Featuring three giant swimming pools, a “white-water” canal 300 feet long, three thrilling water slides, ponds with pedalos, a restaurant, a café, and a quiet area shaded by a tent where adults could sit on carpets and listen to pop music, the project sought to charm patrons of every age. According to The Guardian in the UK, the Fun Park played a key role as part of an “entertainment circuit” hoping to draw well-heeled visitors to seaside cafés, the Gaza Mall, and horseback riding at the Faisal Equestrian Club adjacent to the Fun Park.

According to a glossy feature in Egypt’s Al Ahram, Crazy Water was “one of a rapidly growing grand group of Gaza leisure parks, including the Al Bustan resort and the Bisan City tourist village. A sense of absolute prosperity prevails, as manifested by the grand resorts along and near Gaza’s coast.”

This notion of “absolute prosperity” hardly comports with coverage in the world press of Gaza’s oppressed and unfortunate state, but the optimism in 2010 seemed widespread and genuine. Israel, which had ruled the Strip since its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, had moved all of its military and law enforcement personnel, along with 8,000 Jewish settlers, out of the area and turned over the responsibility for running Gaza to local Palestinian leaders, openly encouraging them to develop the self-governing entity they had been demanding for decades.

Unfortunately, the abrupt Israeli withdrawal led directly to a minor war between the established officials of the Palestinian Authority who were affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and the newly organized religious radicals of Hamas. The ruthless Islamist revolutionaries quickly prevailed and took full power at the same time the dreamers and planners were completing Crazy Water and other entertainment or relaxation venues.

Medved to Hamas: ‘What are you trying to achieve other than killing Jews?’

Needless to say, the clerics who ran Hamas at the time had no interest in water slides and resort villages, and much preferred to concentrate their efforts and resources on attacking Israel, killing Jews and purifying the Islamic practice of the local inhabitants.

In that context, the officials closed Crazy Water for three days in August 2010 as a warning against continuing the hideously un-Islamic indulgence of permitting men and women to “mingle” while visiting the Fun Park. In other words, some of the devout leaders of Hamas worried the Fun Park might be offering the wrong kind of fun.

As it turned out, Hamas imposed a longer, more carefully policed closure in September, shutting Crazy Water for 21 days. In the middle of that span, “40 masked militants” (as newspapers described them) stormed the water park, broke everything they could seize and shatter, and used gasoline to set fire to the restaurants, administration buildings, and the plastic water slides themselves. Israel’s Haaretz reported the director-general of Crazy Water, Alladein al-Araj, filed a statement that the thugs also tied the hands of the security guards and beat them severely.

After barely three months of operation, the dream of a fanciful facility to attract tourists and delight locals lay in ruins, with devastating damage that discouraged any inclination to attempt repairs. Most of the other efforts to take advantage of Gaza’s genuinely scenic beaches similarly collapsed, with restaurants, cafés, and souvenir shops promptly shuttered by governmental decrees. The common assumption, inside and outside the Strip, held that the 40 masked marauders who wrecked Crazy Water had been sent by the Hamas leadership to put an end to any Palestinian attempts to enjoy themselves. It turned out the only word in the grand title “Crazy Water Fun Park” that actually applied to the project was “crazy.”

Medved in late 2022: Why the sudden rise in antisemitism?

It’s also terribly sad and makes it clear the madmen in Hamas are not only warmed by their bloodlust against Israelis but disfigured by their utter contempt for the ordinary Palestinians they rule. In this context, the tendency to sacrifice innocent civilians as human shields and to deliberately draw Israeli bombing raids against apolitical families seems to show an evil consistency with their insistence on prohibiting any enjoyment of a well-meaning water park 13 years ago.

The horrors that shocked the world in the most recent Hamas explosion of terrorism are, for them, only one more battle in a long war. In the end, it’s not a war against Israel alone; it’s a war against decency and civilization. And as the sad tale of Crazy Water demonstrates, it is also a never-ending war against fun.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

Each of the likely major party nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and very possibly both of them, may decline to participate in the familiar October ritual. Advisers to both sides could easily calculate that the risks of such a high-profile, live media confrontation could outweigh any potential gains.

Former President Trump has already reached that conclusion regarding the first two Republican primary debates, with strong hints that he also plans to skip the third GOP gathering scheduled for November in Miami.

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Trump’s absence from the earlier debates certainly produced no damage to his standing in the polls or undermined his dominant role within the Republican Party. In both of his prior presidential runs, he generated more favorable public reactions and more consistent ratings with his long, rambling speeches to nearly delirious rally crowds than any broadcast in which he was forced to share the stage with rivals he despises.

As for Biden, his handlers already take pains to keep their 80-year-old boss mostly protected from pestering questions from the press, so that avoiding an aggressive, insistent grilling from Trump himself, who’s notorious for his lack of both self-control and courtesy, already constitutes a natural priority for their cautious campaign.

Would the public protest if the candidates continued to concentrate on their admiring loyalists and sympathetic reporters, while dodging the sort of crude, nasty, angry slugfest they delivered in their first debate of 2020, from Cleveland on Sept. 29? Memorably described by Jake Tapper of CNN as “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck” and hailed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC as “the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life,” the broadcast failed to deliver a discernable boost to either candidate.

The second debate, complicated by then-President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, and his stout refusal to participate in any form of remote broadcast with the two candidates and the moderator in different locations, led to a last-minute cancellation that produced scant disappointment from either voters or television viewers.

Presidential debates in the 20th century

In fact, even after the storied and groundbreaking Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960, where the two candidates engaged in four different substantive confrontations, the early history of televised presidential debates demonstrated that successful nominees could duck their invitations to face down their rivals and still win landslide victories.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson had built up so much goodwill and admiration after taking over from the martyred JFK, he saw no reason to appear together with the controversial, acerbic Republican standard-bearer Barry Goldwater. He nonetheless carried 44 states and 61% of the popular vote.

Four years later, Richard Nixon returned as the Republican nominee, having lost to Kennedy in 1960 by one of the slimmest margins in history — which many commentators blamed on his haggard appearance and lack of energy in the first-ever televised presidential debate. Obviously, “Tricky Dick” needed no trickery to shun the format in his next two races in 1968 and 1972, winning the first campaign with 32 states and the second, carrying 49 of the 50 states and 520 electoral votes.

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The next campaign, between Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford and Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, revived the suspended tradition of televised debates and closely contested elections. In fact, a random, bone-headed comment by the Republican incumbent in their October debate (“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”) is widely credited with giving Carter the slight lift he needed to prevail in November. That single sentence (recited a second time when journalist Max Frankel cut in to ask what President Ford had meant) stands as a warning to the two gaffe-prone front-runners in 2024 about the ongoing dangers of the debate format.

It’s not at all difficult to imagine either Biden or Trump (or, of course, both of them) uttering some inaccurate or incoherent combinations of words that could undercut any momentum they had built up late in the race.

A third party joining the race

Another factor making the debate stage a particularly dangerous territory for these two aging and all-but-inevitable nominees are multiple polls showing some 70% of American voters, of both parties and no party, wishing that the final ballot in November of next year offered some fresh alternative to the doddering duopoly of Biden and Trump. If those survey respondents mean what they say, it shouldn’t be unthinkable for some third – or fourth – party candidate to earn at least 15% support on a consistent basis, which would qualify them for debate participation, which in turn might set up a genuine three-way competition that would challenge two-party control.

For several weeks in the autumn of 1992, as President George H.W. Bush sought reelection, this appeared to be the unprecedented situation. Millionaire entrepreneur Ross Perot rode high enough in the polls (scoring more than 15% of likely voters) to qualify for participation in three debates against President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, while earning his running mate (Admiral James Stockdale) a place on stage against Senators Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

Perot did particularly well in the first debate in St. Louis, where a CNN/USA TODAY poll of those who had watched the televised event showed a stunning 47% who believed the independent businessman had “won” the night, with 30% picking Clinton and a mere 16% giving President Bush the nod.

At this point, expert opinion saw a genuine chance for Perot to sweep the field with his hastily organized “Reform Party,” but his impetuous withdrawal from the race in its climactic stages, and incomprehensible return, doomed any chance of actual victory. He still managed 19% of the popular vote.

In this year’s contest, no formidable independent has emerged to provide a meaningful alternative to Biden and Trump, but several may be on the way. Reports from the beginning of October indicate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is strongly considering the abandonment of his race for the Democratic nomination, in order to shift his attention to an independent campaign or, conceivably, as the nominee of the national Libertarian Party, if they will have him.

According to a commissioned survey by veteran pollster John Zogby, an independent drive by RFK Jr. would produce a tie between Trump and Biden (at 38% each) with the anti-vaccine activist winning 19% support – more than enough, unless the rules are altered, to secure a spot in at least the first debate.

Political candidate update: RFK Jr. defends himself against complaints of racist and antisemitic online misinformation

Meanwhile, the “No Labels” organization has raised more than $70 million to secure ballot access in as many states as possible, with a convention scheduled for next April to nominate a bipartisan ticket, potentially headed by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia or another celebrated name. Again, the crucial challenge for such a candidacy would be to insert that new presidential possibility into the televised debate, as a more vital and less tired alternative to the Grumpy Old Men likely to represent both Democrats and Republicans.

Moreover, the presence of a third candidate in the televised debates should force both of the major party nominees to take part in it as well, whatever their reservations. If, say, Manchin or Kennedy get an invitation for a television meeting of the minds, it’s hard to imagine Trump doing a rally somewhere else and letting Biden get all the attention of confronting the new guy.

By the same token, President Biden may find the White House a comfortable substitute for his sheltered Wilmington basement, but he would never allow Trump to join forces, however briefly, with a minor party alternative in tearing down the status quo and the chief executive responsible for the pains and problems of the present.

Another episode from the past illustrates the way that this dynamic can work. In 1980, a moderate GOP Congressman from Illinois named John Anderson decided that Ronald Reagan’s ideas, particularly about the economy, qualified as too conservative and too extreme, so he shifted from a contender for the Republican nomination to an independent candidacy. When his support level passed 20%, the League of Women voters (then sponsoring the debates) invited his participation. President Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, refused to show up, terrified that Anderson would take votes from the Democrats and hand victory to Reagan.

The result: A strange, but very entertaining debate, between the Republican nominee and the independent candidate (and former Republican) John Anderson. Reagan dazzled in the setting, as usual, getting off some wonderful one-liners, even on the no-laughing-matter issue of abortion: “I noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born,” he observed. The result of this two-person encounter brought Reagan a significant bounce in the polls and forced Carter to allow a last-week, man-to-man showdown with the former California governor, since Anderson had fallen below debate thresholds in his poll numbers.

More from Michael Medved: Picking the right running mate could powerfully boost Trump’s prospects

That final exchange, including Reagan’s famous close (“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”) led directly, and almost immediately, to his landslide victory and an unexpected gain of 12 seats (that’s right 12!) by his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate.

This year, if nothing else, some third-force candidacy should provide some hint of freshness and energy, better television ratings and openings for new ideas, together with some sparks of hope that provide more sustenance and encouragement to all those tens of millions of debate watchers who yearn for a more meaningful exchange of ideas.

We deserve more than another ill-tempered exercise of Biden and Trump belching their weary, dreary insults at one another. As John F. Kennedy, the debate star of 1960, used to say: We can do better.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3)

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Populism inevitably emphasizes an us-versus-them view of reality, with claims of victimhood and exploitation that promote paralyzing resentments. By separating society into a pure-hearted but powerless populace, perpetually oppressed by arrogant elites and a ruthless ruling class, the angry advocates push the painful polarization that has recently amounted to an American affliction.

The spreading speculation about a new civil war isn’t based on regionalism this time, but on distinctions in education and identity in which conservatives have branded themselves as a distinct minority that is dwindling, if not doomed.

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Consider the heavy reliance of all the Trump campaigns – in 2016, 2020 and 2024 – on white voters without college degrees. According to exit polls, this group represented 35% of the electorate in 2020 and Trump won their support in a landslide – 67% to Biden’s 32% – without which the Republican nominee would have been buried among the overall electorate. The point isn’t that white, blue-collar voters count as less worthy than their university-educated peers, but rather that those with no college background are becoming far less numerous.

As recently as 1960, only 7.7% of American adults had graduated from college, but by 2020 that number had swelled to 37.9%. Any party attempting to build an American majority based on that segment of the population that’s never completed college is bucking one of the most durable, undeniable demographic trends of the last half-century.

Then there is the matter of race. In 2020, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, won 58% of white voters but still lost the popular vote by a margin of more than 7 million. Forty years earlier, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won a slightly smaller percentage of whites (56%) but swept the popular vote by a crushing margin of nearly 9 million. How? Because whites represented 88% of Reagan’s electorate, but only 67% of Trump’s. White Anglo voters are already a minority in some major states (California, most prominently) and the rest of the country is certain to follow within a generation. If the GOP maintains even vague hints of racism or nativism in its policies or attitudes, the ability to win in an increasingly diverse federal union will not only decline, but disappear.

It’s worth acknowledging that the evolving ethnicity of the United States bears an obvious connection to issues of immigration. The population growth among people of color almost entirely reflects increases in the Latino and Asian populations, since the Black percentage of the vote has remained mostly consistent (10% in 1980; 13% in 2020).

Not all of the Hispanic or Asian voters have personally immigrated to this country from elsewhere, but the great majority of them have parents, grandparents or cousins who have. As a result, any disrespect for recent new ethnic enclaves or flirtation with repeal of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship may exert nativist appeal to MAGA minions but will do little to win the backing of recent arrivals or their relatives.

More from Michael Medved: Picking the right running mate could powerfully boost Trump’s prospects

Finally, shifts in religious orientation also serve to undermine the populist project to rally the Christian faithful and to foster a sense of persecution and insecurity in religious believers of every kind. As recently as 2004 only 10% of voters in exit polls described themselves as lacking religious affiliation of any kind, but that percentage more than doubled (to 22%) by 2020, and nearly two-thirds of these “nones” voted for Joe Biden (65%). An avalanche of recent polling reports indicates growing disillusionment with religiosity overall, along with declining church attendance — a trend that applies to the heartland almost as much as it does to the coastal elite cities.

The principal problem for populism is that demographic developments make its precepts increasingly unpopular. There’s always been an edge of anger and indignation to the conviction that ordinary and decent citizens must unite to defend themselves against the arrogant abuse of distant, foreign-born, conspiratorial elites. After all, the great populist orator William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 by thundering against the Republican defense of the gold standard by applying Biblical resonance: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Yet even in that distant era, majorities of Americans preferred not to count themselves among the abused and battered (Bryan lost three times as a Presidential nominee!), and far more voters counted themselves as aspiring rather than aggrieved. In 2024 and beyond, most voters will remain committed to the traditional American characteristics of optimism and self-improvement and will more likely align with the confidence above the complaining.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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In November 1973, in the early stages of the Watergate story that ultimately wrecked his presidency with a coverup that amounted to obstruction of justice, Nixon made a crucial mistake while addressing 400 editors assembled by the Associated Press in Orlando, Florida. The Washington press corps had recently raised questions about $10 million of federal funds used to upgrade security at the president’s vacation homes in Biscayne Bay, Florida, and San Clemente, California. This led to further investigations about his personal tax avoidance strategies, greatly upsetting a political leader who had always prided himself on his working-class roots and modest wealth.

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“I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service – I have earned every cent,” Nixon told journalists in prepared remarks. “And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”

In his memoirs, Nixon acknowledged the destructive impact of his inept proclamation.

“This was not a spur-of-the-moment statement,” he wrote. “The attacks on my personal integrity were more disturbing for me and my family than all the other attacks put together. I thought it was essential to put my defense in down-to-earth, understandable language. But it was a mistake. From then on, variations of the line ‘I am not a crook’ were used as an almost constant source of criticism and ridicule.”

In fact, those words helped to explain how within the course of just a single year the president could go from a landslide victory (carrying 49 of 50 states and 61% of the popular vote) to a battered object of contempt careening helplessly toward impeachment proceedings, disgrace and ultimate resignation.

Prior presidents similarly demonstrated the unique potency of financial transgressions to shatter public confidence and political prospects: Americans have displayed a long-standing tendency to take misbehavior most seriously when they can associate dollar signs with its cost. Consider the most notoriously scandal-driven campaign in American history: In 1884, recently elected New York Gov. Grover Cleveland battled the former Speaker of the House and Secretary of State, the celebrated and charismatic James G. Blaine.

Republicans felt confident that they had destroyed Cleveland’s chances when they discovered and publicized the sad and sordid story of the bachelor candidate’s involvement with a troubled widow with whom he allegedly fathered a child out of wedlock, and even paid for the baby’s care in an orphanage. GOP enthusiasts rallied around the catchy chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” while the Democrats jauntily answered, “Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha!”

In contrast, Blaine’s family life seemed impeccable and exemplary, but his participation in suspect railroad deals and incriminating correspondence fatally damaged his campaign. For eight years he denied the authenticity of “The Mulligan Letters,” which indicated that he had received $64,000 for some nearly worthless railroad bonds in return for Congressional favors for Union Pacific. Worst of all, he had concluded one of the suspect missives with the unforgettable conclusion, “Kindly burn this letter.” Another chant that energized Democratic partisans in the heat of the campaign: “Burn, burn, burn this letter!”

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In the end, Blaine’s twisted business relationships produced a more indignant and decisive public reaction than Cleveland’s intimate indulgences. Cleveland went on to a tenuous victory in November and a glamorous and romantic White House wedding in the midst of his first term. He also became the only president before Trump to lose his fight for re-election, and then to come back with a third nomination in in a less personally focused (and more decisively successful) race in 1892.

Sixty years later, Nixon won the vice presidency as running mate to General Dwight Eisenhower and received an early, unforgettable indication of the public’s limited tolerance for self-enrichment on the part of public servants with any serious connection to the White House. Sherman Adams, the former governor of New Hampshire who became Ike’s tough-minded and all-powerful chief of staff, ended his eminent career in 1958 when a House subcommittee exposed his acceptance of an expensive vicuna overcoat and an elegant oriental rug from a textile manufacturer who had business with the federal government.

The Democrats in Congress demanded his resignation, but the president didn’t have the stomach to transmit the bad news personally. Instead, he handed the onerous job to Vice President Nixon who reluctantly delivered the message in an emotional meeting that Adams recalled to me when I interviewed him for my 1979 book The Shadow Presidents.

More recently, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received the most negative publicity since his confirmation hearings 32 years ago because of lavish vacations and costly gifts, provoking widespread indignation despite the lack of evidence of any favoritism whatever displayed to the sources of that largesse.

Looking ahead, regardless of what all the Republican-led House committees discover about the Biden family’s dubious finances, no one expects a Nixonian resignation or successful impeachment and removal from office.

But the charges against the president and his relatives for alleged influence peddling to fill the family coffers, amount to more than partisan “what-about-ism” designed to distract attention from the multiple allegations against Donald Trump. The Nixon disaster also highlights the manner in which the public understands monetary misdeeds and old-fashioned greed more readily than the importance of conscientious cooperation with the National Archives in handling presidential documents.

Ordinary Americans can more readily grasp the shameful nature of receiving millions in under-the-table payments from sleazy foreign interests in return for access to the vice president than can comprehend the complexities of trying to replace duly certified members of the electoral college with panels of impostor fake electors.

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Democrats believe Trump’s alleged crimes threatened the core functions of our democracy while the Bidens have, at worst, engaged in the sort of self-serving, unscrupulous behavior that’s been a familiar feature of money-hungry politicos since the beginning of the Republic. But the very familiarity of these charges makes them easier to understand and helps to mobilize indignant Republicans into resentment of the supposed “double standard” that hits Trump with multiple indictments but at one point provided Hunter Biden with a “sweetheart” plea bargain.

Nearly 50 years ago, the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation spent months reviewing Nixon’s personal history, and even before the conclusion of that investigation committee chairman Wilbur Mills expressed confidence that Nixon would be out of office by November because of public “dismay” over his tax history.

Ultimately, information about the president’s personal handling of money played no discernable role in the articles of impeachment drawn up by the House, which focused almost entirely on the president’s obstruction of justice and misuse of federal agencies including the IRS and the FBI.

In the same context, the allegations against Donald Trump will almost surely produce more legal damage than any of the allegations currently aimed at President Biden’s apparent involvement with the dubious business dealings of his reprobate son.

But the experience of the only president to leave office in the middle of his term still suggests the political impact of financial speculations and the unfortunate declaration that “I am not a crook” can generate even more damage in the world of public opinion than guilty verdicts and legalistic indictments.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3)

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No, there won’t be a repeat of the tickets of 2016 and 2020, so any yard signs and bumper stickers reading TRUMP-PENCE ’24 will have value as oddball collectors’ items only.

The former president’s most committed supporters accuse Pence of disloyalty (or much worse) and boo him at conservative conferences, unable to forgive his prominent role in blocking The Chief’s elaborate plans to overturn the election results after the votes were counted.

The idea of the “stolen election” has become such a sacred element of the Trumpian faith that it’s impossible to imagine that the MAGA minions, let alone the former president himself, would accept anyone who disputes the accusations of massive, game-changing fraud as his ticket mate.

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Sure, Trump will continue arguing about the evidence of Democratic cheating through the course of the new election, but he won’t want to pursue these battles with the Republican nominee for vice president.

A Trump – DeSantis ticket not likely

Similarly unlikely — and contradictory to the Constitution — is the stubbornly popular notion that Trump and Ron DeSantis, his most publicized rival, will give up the insults that have increasingly characterized their toxic relationship and decide to run together for the sake of party unity. This utopian scheme directly contradicts the wording of the Twelfth Amendment, which begins: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”

In other words, a ticket comprised of two Floridians would automatically forfeit all thirty of Florida’s electoral votes — a suicidal, self-inflicted blow that would make no sense whatever in the likely event of another close election.

In fact, the polling indicates that a battle between Trump and Biden would be tight enough that the choice of a new Republican running mate could make a decisive difference in the outcome. The GOP enjoys a “fresh face” option that the Democrats don’t; barring some dire episode of illness or physical breakdown, Dems will nominate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris once again. Despite her unpopularity (which rivals Biden’s own), White House strategists can’t conceivably replace the first-ever woman-of-color Vice President without risking grave offense to two constituencies (blacks and females) absolutely essential to Democratic success.

With big majorities of every segment of the electorate expressing their preference for something new and different in place of a tired rematch of the same teams from last time, only the Republicans can satisfy that yearning by adding at least one novel personality to their national ticket.

For obvious reasons, it makes sense that this new face should, if possible, be female — since Trump painfully under-performed with women voters in his prior presidential runs.  2016 saw Hillary Clinton crushing him among females by 11 points, and four years later Biden achieved an even more lopsided advantage with 57% of women to Trump’s 42%.

Nikki Haley is one possible running mate

The most prominent female figure in Republican presidential politics, Nikki Haley, has frequently been mentioned as a vice presidential possibility, though she explicitly insists she’s not interested in becoming anyone’s number two.  She also faces a problem with her unequivocal promise that she’d support Trump for president again if he decided to seek another term and would give up any thought of launching a competing campaign of her own.

Trump and his allies have reminded her (and the public) of this broken pledge, and whether or not her own campaign eventually generates competitive momentum as one of Trump’s rivals, it won’t help her secure a place as the Big Guy’s number two. If she stays in the single-digit doldrums as a campaign irrelevancy, Team Trump would question the idea that she could bring massive new support to his ticket. But if she does challenge him seriously (especially in the debates), it hardly comports with the dutiful subservience the candidate would presumably prefer as his designated replacement.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, and Lauren Boebert among the contenders

Other women with closer connections to the MAGA movement — Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, and Lauren Boebert — have also been mentioned as potential running mates for Trump, but each of them comes with disqualifying aspects — like Lake’s implacable refusal to accept her 2022 defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, or Greene’s deep and enduring association with the crazed conspiracists of Q-anon — that would interfere with any Trumpian attempts to broaden the party’s base by appealing to suburban independents.

Mike Pence proved an effective addition to the national ticket because he clearly counted as a widely admired representative of the party’s mainstream, not a product of the flourishing Trumpist subculture at the edge of the GOP.

This brings us to the one figure for 2024 who most credibly deploys the same advantages as Pence: as a current governor and a former, well-respected member of the House of Representatives.

Kristi Noem is a real possibility

Kristi Noem of South Dakota also offers a unique combination of grit and glamor: She became a beauty queen who reigned as South Dakota’s “Snow Queen” in 1990, but left college early to take over the family farm when her father died in an agricultural machinery accident. In 2022, generally a tough year for Republicans, she won re-election as governor with a 62% landslide, drawing more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in her state’s history.

Skeptics might deride her elevation to a national ticket as a repeat of the Sarah Palin blunder in 2008, by relying on good looks and charisma more than meaningful political experience. But the comparison is altogether unfair: at the time John McCain chose her as his running mate, Palin had been governor of Alaska for less than two years and her only prior electoral experience had been in her small hometown of Wasilla.

Noem, on the other hand, served two terms in the South Dakota state legislature (the second as assistant majority leader) and four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before her first victory as governor.

She has already won the enthusiastic and outspoken admiration of Donald Trump by hosting one of the most successful public events of his presidency (the stirringly patriotic July 4 speech in 2020 at Mt. Rushmore) and for speaking effectively at the Republican Convention of that year. As the mother of three, married to the same man (insurance broker and family farmer Byron Noem) since age 21, the only scandalous behavior in her history involves her dangerously aggressive driving.

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By the end of 2021, Governor Noem had racked up 26 traffic citations — 20 for speeding, three for stop sign violations, two for seat belt violations, and one for driving without a license. She has apologized repeatedly for this outlaw history to the citizens of South Dakota, but many of her constituents seem to find her speed demon tendencies endearing if not exemplary.

The best argument for Noem as part of the Republican ticket in 2024 involves her dramatic contrast with Kamala Harris and the prospect of their inevitable and significant televised debate. The choice between the midwestern farm girl versus the daughter of divorced, immigrant academics in Berkeley, California, could boost GOP efforts in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, with significant rural populations and close results in both of the last two elections.

Above all, bringing Noem onto the national ticket (especially if he announces the choice before the convention in Milwaukee) would help to “Republicanize” Trump — giving his candidacy at least some flavor of heartland normality and wholesomeness, lessening the chance that the ’24 ticket will be viewed as alien invaders from planet MAGA. Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa, another possibility for the Vice-Presidential nomination, would provide a similar reassuring impact.

Of course, Donald Trump will instinctively savor his position as the star of the circus and the center of attention for as long as he can possibly maintain it, but the addition of a more conventional teammate in the early stages of the campaign might also help by taking the focus away from legal problems and other unnecessary and distracting controversies. At the same time, the choice of an energetic and appealing Number Two for the Republican nominee (whoever it is) can help attract Americans of every perspective who yearn for an element of novelty and freshness beyond the dreary duopoly of two grumpy old men.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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In other words, will the crowded schedule of indictments, investigations, depositions, and trials serve to boost or block his pending presidential ambitions?

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A recent caller to my daily radio show made a novel argument on behalf of the former president’s unprecedented strategy and introduced a provocative analogy to explain why the legal and political forces arrayed against him are likely to fail.

Identifying himself as a high school teacher named Tim in Snohomish, Washington, my guest suggested that the situation in today’s national politics resembled a school that’s been horribly, constantly disrupted by a plague of cruel and unconscionable bullying. The offenses follow a consistent pattern in which a clique comprised of the most popular, privileged, and arrogant students regularly persecutes a noble outcast who doesn’t fit in.

The situation becomes so dangerous and destructive that disciplinary expulsions are not only appropriate, but required. The question for administrators: Should we punish the whole crowd of spoiled thugs at fault in this situation or try to remove the one long-suffering soul who has been their unfortunate victim?

In Tim’s perspective, the former president is the incorruptible non-conformist who, as a matter of conscience and conviction, refuses to submit to the expectations of the haughty establishment, the governmental and media elites who comprise the all-powerful deep state and can’t tolerate Donald Trump’s unbending determination to drain the putrid swamp that has become their comfortable habitat.

This line of thinking helps to explain the odd phenomenon that sees Trump’s poll ratings improve with each new charge against him. Having already survived two impeachment attempts to drive him from office, the so-called “Russia Hoax,” the dubious dossier, decades of questions about his business practices and tax returns, the “Access Hollywood” tape, and the payment of hush money to a porn star, the MAGA Man has made his pursuers look not only relentless but ineffectual.

Gee Scott: Trump ‘has to go to jail, it’s not rocket science’

To his loyal supporters, the fact that no prior president endured prosecution for mishandling classified documents doesn’t show Trump as distinctively irresponsible but as uniquely targeted by unscrupulous and implacable enemies. Each fresh accusation makes its predecessors seem less serious and singular, not more so, indicating a pattern of pointless persecution, not personal wrong-doing.

As the analogy about one brutally bullied student would seem to indicate, the ferocious focus on Trump’s personal shortcomings also helps in a strange way to elevate his stature –the same way that a school would devote special attention to any kid who suffered cruel and consistent abuse.

As the undisputed center of attention and controversy, the former president confirms the conviction of his loyal followers that their hero plays a gigantic, utterly disproportionate role in this moment of history.

While war rages in Ukraine, deficit spending menaces our economic future, homelessness and rising crime afflict our major cities, the multiple charges against Trump seem to suggest a blinding obsession on the part of his political foes who, recalling the indelible images of Gulliver’s Travels, look like tiny, irrelevant Lilliputians struggling vainly to bind and subdue a giant they can’t comprehend but instinctively fear.

The fears about bullying, the “weaponization” of government, and the politics of personal destruction threaten the national welfare not through needless battles but by paralyzing distraction. Instead of a much-needed new willingness to cooperate in addressing the most pressing common problems, we deploy ubiquitous assaults on the opposition. Trump’s prosecutors were hardly the first to lead lusty chants that demanded that the leaders of the other side should promptly be locked up.

More from Michael Medved: Overstating the dangers to Democracy

Just as an educational institution damaged by a plague of bullying will find less time for learning or development of constructive connections among the student body, so too a political system in which both parties claim victimhood and accuse each other side of persecution will be unable to address the nation’s most substantive challenges.

In announcing his candidacy, Trump promised Americans who felt disregarded by the Democrats that he would become “your voice, your justice, your retribution.” The overriding conviction on the part of the candidate himself that he has been treated unjustly gives rise to the reasonable fear that the retribution he has in mind involves personal grudges more than fresh approaches to politics or policy.

As far as conducting a revenge-seeking, victimhood campaign for the nation’s highest office, Trump’s true believers may try to persuade the public of the faults of their rivals but face a much tougher fight to establish the blameless innocence of their own eternally embattled leader.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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In my adolescence (I started studying at Yale at age 16), I nourished a youthful obsession with Slavic culture, identifying with the 19th-century Slavophiles who preached the inherent superiority, and incomparable depth and richness, of Russian character and civilization.

I particularly savored the music that heritage produced, listening incessantly to the nationalistic grandeur of “The Mighty Handful” composers (Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and colleagues) as well as their brilliant 20th century successors (Serge Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff). The novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the lyrical plays of Chekhov, seemed to me the peak of literary expression; appropriately, I happened to be reading Crime and Punishment during the occasion of my only teenaged arrest (for camping without a permit).

Slavic appeal comes from family background

Part of the special appeal of all these flavorful Slavic offerings stemmed, unconsciously, from my family’s Ukrainian-Jewish background. My paternal grandparents hailed from a village too small to appear on standard maps, then immigrated to Philadelphia where my father was born in 1926. “Medved” means “bear” in Russian, and remains a common moniker today (especially with the common variant “Medvedev,” which is the designation of an especially sinister member of Putin’s inner circle).

Of course, growing up at the height of The Cold War, our family never made too much of these suspiciously Soviet connections, especially after Sputnik in 1957 gave the USSR a short-lived lead in the space race; that development seemed to present a direct challenge to my father’s work as a physicist, whose career required high-level security clearances. But the hint of exoticism in my background allowed a subtle twinge of recognition, or even kinship when cultural exchanges came to town — including the Red Army Chorus, Bolshoi Ballet, and touring pianists and chess masters.

More Michael Medved opinion: More Americans are willing to use violence to achieve political goals

Certainly, Russia’s rich, atmospheric culture might exert a deep, almost hypnotic fascination over vulnerable young romantics, but confronting the truth about Russia’s cruel and pervasively brutal past produces a very different reaction. At Yale, my total of four semesters exploring Russian history covered more than a thousand years of misery from ancient Novgorod and Kiev to the more recent horrors of the Soviet era, offering subject matter so relentlessly, exhaustively depressing that I eventually changed my academic focus to concentrate on the more hopeful trajectory of the United States.

Of course, American history features harsh realities, including our treatment of indigenous peoples and the monstrous crime of slavery. But the overall direction of the society in our relatively brief national existence has been unmistakably positive, if still imperfect. As Dr. Martin Luther King many times observed: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In the case of Russia, the arc has bent hardly at all, producing more than a millennium of mostly unalloyed misery. Anyone who’s studied Ivan the Terrible, or his latter-day admirer Josef Stalin, will recognize the resemblance between the two autocrats, beyond the improved technology that allowed the more recent megalomaniac to slaughter even more of his long-suffering subjects.

Before my coursework in college, like most Americans, I knew nothing of “The Time of Troubles” — a 15-year period (1598-1613) of chaos, civil war, starvation, mass murder, demented pretenders to the throne, famine, and destruction. The relevant encyclopedia entries estimate that between one-third and two-thirds of the Russian population perished through a lethal combination of internal strife, famine, disease, and the general breakdown of all elements of civilized life. The records show that the crown changed hands six times in 15 years, with at least 10 “False Dmitrys” — imposters who claimed to be one of Czar Ivan’s dead sons who had perished as very young men, through unlikely accidents, or the court machinations of their deranged father.

Russian culture involves ‘indescribable pain’

It’s bad enough to focus your time on reading about such indescribable pain, but it’s even worse to imagine living through it — as the Russian people have, from generation to generation. The great national gift (if you can call it that) is the readiness to endure suffering. Americans who ponder the epic corruption and cruelty of the Putin regime wonder how the Russian population can stand for it; the direct answer is that neither the current crop nor their distant ancestors have ever experienced anything that’s notably better.

In the U.S., it’s become trendy to find fault with our previously revered leaders, but even if you emphasize the shortcomings of, say, the four Rushmore presidents, it’s impossible to classify them as bloodthirsty monsters. Russian history, on the other hand, is full of such figures, both before and after the Revolution and Civil War.

In fact, the five years of post-revolutionary conflict (1917-22) between the Reds and the Whites claimed between 7,000,000 and 12,000,000 lives, the great majority of them innocent civilians —including my father’s five older sisters. They each perished before reaching the age of 14 and before my grandmother could escape with them to America, reunite with my grandfather, and give birth to my dad, welcomed, with astonishment, as our family’s very own American Miracle.

If they had remained trapped in the Russian Empire for another decade, the chances of survival would have been slim, with at least 3.2 million starvation deaths during the Ukrainian “Holodomor” (the enforced, Stalinist famine, 1932-33) followed by the unimaginable casualties of World War II (at least 20,000,000 more, mostly civilians, from 1941-45).

Medved: Faith and doubt can coexist

The horrors that the Russian people have endured during their long history count as so vast and so unparalleled, that the populace has developed a national instinct to blame hostile outsiders for every misery. Never mind that internal struggles for power, peasant rebellions, sadistic autocrats, and bloody civil conflict took at least as many lives as all the invaders who exploited those divisions for their own purposes.

Still, endless and often disastrous warfare with Mongols, Tatars, Teutonic Knights, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Turks, Japanese, Prussians, French, Germans, and many more promoted the idea that foreign villains caused the legacy of Russian suffering more than the long, indelible record of domestic faults and failures.

That powerful pull to wallow in victimhood inevitably encourages absurd ideas, like blaming Western powers for Putin’s unspeakably cruel and utterly irrational invasion of Ukraine, and most recently the claim that “American Interference” caused the Wagner Group mutiny and the recent bid for power by Yevgeny Prigozhin. A decade ago, Putin insisted that “American exceptionalism” amounted to a pernicious myth, but that Russia alone counted as truly exceptional. The only way to advance that argument involved playing the role of the perpetually wounded party on the world stage, constantly abused by jealous and far inferior rivals.

The suffering of the Russians has, in fact, become habitual but it should never be accepted as normal or inevitable — no matter how much one may feel drawn to the study or their mournful and melancholy history.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago is one of the most respected operations in the world when it comes to sampling public sentiment, but their latest “Dangers to Democracy” survey falters – badly – when it uses the words “violence” and “force” interchangeably.

In asking questions of some 50,000 respondents, they inquired how many adults would agree with the statement “Force is justified to restore Trump to the White House” or “Force is justified to restore abortion rights.” Their numbers indicated that some 12 million adults favored force to bring Trump back to power, while nearly twice as many (22 million) endorsed force for the sake of rebuilding the guarantees previously assured by the Supreme Court.

These responses may shock more moderate observers and conjure fears of brutal civil conflict, but the context in which the organization presented its data qualifies as seriously misleading.

The GOP should target Kamala Harris early and often

All the questions about justifying force appeared under the inappropriate heading “Support For Political Violence,” even though the word “violence” never appeared in any of the statements for which the pollsters solicited a reaction. Force and violence are, emphatically, not the same thing. While they might find 32 million who agree with the proposition that “force is justified to coerce Congress or government officials,” chances are the number ready to use “violence” for that coercion would have proved far more modest.

The government, for instance, employs force to lay down the law on speeding, shoplifting, or public nudity – that’s why we use the phrase enforcing the law. But violence on these issues occurs only when something goes terribly wrong, on the part of the citizens or the authorities. Resorting to force can involve peaceful protests of every sort, from strikes and boycotts to mass demonstrations, as well as the actions of the duly designated authorities. The language that describes the purpose of such organized action as to “coerce Congress or government officials” suggests just that sort of forceful persuasion — not a violent effort to overthrow the government itself or to lurch toward anarchy and disorder.

Dictionaries recognize the crucial distinction between force and violence. The most common synonyms for the noun “force” (according to Oxford Languages) are coercion, compulsion, constraint, duress, threats, pressure, and influence. The term “violence” never appears as a common substitute for “force.” Meanwhile, the list of words that equate most closely to “violence” includes brutality, ferocity, savagery, cruelty, sadism, barbarity, inhumanity, and ruthlessness.

Does anyone actually believe that a significant share of Americans would authorize the deployment of those characteristics in order to facilitate Trump’s return to power or the restoration of abortion rights? In that context, the press release associated with the University of Chicago survey clearly overstates the danger of civil strife when it trumpets its results with the sentence: “More than two and a half years after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capital, a new study estimates some 12 million Americans would support violence to restore former President Donald Trump to power.”

More from Michael Medved: Faith and doubt can increasingly co-exist

Since the language of the survey never mentioned violence at all, it’s a dispiriting slander to assume that all those who would like to bring about Trump’s return, or changes in abortion regulation, are ready to inflict death or injury to accomplish such purposes.

Without question, the present polarization in the country counts as troubling and regrettable, but exaggerating its brutal and violent nature will only exacerbate, rather than heal, the divisions that dismay us.

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Recent figures gathered for the authoritative General Social Survey by the University of Chicago indicate that overwhelming majorities of our fellow citizens still say prayers regularly and believe in an afterlife that follows our earthly experience.

John & Shari: Why are people turning away from organized religion?

At the same time, firm belief in God’s very existence has declined dramatically. A recent report in The Hill, based on GSS numbers, begins with the stark, startling, but somewhat misleading declaration: “Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists.”

This contrasts with 2008, when “the share of sure-believers topped 60%,” and nearly two-thirds of respondents agreed with the statement that “they know God exists and have no doubts.”

This unmistakable trend away from faith-based certainty might lead observers to conclude that religious conviction is either dead or dying in the United States, but other figures from the same study undermine that conclusion. The General Social Survey shows that only a small minority (7% of all adults) describe themselves as “atheists” and embrace the unequivocal statement that “they do not believe in God.”

In other words, if 50% of the country says “they know God exists and have no doubts” and only 7% of the populace denies God’s existence altogether, then religious sentiments still win by a landslide in the nation at large.

And what about the “in-between” approaches that manage, somehow, to combine elements of faith and doubt?

The GSS shows 16% who “believe in God but have doubts,” 6% who say they believe in God “sometimes,” and 14% who recognize the existence of “some higher power” but decline to identify it in traditional theological terms.

Combining these self-identified categories, they amount to more than one-third of all Americans (36%) who are inclined to acknowledge an almighty force that controls our lives and the universe, thereby combining elements of faith with some underlying questions about its precise nature. Many of these middle-of-the-roaders more closely resemble the religious no-doubters far more closely than they fit with outnumbered atheists and agnostics.

The data indicate, for example, nearly three-quarters of the population say they believe in life after death, and “that number has remained relatively stable over the decades.” As Professor Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, aptly notes: “Belief is very stubborn in America today.”

The habit of prayer remains amazingly widespread –a total of 67% of respondents say they pray once a week or more. This means that many of those who feel an intimate impulse to address God regularly with their entreaties may still harbor doubts as to whether those prayers are ultimately answered or even heard.

I recognize this pattern because I have lived it, personally, for most of the years of my adulthood. Yes, I recite traditional Jewish prayers every morning and every night before sleep and walk to our Orthodox synagogue each Saturday morning and on major holidays to participate in worship services.

Our congregation is full of people, our friends and neighbors, who feel enough faith to honor similar commitments but wouldn’t necessarily agree with the survey statement that we “have no doubts” about God.

Why, then, would it make sense for anyone to go through considerable effort and inconvenience to follow religious rules if you remain in any way uncertain about their source? For me, and for many other religiously involved Americans, the obvious answer concerns the value of the rules themselves as a pattern for healthy living.

Yes, one can sustain persistent questions about what, exactly, God wants of us, at the same time that your own experience makes you certain about a system of behavior that’s good for you. In that context, there are tens of millions who pray regularly but still may tell pollsters they “believe in God but have doubts.”

This tension relates to an 85-page advisory released last month by the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, who focused on loneliness as a new public health epidemic. The report showed that more than half of Americans are chronically lonely and suffering devastating health effects from social isolation, including heart disease, dementia, stroke, anxiety, and depression.

More from Michael Medved: An ancient antidote to the new plague of loneliness

If nothing else, participating in communal worship provides an age-old, time-tested antidote to this current plague. Beyond theological arguments or differences in religious outlook, the idea of coming together to express gratitude for the blessings we share helps to promote a sense of common purpose and connection.

The deep significance of such faith communities helps to explain the most surprising inclusion in the Biblical formulation of the Ten Commandments. The Fourth Commandment (in most enumerations) tells humanity to “remember” and to “guard” the Sabbath day as one of the most meaningful and imperative aspects of human behavior.

The purpose, according to sages of every tradition, is not just for people to thereby draw closer to God but also to build deeper and more durable connections with one another. With shared meals, along with celebrations in both homes and houses of worship, those who honor Sabbatarian traditions can tell you how effectively this ancient pattern still works. Doubters and deniers don’t ruin a festive Sabbath meal and can, instead, enrich it.

In the same context, the United States remains a deeply and broadly religious country, with only a small segment of the populace (19%) saying they claim no religion. According to the Pew Research Center, other wealthy nations considered our peers show numbers on religious disengagement that are significantly higher – such as 26% in Germany, 31% in Britain, 32% in France, 52% in China, and 60% in Japan. The vigor and resilience of American religiosity relate directly to the diversity of expressions of faith and the range of options available, even for doubters, in America.

With the common phenomena of faith and doubt co-existing in the same community or even inside the same household, the idea that a multiplicity of attitudes should flourish in the same country is a reassuring sign of health and well-being, not decadence and doom.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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Most obviously, she will be running alongside the most elderly presidential nominee in American history. At age 82, by the time of the next inauguration, Joe Biden’s incapacity or death could conceivably place the bumbling vice president in the White House.

‘Lots of concerns’ as President Biden announces bid for re-election

It is hardly outrageous or unthinkable to argue that those who back a Biden presidency are simultaneously endorsing the real possibility of a Harris presidency before Biden’s next term comes to its scheduled close when he’s 86 years old.

Secondly, Harris’s role in the upcoming campaign will take on special importance because the Republicans mean to focus on it.

Polling shows that during her more than two years in office, the vice president has drawn even weaker support than her boss. A recent Wall Street Journal survey showed only 35% of likely voters expressing approval of the job she’s done for the nation. For the GOP, targeted criticism of Kamala Harris works as a “twofer” — simultaneously reminding the public of Biden’s vulnerability and infirmity at the same time that you emphasize the limitations and stumbles of the vice president who might well succeed him.

In fact, Harris represents such a uniquely juicy target that Republican strategists should develop plans for heightening the attention she receives.

One way to do that would be to identify their own candidate for vice president as soon as possible in order to compare and contrast the available choices for the second-highest post in the executive branch of government.

Harris is already a sure bet as the Democratic nominee; Biden featured her prominently in his three-minute announcement video, and his campaign team has left no doubt whatsoever that they mean to return her to the Naval Observatory — the official, if anomalous, home of all vice presidents. This situation gives her maximum exposure to Republican attacks and fault-finding, with more than 16 months before the GOP convenes their national convention in Milwaukee to make their own choice official.

But why should the Republicans wait that long before designating their replacement for Harris?

Medved: Could Trump Really Pick DeSantis for VP?

The battle for the presidential nomination is scheduled to reach its climax by March 5, 2024, with Super Tuesday, when a dozen states hold their primaries or caucuses, including such vote-rich battlefields as California, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and more. As in other competitive nomination fights in both parties over the last 40 years, the winner on Super Tuesday will very likely command enough momentum and delegates to lay claim to the nomination, whether that candidate turns out to be Donald Trump or one of his potential rivals.

For the front-runner to announce his vice-presidential choice in mid-March — some four months before the delegates actually assemble for their national convention — would not only provide more time for the new team to learn to work in collaboration but would also expand the opportunity to bring together the various factions in the cause of party unity.

An early announcement of a Republican veep would also mean 16 extra weeks (at least) to turn that candidate loose in an all-out assault on Harris and her weaknesses, emphasizing the manifold advantages of the GOP selection.

It’s easy to imagine who that contender could be, especially with pressure for the Republicans to recruit another, more formidable female to replace the first woman to hold a nationally elected office. Nikki Haley offers one obvious choice, as do Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, or Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, for that matter.

The longer that Kamala Harris faces comparisons to a new, credible, and energetic rival, the more tired, dreary, and exposed the incumbent would seem. It’s worth remembering that when Harris conducted her own campaign for president in 2020, she managed to shed rather than build support every week that she continued an embarrassing candidacy that yielded nothing – an absolute zero – in terms of delegate support.

More from Michael Medved: What the Fox-Dominion deal means for Trump’s prospects

Other prominent and esteemed Republicans have experimented with early running-mate designations with limited success. In 1976, Ronald Reagan tried to inject last-minute new support for his robust nomination challenge to President Gerald Ford by announcing his choice of Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, as his running mate if he succeeded in winning the nomination. Reagan fell just short of victory, and when he did win the White House four years later, he selected Schweiker as his first Secretary of Health and Human Services.

On April 27, 2016, as the last serious contender hoping to block Donald Trump’s nomination by the Republican Party, Senator Ted Cruz announced that if he managed to beat the odds and became the nominee, he would select former candidate (and one-time corporate CEO) Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential running mate. Six days later, he lost the Indiana Primary, and Senator Cruz suspended his campaign, making Fiorina’s candidacy the briefest in political history.

The idea of naming an early challenger to Kamala Harris bears no real similarity to these prior disappointments because this time, that choice would come, ideally, only after the POTUS competition had been decided definitively, not as a desperate stunt to keep the contest open.

The idea would be to target Harris as early and effectively as possible by stressing the superiority of the Republican choice by every available measure. One can even imagine a pre-convention televised debate between the two designated candidates, a way to inject new energy and public interest in a race where both Trump and Biden – the two likely presidential contenders – have both expressed significant reluctance to participate in high-profile showdowns over the most important office.

In 2024, the advanced age of these aspirants makes the vice-presidential choice more consequential than ever before, and an early selection by the ultimate GOP nominee would help to give that job the enhanced focus that it surely deserves.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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In other words, nearly two-thirds of the opposition party remained convinced that the president of the United States has no right to the office he has already occupied for more than two years.

More from Michael Medved: Could Trump Really Pick DeSantis for VP?

In this context, the recent decision by Fox News to negotiate a quick, costly surrender in its defamation battle with Dominion Software raises a series of uncomfortable questions.

First, why would the most powerful news organization on cable television give up the effort to defend its reputation and save nearly a billion dollars before a trial even began at the time that the great bulk of its loyal, core audience still believed that the presidential contest of 2020 had been rigged and riddled with fraud?

Second, would Fox’s decision to acknowledge broadcasting “lies” concerning the stolen election narrative serve to undermine or alter belief in those charges of cheating, embraced by the big majority of Republicans who agreed with them as recently as a few weeks before the settlement with Dominion?

And finally, would Donald Trump continue to insist that he had actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, even after his most prominent, powerful media ally had visibly abandoned any such claim? And would the former President’s insistence that he had been victimized by a criminal conspiracy to overturn his rightful victory serve, in the end, to help him win the Republican nomination and the White House in 2024?

The answers to these uncertainties range from the obvious to the unknowable.

In terms of the reason for Fox to agree to an embarrassing settlement rather than engage in a protracted and hyper-publicized court battle, the decision reflects an inescapable lack of confidence in the case they expected to present. In a pre-trial statement for the record, Judge Eric M. Davis unequivocally declared: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that it is crystal clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

This meant that even under the defendant-friendly “Sullivan Standard” developed by the Supreme Court in 1964, Fox could easily have lost the argument based on “reckless disregard for the truth” even without the conclusive proof of “actual malice” that plaintiffs are otherwise expected to display in such situations.

While diehard Trump loyalists might be expected to keep watching Fox regardless of the outcome of the Dominion defamation trial, a very possible loss for the network would have profoundly undercut the mainstream respectability important to the Murdoch family and other executives, who had built their operation on the proud (if frequently anomalous) slogan “fair and balanced.”

As to the impact of the Fox News refusal to go to the mat to defend the rigged election storyline, there’s no reason to expect that such a decision would shake the worldview of its true believer audience. Those who insist that the outcome of the election had been fraudulently pre-determined by a ruthless and all-powerful establishment could easily believe the same set-up applied to the Dominion defamation trial had it been allowed to proceed.

As it happened, the Fox deal to settle the matter by paying half the funds initially demanded, and without a requirement of a public acknowledgment of guilt, might be understood as a draw of some kind rather than an outright surrender.

Most importantly, the last-minute arrangement to settle the argument over Fox’s post-election coverage preserved Trump’s room to maneuver on the one issue that has seemed most essential to him in his third pursuit of the presidency: his unwavering assertion that he won the last time and has been victimized by a conspiratorial and malevolent effort to ignore the will of the people.

This conviction represents the single most obvious distinction between the former president and all of his present or prospective challengers, who express either skepticism or discreet silence regarding the stop-the-steal creed that continues to obsess at least a plurality of the Republican base.

The notion that Trump himself would abandon this cultish conviction seems far-fetched; even the desertion of Fox News from that creedal commitment only serves to make the fearless leader seem all the more unshakable and singular to his devotees and, it would seem, in his own mind.

In the same way that Trump’s indictments appear to strengthen his position within his own party but may damage his prospects for November 2024, the split with Fox News over the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s last victory may mean little for Trump’s chances at the nomination but could still influence waverers or independents in the general election campaign, and help the aging Democrat to yet another decisive win in the final tally.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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The idea has obvious appeal, with the Associated Press reporting on thousands of “fake, automated Twitter accounts” that pour out lavish praise on the former President while “aggressively suggesting” that the Florida governor would make an ideal choice as his candidate for vice president.

Though reports suggest that these busy bots have been generated by sophisticated AI programs, the idea of a Trump-DeSantis ticket also makes some sense to actual human beings. National polls show the two GOP leaders jointly dominating the race for the nomination, attracting the combined support of more than 70% of self-identified Republicans.

More Medved: As religious affiliation declines, why do believers still control Congress?

If Trump offered the second spot on the ticket to DeSantis, and he accepted, it’s likely that lesser rivals – Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and so on – would likely pull out of the race. The nasty primary battle that most pundits predict would be over before it even begins. This would spare the Grand Old Party a long season of intra-party squabbles and the squandering of billions of dollars that otherwise could be saved for beating Democrats.

Despite the good sense behind this scenario, it almost surely won’t happen for three powerful reasons –

1-     Trump won’t make the offer

2-     DeSantis won’t take the offer

3-     And the Constitution clearly discourages the very idea.

1. TRUMP’S DISCOMFORT. One of the obvious and undeniable aspects of the Maga Man’s powerful personality is a perpetual, unequivocal need to be the center of attention. Until the very end of his administration, when Trumpian true believers rallied January 6, the soft-spoken Mike Pence never once upstaged his boss. Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, would be a threat to steal the spotlight from the chief from the very moment their prospective partnership commenced. That’s especially true because on the two most controversial aspects of Trump’s worldview – his belief that he actually won the 2020 election and his insistence on cutting back U.S. aid to Ukraine—DeSantis appears to express a dissenting, if somewhat muddled, perspective. If Trump-DeSantis won the White House, the president would be Constitutionally prohibited from making another run for the top job and would inevitably suspect Vice President DeSantis of maneuvering for his own benefit rather than sacrificing everything for team Trump.
2. A BAD FIT FOR DeSANTIS AND HIS AMBITIONS. If the GOP ticket went down to defeat, the vice-presidential nominee (whoever it happens to be) would be tainted forever by association with a political polarizer and loser. It’s even likely that Trump would find a way to blame his running mate for the disaster; however, it comes about. And if the ticket prevailed, they’d get only a single term that’s sure to be turbulent: with Trump’s CPAC promise to inflict “retribution” on all his enemies, it’s hard to imagine that he’d leave behind that “Morning in America” glow that allowed Vice President George H. W. Bush to triumph in 1988 as Ronald Reagan’s logical successor.

Another factor that would push DeSantis away from the vice presidency is the great likelihood that he would hate the job. Even the governor’s most strident critics recognize his indefatigable energy: he’s an activist executive who would feel trapped and bored in a famously frustrating, largely do-nothing job. You don’t have to be Kamala Harris to feel diminished and paralyzed in the nation’s least respected prominent post. DeSantis would almost certainly prefer raising more hell in Tallahassee in the two years left in his gubernatorial term to attending the funerals of foreign dignitaries or biding his time in the Naval Observatory and waiting for Trump to depart or die.

1. CONSTITUTIONAL TROUBLE FOR A “TWO FLORIDIANS TICKET”. The Twelfth Amendment, adopted in 1804 to clarify the functioning of the Electoral College, declares: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves…”

So what happens if both top candidates are, indisputably, “inhabitants” of the self-same Sunshine State? Constitutional scholars agree that the text means that any such ticket can’t legally capture any electoral votes from the state in which they both reside, so the two Floridians would automatically forfeit the 30 electoral votes of the nation’s third most populous state—an appalling handicap for any Republican seeking the presidency.

The only time in political history that this issue actually arose came in 2000, when George W. Bush (who lived in Austin) selected Dick Cheney (who lived in Dallas) as his running mate, risking the loss of the Texas electors who were desperately needed in one of the closest elections ever. Fortunately, Karl Rove and the other Bush managers understood the problem: just days before the announcement of Cheney as the Vice-Presidential choice, the prospective candidate traveled to Wyoming to officially change his voter registration. He also placed his Dallas home on the market to clearly mark the end of his status as a Texas inhabitant, listing his Wyoming vacation home as his new primary residence. Some Democrats may have looked askance at these maneuvers, but no one attempted a legal challenge, suggesting that either DeSantis or Trump could, if necessary, perpetrate similar shifts. But would they?

For DeSantis, with two years left in his term as governor, shifting his official residence to some other state would look dubious, embarrassing, and perhaps illegal – possibly requiring his resignation from a job that he loves. As for Trump, he’s always been known as a New Yorker and only recently claimed the status of Floridian, so it’s hardly unthinkable that Trump Tower once again becomes his official base of operations. But the prospect of the proud Master of Mar-a-Lago giving up one of the grandest residences in the country to enable Governor DeSantis to take a secondary place on the ticket hardly seems commensurate with Trump’s enduring sense of his own ducal grandiosity. Sending a message that he needs DeSantis so desperately as a running mate that he’s willing, very publicly, to move his personal place of residence hardly seems like a plausible Trumpian maneuver. As for the possibility of trying to contest in court the definitive meaning of the Twelfth Amendment, any such proceeding raises an unfortunate reminder that the former president already has more than enough legal proceedings to distract him from his political priorities.

Conventional wisdom suggests that if Trump wins the nomination, he will likely seek a female running mate – Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, perhaps, or defeated gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake of Arizona, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, or other eligible females.

Yes, the selection of DeSantis for the 2024 ticket would be exciting and unifying, but the problems and drawbacks surrounding the choice make it unlikely or outright impossible, whatever the mischievous Twitter bots may say.

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In 2007, only 16% of the public failed to identify with a specific religious faith, but that number has now nearly doubled to 29%. At the same time, the proportion of Christians elected to the House and Senate has barely budged: From 91% in Reagan’s America of 1980 to 88% in the new Congress that just took office.

These figures (compiled by the Pew Research Center based on surveys by Congressional Quarterly Roll Call) indicate an anomalous situation that raises a number of uncomfortable questions. Does the predominance of self-proclaimed Christians indicate a persistent prejudice against unbelievers? Or does the preference for the conventionally religious reflect a lingering, widespread, under-estimated respect for faith-based commitment among big majorities of American voters?

Medved: Other ex-presidents who tried to recapture the White House

It’s worth noting that all three of the major religious groupings are substantially over-represented on today’s Capitol Hill. Protestants represent only 40% of American adults in the most recent figures, but they hold a significant majority — 57% — of the current seats in the House and Senate. Catholics have increased their representation in recent years, with 28% of the members of Congress, but only 20% of the national population.

Jews also enjoy disproportionate numbers among our elected leadership, with 33 representatives in the national legislature (6%) with just 2% of the Republic’s overall populace.

In fact, the Jewish participation in Congress has decreased substantially since its recent peak in 2009 (with 45 seats), reflecting, perhaps, the worrisome re-emergence of antisemitic attitudes reported by many Jewish defense organizations and monitors of reported hate crimes. If nothing else, those recent fears may have served to discourage potential Jewish candidates reluctant to expose their families to ancient hatreds, even if such bigotry continues to flourish most visibly on the fringes of both right and left.

Other minority religions – Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism — continue to win representation closely in line with their overall proportion of the population (approximately 1% each), with Congressional delegations now numbering three Muslims, and two each for Buddhists and Hindus.

The unaffiliated remains the only major segment of the public with radical under-representation, with only one member of either House or Senate (Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the newly-minted Independent from Arizona) to reflect the nearly 30% of the populace that describes itself in those terms. Nineteen other senators and congressmen declined to state any specific affiliation, or lack thereof, when questioned by CQ Roll Call in gathering this information, amounting to just under 4% of the Congress. This response may have expressed a visceral “none of your damn business” attitude, or else a simple calculation that any public identification as atheist, agnostic, or non-believer could only do political damage to a politician in most districts across the country.

This reaction reflects the obvious fact that despite the increasing ranks of the unaffiliated, a commanding majority (more than two-thirds) of American adults continue to identify with one denomination or another. This doesn’t mean that all those people feel deeply committed to traditional doctrine or regularly attend religious services. But it does suggest that those who pretend to be more religious than they actually are will always far outnumber those few embarrassed but devout souls who try to downplay or hide their actual faith commitments.

In that regard, religious identification will commonly help a candidate more than it could harm or handicap that politician. Even among the tens of millions of unaffiliated voters, it’s hard to imagine many non-believers who would oppose a politician simply because of that office seeker’s connection to one church or another. For one thing, unaffiliated voters are definitionally less concerned with theological issues and are probably less aware of any given candidate’s personal faith background than their more religious neighbors.

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An instructive analogy involves the tendency of all politicians to feel instinctually, inevitably compelled to portray themselves as deeply committed to their spouses and families, despite the fact that single, divorced, and widowed people now comprise a clear majority (55%) of the adult population.

Even if your experience with marriage is non-existent or nightmarish, the ideal of a healthy family life still strikes most people as a good thing, indicative of a candidate’s stability and decency. In campaigns for lesser offices like county commission or school boards, your mailbox will regularly be stuffed with mailings that show photos of an office seeker closely surrounded by his confidently smiling kin.

By the same token, even for non-believers whose personal faith experiences may have been limited or unpleasant, there’s still a deep-seated tendency to respect, or even admire, that dwindling segment of the community that shows the discipline and commitment to fill the pews every week. Even if the church you attend may be controversial – think Barack Obama in 2008 or Mitt Romney four years later – candidates won’t try to hide their participation or minimize their involvement in religious institutions.

Among the rising numbers of Americans who never attend church or synagogue, the majority will still cherish memories of grandparents who probably did. The over-representation of religious believers in Congress doesn’t demonstrate a tendency for voters to back candidates who share their own specific faith commitments, but rather the deep-seated suspicion that religion in general may be a good thing for candidates, and for their country.

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As the new year began, the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek H. Murthy, warned The New York Times, “I believe loneliness is one of the defining health concerns of our time,” with severe consequences to both emotional and physical well-being.

Like other analysts in recent decades, he cited ample research indicating that “people who are more socially connected live longer and are more protected against stress, depression, and declines in memory and language.”

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In their new book, The Good Life, psychologists Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz emphasize this “social fitness” as “the key to mental health, physical health, and longevity. Developing skills that enable one to cultivate and maintain positive connections to other people are at least as important as proper nutrition, physical exercise, adequate sleep, and the avoidance of harmful habits such as smoking.”

It’s therefore hardly surprising that the current “friendship recession” contributes to the recent sharp declines in American life expectancy, especially for men. A pre-pandemic YouGov poll in 2019 cited 22% among Millennials of all genders who say they have “zero friends” and nearly a third (30%) claiming “no best friends.”

Surveying all adult age groups last year, the Survey Center on American Life reported 12% who sadly survive with “no close friends at all” compared with just 2% who described themselves as living without friends in 2003, according to Gallup.

In a provocative recent piece in The Guardian, Anton Cebalo argues for a direct association between internet obsessions and the damaging disconnection of the members of the younger generations. With Americans browsing an estimated seven hours a day, on average, and the number rising every year, 31% as of 2021 said they were online “almost constantly.” Another research study shows that, on average, we check our inboxes 77 times a day.

The impact of such habits has been inescapably established by a parade of dreary statistics. “Mental health among people native to the internet continues to worsen amid an increase in so-called diseases of despair – substance abuse, suicidal ideation, etc. – in the US more generally. These were the leading causes of the drop in life expectancy before the pandemic.”

In a University of Chicago survey going all the way back to 1972, last year registered as the first time that more respondents reported being “not too happy” rather than “very happy.”

Considering all the time and energy we devote to our internet identities and explorations, it’s worth considering why these numerous and often far-flung connections deliver so few of the psychological rewards of face-to-face interaction with people you know well.

One might logically expect that those who win hundreds or thousands of “friends” or “followers” on social media would escape isolation of any kind. But the nature of internet connection is fundamentally, inherently distinct from old and trusted friends who occasionally, at least, manage to see each other.

More from Michael Medved: Other ex-presidents who tried to recapture the White House

Looking over the mass of Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok accounts, the tenor is often more competitive than supportive. Postings invite rivalry as to the elegance of food prepared or consumed, the splendor of remodeling jobs or newly acquired wardrobe, the adorable nature of pets and kids, or the glory of sunsets and accommodations on vacations or adventures. There’s a constant race to keep up with the achievements and indulgences of acquaintances or meant to inspire your admiration or even envy.

Gloomy meditations will more likely repel rather than attract potential followers, and it only stands to reason that upbeat, even braggadocios reports draw more recognition and reinforcement than do complaints or self-pity.

But comfort and support through times of trouble represent the very essence of real friendship and contribute more to well-being and the development of significant, durable connections than do the superficial celebration of good times and conspicuous successes.

Social media communications can’t replace those long-term, nourishing bonds, but they can swallow up the attention and time investment required to sustain them. No matter how frequently we may check our inboxes, we’re unlikely to find deep satisfaction or soul-stirring inspiration among all the random messages.

Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine Blanche Dubois couldn’t pierce her own isolation and loneliness with her famous declaration, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

That strategy didn’t work in A Streetcar Named Desire, and it seems similarly misguided to depend on better results from the phantoms of social media.

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Only Grover Cleveland succeeded in accomplishing such a comeback with his third presidential race in 1892, but three other chief executives ran serious, yet unsuccessful, campaigns to reclaim the nation’s top job after they had left.

A quick consideration of their experiences can provide helpful context for evaluating the problems and possibilities of Trump’s current efforts.

Martin Van Buren

Few presidents brought as varied and impressive a resume to the White House as Martin Van Buren. He had served as a New York state senator, United States Senator, Governor of New York, Secretary of State, and Vice President of the United States before taking charge as Andrew Jackson’s chosen successor in 1836. Unfortunately for him, a devastating financial crisis (“The Panic of 1837”) led to a major depression and ruined his popularity in his first year in office.

He nonetheless sought re-election but lost in a landslide (234 to 60 electoral votes). He tried his first comeback four years later, but at the Democratic convention, despite his early delegate strength, he lost the nomination to the dark horse candidate (and ultimate victor) James K. Polk.

A battered political veteran at 66, Van Buren felt increasingly estranged from the Democrats he had long led, particularly regarding his principled opposition to the spread of slavery in territories and new states. In 1848, he accepted the presidential nomination of the newly organized Free Soil Party and, with Charles Francis Adams as his running mate (son of one president and grandson of another), made a spirited race to return to Washington.

The Free Soilers didn’t carry a single state, but drew 10% of the overall electorate. Van Buren polled strongly enough in his home state of New York, in fact, to tilt the state away from the Democrats and to enable the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor.

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Millard Fillmore

When President Taylor died of a still mysterious stomach ailment two years later, Vice President Millard Fillmore took his place and became the next chief executive to attempt a comeback campaign after leaving office. A little-known Congressman from upstate New York, Fillmore had never even met his running mate, the war hero General Taylor, before their mutual election.

After his ascension to the presidency, Fillmore tried to secure the Whig nomination for a term of his own in 1852 but lost to another celebrated commander of the Mexican War, General Winfield Scott, affectionately known as “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

In the first months of his retirement, Fillmore suffered terribly from the death of his wife and their daughter before seeking comfort and distraction with a year-long European tour. Amid his travels, he received an offer from the rabidly anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, American Party (widely known as the “Know Nothings”) to become their candidate for president in 1856.

He accepted by mail and ran on a platform that restricted all public offices to native-born, non-Catholics and extended the residency requirement for citizenship to 21 years. With support from remnants of the collapsing Whigs, Fillmore managed an astonishing 21% of the popular vote but carried only the state of Maryland.

Teddy Roosevelt

The most celebrated of all the failed attempts at White House recapture involved one of our widely admired Mount Rushmore presidents: Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike the other leaders who eventually attempted post-presidential returns, he won his initial campaign for re-election. Having taken office after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Vice President Roosevelt won a landslide victory for a full term of his own in 1904.

He promised at the time of his victory that he’d make no further bid to continue his presidency after serving nearly eight years and designated William Howard Taft, an esteemed leader of the cabinet, as his successor.

Retirement, however, didn’t suit the peripatetic Teddy (only 50 when he left the White House) who, after a triumphal European tour, decided to challenge Taft for the Republican nomination of 1912.

Despite Roosevelt’s predictable success in a series of recently instituted primary elections, the GOP establishment controlled the most delegates at the Chicago convention and mandated the incumbent’s renomination. Roosevelt’s indignation produced self-righteous fury and a determination to run as a “Bull Moose” candidate of the swiftly organized Progressive Party, announced with the celebrated proclamation: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.”

Inevitably, the Republican division handed victory in that end-of-the-world battle to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, but Bull Mooser Roosevelt still carried six states and 27.4% of the popular vote. While he could feel personal satisfaction in out-polling the hapless incumbent, his dramatic drive for validation and a new term of office never came close to success.

These consistently disappointing outcomes for some of the more colorful ex-presidents in our past raise questions worth pondering for Trump and his principal advisors.

So, why was Cleveland successful?

For one thing, he never contested the painfully close outcome of his first re-election bid, even though he actually won the popular vote against Republican Benjamin Harrison (48.6% to 47.8% nationwide) and lost the state of New York by only 1.09% and with it, the election.

Cleveland made no claims about a stolen or “rigged” result and, as his 2013 biographer John M. Pafford explained, he “refused to look back. He was stubborn, but he did not become bitter or depressed over the outcome of the election. He had fought to win. Now he accepted his loss with grace and got on with his life.”

For the First Lady, at least, that almost certainly meant preparing for another race for the White House. The 23-year-old Frances Folsom Cleveland (who had married the bachelor president midway through his first term) reportedly admonished the executive mansion’s household staff on the stormy day of their rival’s inauguration, that they should take good care of the premises because the Clevelands expected to return in four years.

To make that development possible, the former president, though still in his early 50s, consciously played an elder statesman role, rising above the ideological divisions in his party. That approach helped the Democrats achieve a spectacular and unequivocal triumph in the midterm elections of 1890, gaining a record-breaking 86 seats in the House which, at the time, contained a total of only 332 members – a glaring contrast to the disappointing midterm performance of Trump’s divided party in 2022, just a week before he chose to announce his third White House candidacy.

At the Chicago convention of 1892, Cleveland won the presidential nomination on the first ballot, a striking show of unity at a time when that selection required two-thirds of all delegates. In the general election, the Democrats also benefited from a strong showing by the rising “People’s Party” (or Populists) who drew particular strength from states in the West and the rural Midwest where Republicans had traditionally dominated.

The Populist candidate, former Congressman James B. Weaver, won five states, including four in which Cleveland and the Democrats declined to appear on the ballot (North Dakota, Kansas, Colorado, and Idaho) to help the People’s Party and deny the GOP those electoral votes.

In the end, Cleveland won handily in terms of the Electoral College (277-145) while drawing a slightly lower percentage of the popular vote than he had in both of his prior races.

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Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder

This experience, together with that of the other “comeback candidates” who sought to retake the White House after a prior defeat, suggests that it’s simply not true to assume that when it comes to former presidents, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

This lesson pertains pointedly to the current Trump campaign, where the candidate’s announcement speech on November 15th described his previous term as a golden age to which the public would naturally seek to return. But this would require a dramatic increase in the percentage (46.8%) who voted for him in 2020 – in other words, millions of voters would need to change their minds about Trump and the leadership he offers.

As prior experience consistently demonstrates, once the public has already passed judgment on a chief executive’s presidential performance, it would be hard to imagine how out-of-office activities could ever alter that verdict in his favor.

Considering Donald Trump’s well-publicized behavior since leaving the White House in January 2021, there’s scant reason to suspect that he would somehow make himself an exception to that historical rule.

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Though no one can deny that the recognized experts made generally accurate predictions about the distribution of the national popular vote – Hillary Clinton won her tally by a margin of 3,000,000 while Joe Biden racked up a 7,000,000-vote edge – the battle for the all-important Electoral College control proved far closer in both 2016 and 2020 than prominent surveys and analysts had predicted.

In trying to explain their mistakes, public opinion experts cited the phenomenon of “shy Trumpers” – supporters of the Republican nominee who felt reluctant to talk about their backing for such a controversial candidate. They also acknowledged that conservatives widely perceived a liberal bias in the media and therefore proved less likely to cooperate with pollsters than their liberal counterparts, thereby tilting surveys in a left-leaning direction.

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In this context, what’s the explanation for the peculiar polling of 2022 when the analysts, almost unanimously, anticipated a mighty “Red Wave” that never materialized? If anything, the consensus on the prospects for Republican gains in the House, the Senate, governorships, and state legislatures proved dramatically exaggerated.

Elections across the country turned out to be much closer, with more vigorous Democratic performance than generally anticipated. No major media outlets predicted that Joe Biden’s party would actually gain votes in the Senate, as now appears likely pending the run-off election in Georgia.

Even more shocking, the final control of the House of Representatives remains uncertain even three days after the election. When it is ultimately secured, the widely expected Republican majority will prove far more narrow or tenuous than confident GOP strategists expected.

In the period between this week’s balloting and the upcoming battle for White House control in 2024, pollsters and analysts will no doubt debate the reasons for their recent mistakes, but in that process, they can easily, immediately rule out one explanation.

No one can plausibly suggest that this year’s tendency to overstate the Republican edge in public opinion stemmed from pro-Democratic bias. Yes, the majority of the analysts whose work dominates legacy media are undeniably identified as liberal-leaning, but their errors in 2022 in no way assisted the progressive cause.

If anything, the ubiquitous chatter of a formidable landslide on behalf of the GOP would have worked to encourage Republican turnout and suppressed progressive participation and enthusiasm.

Had the public prepared for the knife-edge, unsettled struggle for control of the House, it’s likely that the Democrats could have out-performed expectations even more than they did, raising additional money and delivering higher vote totals.

Some of the exit polling provides hints as to a possible explanation for the gap between public prognostication and final results. AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 94,000 voters showed that 44% of them identified “the future of democracy” as their “primary consideration” in casting their ballots. A startling majority of Democrats (56%) and one-third of Republicans (34%) agreed with this sentiment.

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While analysts emphasized inflation, crime, and abortion as the dominant voter concerns, they simultaneously derided President Biden’s insistence in high-profile speeches and daily campaigning that “Democracy is on the ballot” as an out-of-touch, desperation tactic with scant support. It turns out that in the last weeks of the midterm battle, opinion may have shifted, altogether unexpectedly, in the president’s direction.

The disappointing performance of GOP “election deniers” in every corner of the country provides further evidence that this emphasis on stolen election narratives from many Republican candidates may have worked to win GOP primaries but ultimately boosted Democrats when voters made their final decisions.

As usual, following mistaken assumptions on the part of the punditocracy, the analysis industry will need to readjust both its procedures and perspectives for a more accurate performance in upcoming contests.

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What recent developments for the Jewish people and the state of Israel have provoked these alarming new levels of hostility in the U.S. and around the world?

The disturbing pattern involves far more than moronic comments by Kanye West and other prominent figures in popular culture. Jews constitute just 2% of the American population, but, according to the most recent FBI figures (2020), they’re targeted in 58% of religiously-motivated hate crimes in the country.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 2,717 incidents of harassment, vandalism, and violence directed at Jews in 2021 – the highest annual total since the tracking of such incidents began in 1979.

“We didn’t see any meaningful decrease in 2022,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Ye’s declaration of “Death Con 3 on the Jewish People” represented a rise in hostility, “from the right and the left pretty much across the spectrum. And it’s not only rhetoric but in physical attacks on Jews and the Jewish community.”

The most horrifying of those attacks occurred four years ago with the murder of 11 Pittsburgh worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Since that time, kosher markets and Jewish restaurants also suffered attacks, not to mention the regular pattern of shoving, insults, and other abuse on the streets and subways of New York, home to the nation’s most visible Jewish population.

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The common explanation for this recent intensification of resentment and negativity connects American Jews to the state of Israel, often reviled by the political left for subjecting its Palestinian residents to an allegedly “apartheid” regime that refuses to make meaningful progress toward peace with its Arab neighbors.

But if such issues indeed played the dominant role in the upsurge in Jew-hatred, then recent months should have brought a reduction, not an increase, in negativity toward Jews and the Jewish state. For the last year and a half, under Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Israel has been led by the most moderate government in its recent history, and the first one including a Palestinian Arab (and Islamist) party in its ruling coalition.

And even if, as widely expected, Bibi Netanyahu wins Tuesday’s election and installs a less compromising right-wing government, he and his colleagues are still proudly committed to maintaining the peace momentum of the “Abraham Accords,” which achieved mutual recognition and economic cooperation with a half dozen Arab states – including, most recently, an American-brokered maritime deal with Lebanon that divides drilling rights to the benefit of both nations.

In coming to terms with increasingly outspoken contempt for Jews and Judaism, concerned analysts must consider changes in America at large rather than focusing on significant shifts in its minuscule Jewish community or our distant compatriots in Israel.

With the rise of the internet and social media as a source of news, opinion, and infotainment, the U.S. has developed a ravaging, seemingly insatiable hunger for conspiracy theories to explain every setback or grievance on the national horizon. It doesn’t matter how unhinged or preposterous these purported plots may seem, there are now millions of troubled individuals who seem ready to embrace them while rewarding their promulgators with notoriety and riches.

This toxic tendency connects directly with the nation’s Jewish citizens and their role in the Republic because the children of Abraham have aroused potent conspiratorial fears for the better part of two thousand years.

In Medieval Europe, major Jewish communities faced mass expulsions (including from England in 1290) based on the “Blood Libel” – the stubborn belief that Jews tradition mandated ritual murder of Christian children to use their blood in baking Passover matzos.

Unquestionably, today’s populist Q-Anon myth – in which members of globalist elites guzzle the blood of kidnapped and tormented children to cement their worldwide power – bears strong parallels with the ancient slander. No wonder the one member of Congress most closely associated with Q-Anon, Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, found a way to blame “Jewish space lasers” for wildfires in California.

Meanwhile, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent concoction from the twilight of Czarist rule in Russia, “revealed” a Jewish plot to take over the world, inspiring both Eastern European pogroms and helping shape the core ideology of the Nazi Party.

It is no accident that some of contemporary America’s most popular and outrageous conspiracy theories carry hints and echoes of long-standing smears aimed for centuries against Jews. Consider the now infamous absurdity of Alex Jones’ insistence that no children actually died at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which actually amounted to a “False Flag” operation – a disgusting lie for which courts and juries have recently ruled that the radio raver must pay close to a billion dollars in damages.

Jones actually associated Israel with the alleged plot that he spent a decade elaborating on, claiming that Israel’s Mossad had, for some reason, collaborated with American extremists to stage the faked mass killing. He even suggested that some of the “crisis actors” pretending to be bereaved parents could be instantly, easily identified as Jews, complete with (non-existent) Hasidic side-curls.

An even more sweeping conspiracy theory, the fantastic notion of “The Great Replacement,” has attracted supporters much further removed from the lunatic fringe than Alex Jones. Tucker Carlson of Fox News has devoted hours of his wildly popular broadcast to this alleged effort by internationalist elites to liquidate the American, white Christian working class to replace them with a tidal wave of unlettered and non-English speaking immigrants who would prove far more malleable to globalist manipulation. The deep-seated fears of the Replacement, or the “Reset” as it is sometimes known, originated in France regarding the mass importation of Muslim Migrants.

While it might be even too much for gullible fabulists to believe that French Jews might benefit by replacing French Catholics with Islamic arrivals implacably hostile to Judaism and Israel, by the time the “Replacement” fable made its way to the New World, it had developed an unmistakable antisemitic edge. Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville gathered for their “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, lustily chanted by torchlight: “The Jews will not replace us!” as they marched around the city’s only synagogue during Friday night services.

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Like most other conspiracy theories, these suspected schemes made so little sense on their face, that people of goodwill may disregard them as irrelevant fantasies with little practical impact. But the obvious, undeniable increase in antisemitic sentiment can hardly register as irrelevant, even while based on fantastical distortions and warped delusions.

Another celebrity recently identified himself with classical Jew-hatred in promoting a documentary film that not only minimized the devastating truth of the Holocaust, but implicated the “impostor Jews” with the worst race crimes in human history. While using social media to praise and circulate “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” NBA all-star Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets defended the film (based, in part, on misinformation provided by Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam) and insisted that his association with it demanded no apology.

“Did I do anything illegal?” he asked rhetorically. “Did I hurt anybody? Did I harm anybody?”
Yes, you did, Mr. Irving. You harmed the truth. And you hurt the Jewish people who, historically, always seem to suffer the most when societies develop sick obsessions with vast conspiracy theories that make ordinary citizens feel powerless and victimized.

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First, Americans must recognize that while the impact of criminal violence is widespread, its perpetrators represent a tiny fraction of our total populace. This “small, hard-core group of habitual offenders constitute roughly 1% of the overall population but commit between half and two-thirds of predatory, violent crime.”

Barr writes that “each of these offenders can be expected to commit scores, even hundreds of crimes a year … The only time they aren’t committing crimes is when they’re in prison.”

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Second, Barr describes the dramatic shift in national policies and priorities that began in the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, with a focus on “getting tough” on crime that continued during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

As a result, from 1991 to 2013, the total prison population in the U.S. doubled – from roughly 800,000 to 1.8 million. At the same time, violent crime plummeted, dropping for 23 years. By 2014, it had been cut in half – to a level not seen since 1970 – and homicides of black victims were down by about 5,000 a year.

Third, the former attorney general slammed the Obama administration, “which saw a return to the revolving door and the demonization of police” so that by 2014, crime rates were headed back up with further increases “in the wake of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter riots.”

Attorney General Barr acknowledges the steep costs of increasing expenditures for more protection from police forces and expanded prison capacity, but he mentions the other lavish spending we provide to “reduce the risk of premature death or injury to the members of the public, including billions on highway safety, environmental quality” and medical care.

Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan fails majority of Americans

He concludes by recommending a rigorous, impartial cost-benefit analysis regarding the new resources we need for apprehending and incarcerating career criminals.

“Progressives say we can’t afford to keep violent predators in prison,” he laments. “On the contrary, we can’t afford not to.”

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

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First, and most obviously, they will decide whether the U.S. will revert to the recent norm of divided government after a brief, turbulent two years of Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Second, the returns this November will help determine whether Donald Trump will maintain his long-term dominance over the Republican Party, or whether the MAGA era should draw to an end, for the sake of the GOP’s survival and success.

In considering both these decision points, Republicans ought to examine crucial numbers from 10 years of recent elections that many party loyalists would prefer to ignore.

Those numbers involve the percentage of the national electorate who, in casting their ballots, want Democrats or Republicans to exercise Congressional control.

More from Michael Medved: Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan fails majority of Americans

Only once in the past decade – during the Obama second term election of 2014 – did a majority of voters support Republican candidates for Congress. Contrary to the common conviction that the leadership of President Trump helped to expand the Republican base, especially among blue collar whites, Congressional elections have shown little or no growth in the overall levels of support for the GOP.

In 2020, when Trump polled 46.9% of the popular vote, it’s hard to argue that his coattails in any way benefited the Congressional nominees who ran alongside him. Actually, GOP House candidates did slightly better than the incumbent president (47.7% of all votes cast) and gained 14 seats due to the demographic concentration of Democratic voters in some of the nation’s most populous urban districts.

This year, polling indicates a likely Republican takeover of the House due to similar factors: The latest Real Clear Politics average shows a 1.6% GOP advantage which, based on recent history and the advantageous apportionment for Republicans, should be more than enough to make Kevin McCarthy the new Speaker.

But little of this optimism depends on the purported, persistent popularity of President Trump. The RCP averages in October showed the former president rated “unfavorably” by a clear majority of voters (54% to 41%), giving him even less support than the struggling Joe Biden (seen unfavorably by a margin of 52% to 44%).

Beyond the obviously imperfect predictions from polling, the actual numbers in recent elections show indisputable disenchantment with the Republican Party in general. Aside from the Democrat’s ability to hold the House and capture both the Senate and White House in 2020, the figures from the last mid-term election in 2018 showed even stronger currents in a Democratic direction.

Despite enthusiastic campaigning by President Trump, the opposition Dems added 41 House seats (far more than likely GOP gains this year) and crushed Republican candidates by an unusually decisive margin (53.4% to 44.8%).

These numbers deserve consideration in view of the common conviction that Trump’s leadership worked magic for the conservative cause, delivering broad-based support in a way that no other leader could have achieved in 2016 and 2020, not to mention in the upcoming races of 2022 and 2024. Yet even in his triumphant campaign against Hillary Clinton, the flamboyant nominee won only 46.1% of the popular vote (less than Mitt Romney’s 47.2% four years before).

Moreover, Trump’s all-important victories in crucial swing states depended largely on more mainstream Senatorial candidates (Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Marco Rubio in Florida, John McCain in Arizona, Johnny Isakson in Georgia, and Rob Portman in Ohio) each of whom ran well ahead of the party’s national standard-bearer in their state contests.

Social media platforms brace for midterm elections mayhem

Portman, for instance, outpolled his Democratic opponent by a landslide margin of 22% while Trump carried the Buckeye State by 8%. Rubio won his highly competitive race by 8% while Trump narrowly won Florida by 1%.

This year, those Senate candidates most closely associated with Trump in each of those swing states (Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and J.D. Vance of Ohio) are precisely those embattled contenders in the greatest danger of losing Republican seats in November and handing the Democrats Senate control.

Of course, each of those Republicans still stands a chance of victory and some pundits and prognosticators persist in predicting a sweeping GOP tidal wave (with a 30-seat gain or more) in the House of Representatives. But even good news on election night shouldn’t prevent an honest, clear-eyed evaluation of Republican struggles in the course of recent years, leading to fresh themes and renewed strategies on behalf of building a durable, conservative electoral majority.

Listen to Michael Medved weekday afternoons from 12 – 3 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3).

Follow @https://twitter.com/MedvedSHOW

Many conservatives have pushed back on President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness announcement Wednesday, with several high-profile Republicans publicly condemning the decision.

Top-ranking GOP members including, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ken.), Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), and Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) have all come out against the decision, with Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), calling the decision “unfair to those who paid their own way.”

Sad to see what’s being done to bribe the voters. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan may win Democrats some votes, but it fuels inflation, foots taxpayers with other people’s financial obligations, is unfair to those who paid their own way & creates irresponsible expectations.

— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) August 24, 2022

“It’s truly outrageous because you’re talking about 13% of Americans who went to college and have student loan debt,” Michael Medved, host of the Michael Medved Show, said on the Gee and Ursula Show. “The overwhelming majority of people who have gone to college do not have student loan debt, they paid it off. And what’s unfair about this is obviously people who go to a four-year college or university have an advantage anyway. This is big spending in government money, about $300 billion minimum, to help people who are among that minority who go to college and complete a four-year college degree.”

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Nearly 94 million, or 42%, of Americans (age 25 and over) have a college degree of some type. In June 2022, about 4.1% of recent college graduates were unemployed in the U.S., down significantly from the 13.3% unemployment rate two years earlier, according to the Statista Research Department.

Biden cited colleges’ exponentially-rising costs as part of the reason to go forward with the student loan forgiveness plan.

“An education is a ticket to a better life. But over time, that ticket has become too expensive for too many Americans,” Biden said in a recent news conference.

Since 1980, college tuition and fees are up 1,200%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all items has risen by only 236%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Adjusting for standard inflation, to attend a degree-granting public school would have cost just $1,856 in today’s dollars, and to attend a private school would have cost $10,227  after adjusting for inflation 40 years ago.

“All this will do, however, is increase the cost of college and encourage and reward those university institutions that basically have been ripping people off in some regards,” Medved said.

The comparison of student loan forgiveness to the federal government for giving Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans has been brought after the conservative backlash crescendo.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, called the debt forgiveness plan “completely unfair” while her family’s construction company received $183,504 in PPP loans two years ago, which was eventually forgiven, as pointed out by the official Whitehouse Twitter account.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.https://t.co/4FoCymt8TB

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 25, 2022

“PPP loans were different because that was a direct response to a government policy which had to do with the pandemic shutdowns and the fact that we were in this terrible financial bind,” Medved said. Now, the question is, was it the right thing to do to forgive the PPP loans? And there, I think you’d have an argument one way or another. But this is not comparable to getting a college loan, because basically getting a college loan, you have decided that you’re going to buy on-time something. What are you going to buy? I’m going to buy a college degree.”

There is currently $1.75 trillion in total student loan debt held among the 45 million citizens in the U.S., with 55% of students from public four-year institutions having student loans.

The aftermath of Biden’s decision has his job approval rating up by six percentage points to 44%, his highest in a year.

(Data courtesy of Gallup polls)

“I think that some of the stuff that has been accomplished is probably going to help him politically, I don’t know if it’s going to help the country,” Medved said. “I think that the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, the impact on the climate, the impact on the economy and economic growth, all of that may sound good, but I think it’s probably going to be much more minimal.”

Listen to Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.