A recently conducted Harvard-Harris poll pertaining to the 2024 presidential election found that former President Donald Trump has a 5-point lead over current President Joe Biden. Among registered voters across the country, Trump led Biden 46 to 41 percent. The former president also led Vice President Kamala Harris 48 to 40 percent.
The poll is clearly an exciting development for the Trump campaign — Trump himself took to Truth Social to share Breitbart’s reporting of it — and shows that people want an alternative to the Democrat Party’s milquetoast malaise.
The poll also indicated that Trump remained the preferred 2024 presidential primary candidate among Republican voters, maintaining a 10-point lead over DeSantis.
But does this really mean anything?
Substantively conservative Americans may be able to breathe a sigh of relief that their fellow Republican Party members haven’t abandoned the MAGA movement’s exercise in economic populism in an attempt to utterly forsake the heartland once more. But even if Trump does secure the Republican Party’s nomination, he’s already campaigning with one hand tied behind his back by being denied equal access to the digital public square by Big Tech in what amounts to a united display of corporate election interference.
And it’s not like Crossfire Hurricane and the Russia-collusion hoax were the only instances in which the deep state and the media collaborated to intimidate and politically undermine Trump. Shortly after the 2022 midterms — something in which Trump had invested immense political capital — it magically became clear to the people who issued the raid on Mar-a-Lago that Trump’s possession of sensitive materials wasn’t, in fact, an issue and that he likely wasn’t selling national secrets to our enemies.
The Washington Post, the favorite rag of feds everywhere, even ran a piece exonerating Trump, titled “Investigators see ego, not money, as Trump’s motive on classified papers.”
Previously, Michael Anton, a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration, said, “The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”
And there’s a good chance that the “people who really run the country,” by which Anton means the managerial elite who fill out the rank and file of the federal bureaucracy, are doing all they can to prevent the 2024 election from being conducted on equal footing. Why wouldn’t they? If the guy they’ve been railroading for the past decade gets power once more, he could make their lives incredibly difficult by exacting revenge by using presidential authority to thin the herd through schedule F firings.
But even if these people are excised from the federal government, there is a greater than likely chance they’ll be taken care of by those in their professional networks with whom they’ve ingratiated themselves, who will help them find work in Big Tech or some other corporate apparatus infested by the managerial elite’s groupthink.
Perhaps the one substantive positive that came from Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, besides an uptick in people posting edgy memes and formerly unfairly banned accounts regaining access to the platform, was that “The Twitter Files” revealed how members of the managerial elite in the federal government (notably the intelligence agencies) explicitly and implicitly direct members of the managerial elite in Big Tech to carry out tasks that align with the ideological and political goals of the entrenched, bureaucratic hegemony.
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, working hand in glove with the FBI to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which undeniably played a role in swaying the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, is the perfect example of this.
7. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. pic.twitter.com/7j59zfBuJQ
The people who fancy themselves the protectors of our national “democracy,” despite rigging our elections, will work to advance causes that serve the entrenched leftist bureaucracy because it benefits their ideological priors, but, more importantly, it stabilizes their positions as societal elite.
So long as they have power and are emboldened to continue abusing their placements to affect political outcomes, candidates — such as Trump — who threaten the regime are incredibly disadvantaged.
The managerial elite seamlessly integrated corporate America into the federal bureaucratic apparatus. By doing so, they created a system in which the democratic principles that were central to the foundation and maintenance of our republic have been reduced to window dressings for a regime more concerned with rewarding its enforcers than helping its people flourish, let alone reducing their suffering.
Unless these people and institutions and this system are brought to heel, it doesn’t matter how much better Trump polls than Biden. The American political system no longer operates on the pre-2016 paradigm in which someone seeking to buck conventional political wisdom and break with “permanent Washington” has a fair shot.
The American political system is rigged against anyone who threatens the managerial elite’s job security.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.