump reactionaries in the Republican party, who pine for the good old days of the Bush regime when the neoconservatives were firmly in charge, are doomed to fail in their attempted re-conquest of the party. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, and if they try to retake the party through bureaucratic fiat, the 2016-era Democratic intra-party feud between the Sanders and Clinton factions will look placid by comparison.