CNN’s Zakaria Throws in the Towel: Trump Trial Boosts Trump, Biden’s Campaign in Shambles

by Jeff Childers

By way of a Trump Trial update, I present yesterday’s clip from CNN’s hangdog-looking anchor Fareed Zakaria, who is now hanging even more doggedly. In fact, he’s about ready to give up. “It is very unlikely that Biden can win this race,” he sighed in his short monologue.

When the ’24 race began to take shape, I thought Pres. Biden had a strong pitch to voters: a rebounding economy and a return to normalcy after the chaos of Covid & Trump.

Things haven’t played out that way.

My take: pic.twitter.com/WAwifAZjfB

— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) May 12, 2024

To Fareed, at first the electoral strategy looked very sound. Joe Biden was supposed to stand for a post-pandemic return to normal life — as if that were even possible — and to easily preside over a rapid return to a booming economy. Without cannibals. “I have to admit, none of this is playing out like I thought it would,” Zaharia sadly admitted. “Trump is now leading in all the swing states,” he said, “but behind those numbers lie even more troubling details.” The anchor paused dramatically, searching for words. “I think it’s best to be honest about reality.”

Honesty is the best policy. Not that it ever stopped CNN.

Firstly, all the big issues are favoring Trump. Almost wistfully, as though parting with a lover, Fareed gingerly suggested abortion won’t loom large over the presidential race, since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe threw the issue back to the states; in other words, it’s not really a national issue anymore.

Instead of handily winning on abortion, President Peters instead faces two insoluble problems dividing democrats like the Red Sea: the wide-open border and the Israel issue.

The open border is an open political wound, relentlessly oozing shocking scenes of rapes, random attacks, disparate treatment, and community discontent. And it’s riling up the inner city — i.e., mostly democrats:

 
Even worse, Biden’s unaccountably awful, shimmying and shifting support-slash-non-support for Israel is roiling the country and shattering democrat unity. Half of democrats are shocked Biden is betraying one of the U.S.’s most important Middle Eastern allies, while the other half demands the U.S. double-down on dividing up the world’s only Jewish nation.

Compare Axios, on Friday…:

 
…with this headline from the Jerusalem Post, the day before on Thursday:

 
Those two sides of the democrat coin are irresolvable; they don’t even want be reconciled or compromised. By trying to offend nobody, Biden is mumbling his way around to infuriating everybody.

Fareed next turned to the Trump trial — and this was perhaps the anchor’s most significant admission — Fareed flatly stated about the Manhattan trial what we’ve all been saying since Day One: it would never have been brought against anyone else. Trump-deranged democrats have somehow managed to transform the former president into the most famous underdog the country has ever tried to elect; and America loves an underdog. Fareed’s astonishing admission:

The trials against him keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base — who sees him as a martyr — and may even make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe his prosecutors are politically motivated.

This happens to be true, in my opinion. I doubt the New York Indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Trump.

What the CNN anchor was really saying was, you morons thought tying him up in court would lock down the campaign? Idiots, Trump gets more eyeballs this way than he EVER would have on the trail.

A couple weeks ago, a friend texted me asking whether I agreed the trial would hurt Trump by keeping him sitting around the courtroom trying to stay awake instead of on the campaign trail. My response was uncertain: there’s no way to predict the utterly unpredictable.

But based on Zakaria’s bombshell monologue, it sure seems like the trials are helping Trump.

Zakaria ended his exasperated exposition on a sour note: Biden is not getting any younger. The distressed anchorman explained:

Trendlines are not working in Biden’s favor. He needs to do something bold and dramatic to seize the initiative — on asylum policy, for example — and reverse these numbers. The figure that troubles me the most is on the question of, who was the more competent? Joe Biden led Donald Trump by +9 points in 2020. But Trump now leads by +16 points in January, 2024. That +25-point shift could be a reflection of people’s sense that the President’s age is affecting his capacity to govern. And there’s very little that Joe Biden can do now to change that perception.

What could Biden possibly do at this point to turn things around?

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