By Michael Bielawski

Vermont’s Republican National Committee member Jay Shepard told the Morning Drive radio talk show on Monday this week that it’s pretty much a guarantee that former President Trump will be on the ballot likely in all 50 states despite current calls from Democrats for otherwise.

A caller called into the show and asked about how several states have engaged in efforts to keep the former president off of their 2024 ballots. Former state lawmaker and co-host of the show Kurt Wright commented first.

“It seems the desperation of some folks just trying to do whatever they possibly can to make sure that Trump isn’t on the ballot but there are some states that are talking about somehow precluding a former president from being on the ballot,” Wright said.

Shepard was concise that this would not happen in any state.

“There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment that stops President Trump from being on the ballot,” he said. “He’ll be on the ballot in every state.”

Also regarding the 2024 presidential election, Shepard does not think the candidates on either side are going to make a huge difference because they are running on the Democrat and Republican platforms where the real differences are found.

“It doesn’t matter who it is on the left, it doesn’t matter if it’s Newsom [California governor Gavin Newsom], it doesn’t matter if it’s Kamala [vice president Kamala Harris], it doesn’t matter who it is on the left because they all have the same policies,” he said. “It’s all Obama 3.0 which is taking this country and throwing it in the gutter,” he said.

He continued that the Democrat Party has a long list of recent missteps.

“If you look at what they are doing with the First Amendment, they want to destroy the Electoral College and have mob rule, and just recently what that governor of New Mexico did is blatantly unconstitutional, and there is no way other than using far-out emotional arguments to defend that.”

While he said that Trump’s presidency did make America great again, he added that the other nine GOP candidates have largely demonstrated that they are standing for much stronger policies than the status quo.

“Each and every one of the ten candidates running on the Republican side will at least stabilize this country and stop this tremendous decline that’s going on,” he said.

A caller on the show agreed with the sentiment that it’s the Democrat party platform that Americans will be voting against.

“I think the Democrat agenda is actually destroying the U.S. Constitution,” the caller said.

Wright talked about a recent press conference in Vietnam where Biden was largely seen as incoherent and the conference ended with him telling reporters that he needed to go to bed. Wright noted some other poor behaviors at the conference.

“Then he was heard joking about the approved list of softball questions from the approved list of reporters, this is on the international stage,” he said.

“I never thought in my life that – agree or disagree politically – that I would see a president of the United States doing these things in public.”

Wright noted that 70% of Democrats in recent polling do not want Biden to be their candidate and yet the party leadership seems insistent on going forward with him anyway. A poll by CNN shows the number at 75%

The conversation turned toward the reopening of state economies during the aftermath of the COVID-19-related shutdowns. Shepard and Wright agreed that then-president Trump seemed to wait too long to allow states to re-open, likely due to poor advice from Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Shepard said that was a misstep on Trump’s part, but he still praised the president’s overall performance.

“He was following Fauci’s advice at that time and in retrospect we look back and Fauci should have been fired,” Shepard said. “… President Trump was not perfect but he was by far one of the greatest presidents that we’ve had in our lifetime.”

The author is a reporter for the Vermont Daily Chronicle

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