It’s “just wishful thinking” from “the denizens of Trump World” to imagine “a big, crowded Republican field is just the ticket for Donald Trump to grab the nomination,” explains Keith Naughton at The Hill. Pundits say “a big field will help Trump beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,” but: “What polling and history really says is the Republican field will shrink fast and DeSantis would gain an advantage.” He might even “knock Trump out early.” Fact is, Republican primaries are “built to force out nuisance candidates.” And “when you remove the chaff from the GOP contest and ask Republican voters to choose between DeSantis and Trump, DeSantis mops up almost all the extra votes.” Overall, the 2024 GOP primaries look “less like Trump repeating 2016″ than a replay of 1980, when Ronald Reagan rapidly dispatched onetime frontrunner George H.W. Bush.
Democrats keep claiming the Trump income-tax cuts are adding trillions to the federal debt, but “those who have done the math” find otherwise, trumpets David M. Simon at National Review. Just compare the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s projections for future federal revenues before the cuts passed with what Uncle Sam actually took in: The loss totals just $105 billion for 2018-2022, even with COVID’s hit to the economy. And yearly revenues now are half a trillion above what the CBO projected in 2017. “Both economic theory and history suggest that tax cuts lead private capital spending to rise, economic growth to increase, and tax revenues to swell over time” — and that’s what’s happened.
With Donald Trump hitting the campaign trail near the toxic train accident in Ohio, notes the Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon, his GOP rivals “are gnashing their teeth.” A concerned Ron DeSantis “may be recalibrating how long he should wait — is it still the end of the state legislative session in May? — before pulling the trigger” on entering the 2024 presidential race. Donors aren’t giving to Trump, suggesting that they, “like 54% of Republican voters, would prefer someone other than Trump as the GOP nominee — but they won’t wait forever.” Meanwhile, “three Republicans have entered the field” — Trump, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. If DeSantis decides sooner than later, he could take away supporters from all three, and “the GOP primary could become a two-horse race” — but “the calculus for DeSantis is changing fast.”
“Liberal heads exploded when” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced her bid for president, quips Renu Mukherjee at City Journal. Her comment that her family was “blessed” to live in America despite its flaws, in particular, “struck a nerve”: Whoopi Goldberg, for example, accused her of “just finding out” America isn’t perfect. Yet Haley’s message, notes Mukherjee, clearly “isn’t that America is perfect” but that its “principles — liberty, equality, individuality and merit — allow it to come closer to perfection than any other nation in history.” Alas, our commitment to these principles is “much less firm today, at least among race essentialists” on the left. Rather than toss them aside, as they would like, we should “just strive harder to meet them.”
“The disastrous effects of remote instruction” during the pandemic “are still with us,” frets Mayor Michael Bloomberg at The Wall Street Journal, yet “we know how to overcome learning loss.” Last year, he and other philanthropists launched Summer Boost in New York City, a program focusing on math and English for struggling K-8 kids in public-charter schools. After the program, “the percentage of students who met grade-level standards in math nearly doubled — and in English, it more than doubled.” Yet donors can’t fund all the nation’s summer schools. With summer “fast approaching,” education leaders and elected officials “should begin planning and organizing,” and “citizens should make their voices heard”: “Support our kids this summer, or lose our support in November.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board