Just guessing here, but I think they simply believed their own BS — and expected such a perceived lame demagogue as The Donald to self-destruct when given the chance in front of a national audience.  Boy, were they wrong!  No surprise, however.

The next day, Dan Bongino figured that Trump had just locked up the nomination and beyond...although he did admit that 18 months is an eternity in politics.  Meanwhile, the Bidenoids keep digging deeper and deeper into the abyss into which they have fallen.  Let's see: the chaos at the border is continuing to metastasize, Hunter's criminality and its corruptocrat cover-ups keep oozing into plain view, and ridiculous proposals such as banning gas stoves and diesel trucks continue to spew out from wannabe totalitarian nitwits.  This is not to mention Biden's lapsing into pathetic senility in front of G-d and everyone else.

If I were a Progressive totalitarian wannabe, Trump would scare the living [expletive] out of me.  He's certainly not from Central Casting.  He's his own guy.  In a world of extremely competitive politics, Trump is perhaps the most combative in the mix.  Beyond that, he is also the most capable of taking a punch...and then making that other party seriously regret throwing it.  So many of the others are, thanks to Pat Buchanan via Spiro Agnew, pusillanimous pussyfooters.

By way of context, I was not all that hot to trot for Trump in 2016.  I particularly liked Scott Walker because, as governor of Wisconsin, he really stuck it to the government worker unions — especially the teachers.  You gotta love a guy like that.  Trump was not all that familiar to me, since I never watched his TV show. 

After he got the nomination, a Republican activist friend asked me what I thought would happen.  I told her I'd call her up the morning after the election and tell her that I've got good news and bad news.  The good news was that Hillary ("And your little dog, too.") lost.  The bad news was that Trump won.  Nonetheless, I was seriously surprised to see how well he did afterward.  I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this change of heart.

This is the essence of the Trump story.  Conventional wisdom sucks.  The current political establishment has no idea as to how the world really works...hence, they absorb nonsensical agenda items as if they really mattered.  Trump is from the real world.  Having to be a problem-solver during his business career, he fails to latch on to the categorical nonsense that overwhelms the Progs — such as race dominating the progress of history and carbon-based energy being any kind of danger to civilization.

Trump's only negative is the enormous legal burden he has acquired.  And yet his popularity endures.  Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis seems to be waiting in the wings with occasional forays into the limelight.  He and Trump are pretty much on the same side of the political divide.  That pesky 12th Amendment would, however, make it needlessly complicated for them to run together on the same ticket.  My expectation, should Trump achieve a second term, is that, when DeSantis is termed out as governor of Florida, Trump appoints him to be secretary of state, to showcase him as the next in line.  Another, more far-fetched scenario would have Trump being a stalking horse for DeSantis, keeping his distance all the while exhausting the Dems' supply of ammunition and ultimately putting his arm around DeSantis and telling the world, "He's my boy."

What is particularly annoying about all this is the overwhelming political bias on behalf of the dominant "news" media.  Advocacy is perfectly kosher...when it is honestly presented as such.  But pushing fiction as a substitute for reality destroys whatever credibility existed among those who possess even the slightest degree of skepticism. 

The modern world's plethora of information sources has resulted in a scattering of perspectives — some of which are nonsensical.  Biden just announced that white supremacy is the number-one threat facing our nation...while a college-educated woman recently told me that she and her retired attorney husband have to eat only organic and vegan food because everything else is contaminated with Roundup.  Biden at least gets some kind of a pass because the Dems are desperate to hold on to the Black vote — as it keeps slipping away toward down-to-earth humans like Trump.

Meanwhile, in this vein, may I suggest that Mr. Trump sarcastically announce that he has discovered President Biden's secret plan to end the chaos at the southern border?  The administration, in cahoots with the mayors of the blue cities, are making life in the U.S. so freakin' miserable that even Venezuelans don't want to live here.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.