Provocations: In mudslinging marathon, watch out for splatter (DAVID NEESE COLUMN)

The presidential race has barely started and already the mud is flying.

And not surprisingly.

The race does, after all, feature Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

What would you expect? Surely not a high-minded civics lesson.

In a previous campaign, Trump, as you may recall, did not hesitate to mock John McCain for having been a tortured POW.

Nor did Trump hesitate to ridicule the physical disability of a reporter covering his campaign.

Trump may have exceeded even his own low expectations when he accused the father of a political opponent, Ted Cruz, of involvement in the JFK assassination.

As for Joe Biden, he has set a low tone for the race by suggesting his candidacy is a crusade against America's rampant white supremacy spread by MAGA-ite, insurrectionist yahoos.

The mud is flying, watch out for collateral splatter, ladies and gentlemen.

While local soup kitchens go begging for funds, there seems no end of money, millions upon millions of dollars, available for campaigns to disseminate distortions, vituperation and various outright slanders.

The blustery Trump seems practically born for such mudslinging marathons. But do not underestimate the lifetime politician Biden and his penchant for nastiness.

Or Kamala Harris’, either. Remember the Democratic primary debate in which she turned on Biden (literally) and attacked him as a shameless crony of Old South-style segregationist, anti-busing, minority-incarcerating, Jim Crow racism?

It looks like Biden, as before, will stick to a tight script in which he is the featured act of a campaign puppetshow. Can this act be pulled off again?Probably.

Biden again likely will enjoy the very advantage Vladimir Putin has long enjoyed in Russia, i.e., the backing of the government bureaucracy/corporation oligarchy, a partnership sealed by billion-dollar contracts, and the blessing of a pliant media.

The inspirational motivation of this formidable political force is the millenarian belief that the Evil Excrescence of Trump must be excised at all costs, including at the cost of even-handed law enforcement and several provisions of the Bill of Rights, if necessary.

The Biden campaign, though, could still go disastrously sideways if the lid can no longer be kept clamped down on the Biden family's entrepreneurial grifting, its multimillion-dollar influence-peddling scam.

But in such an event the Democratic Party's media wing likely would again shift into DEFCON 1 damage-control mode, as it did with the Hunter Biden laptop revelations. (And before that, with the fictional Trump-Kremlin collusion contretemps.)

It would, however, be a longshot for Republicans to wager that impartial justice is suddenly going to emerge from the upper reaches of the FBI and Department of Justice after years of inaction or partisan law enforcement.

A somewhat better bet, for Republicans, is that the actuarial realities will continue to work their inexorable erosion on Joe Biden's slipping stamina and cognitive abilities, as the forces of aging do on us all.

A blithering, meandering, further ferhoodled Joe Biden just might find himself beyond the pale of voter acceptance.

Yet, as before, propped up by teleprompter scripts and cue cards indicating the spot where he should stand, Biden just might dodder onward to victory again. And chances are, he will.

Plus, remember, Trump, at 77, is not that far behind Biden, 80, in wear-and-tear mileage. We used to lampoon the creaking gerontocracy that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union. But even the geezer dictator Brezhnev was a relative spring chicken, at 75, when his rule came to an end.

But still, Biden, though hardly a paragon of agility at four score and counting, has a better-than-even chance of prevailing in the nation's trial-by-ordeal presidential election.

For one very important thing, Biden can count on the Democrats’ one-party monopoly metro fiefdoms — New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and lesser urban enclaves — to crank out 90 percent margins for him. Only the extent of the turnout will be in question.

If Joe Biden does physically and mentally falter, Democrats will be presented with a tough nut to crack indeed: marketing VP Harris to what polls show is an electorate wary of her cackling, jibberish-spouting, ditzy persona and sleazy back story as the one-time ladder-ascending paramour of California political boss Willie Brown. But any attempt to shunt her aside, given her gender and her lightly pigmented complexion, would ignite a firestorm in the party's volatile, color-coded, identity-politics ranks.

All of that said, the Republicans, who have long thought of themselves as a staid organization, are the party more likely to produce a jaw-dropping primary spectacle of the Jerry Springer Show genre.

Trump has a huge lead in the bank right now. But the well-bankrolled DeSantis looks to have the acetylene torch and explosives to make at least a damaging attempt to break into that bank.

DeSantis’ campaign, with its flush finances, might, for example, heed the advice of those take-no-prisoners campaign consultants who are pressing him to match Trump, low blow for vicious low blow.

DeSantis, of course, can't match Trump's capacity for sheer bluster. (Nobody can, excepting possibly Chris Christie.) But there are ad hominem countermeasures DeSantis can take, the campaign consultants are telling the Florida governor.

They are urging him to contrast his military service to Trump's lack of service and to do so relentlessly. Stink-bomb inuendo could be set off on this topic.

The cum-laude DeSantis served in the Navy out of Harvard Law and was awarded a Bronze Star for "meritorious" (non-combat) service in the combat zone of Iraq. Consultants are urging DeSantis to thump the tub loudly on this topic, knowing that Republicans historically have always had a weak spot for patriotism tinged with demagoguery.

It wouldn't be surprising, though, for Trump to address such a gambit head on. Ever susceptible to his own erratic, Tourette-like verbal impulses, the mouthy Trump might very well scoff at DeSantis’ military service and Bronze Star — yet still have veterans at MAGA rallies cheering lustily. His insults of the war hero McCain seemed to have entailed no costs regarding the 2016 Trump nomination.

In contrast to DeSantis, Trump, thanks to a dubious medical exemption from what was then involuntary military conscription, or the "draft," avoided military service during the Vietnam war. (As did Joe Biden through repeated student exemptions before finally avoiding service for good with a dubious medical exemption of his own.)

But war veterans seem in recent times to have gained little if any political advantage from their combat service, as indicated by the campaigns of Clinton v. G.H.W. Bush, Clinton v. Dole, G.W. Bush v. Kerry and Obama v. McCain.

Meanwhile, despite a massive lead over DeSantis, Trump faces mounting civil litigations and criminal proceedings — although these, so far, seem only to have rendered him a modern-day Antaeus, the mythological figure who gained renewed strength from the earth each time he was thrown to the ground in combat.

And now DeSantis himself is getting a taste of the media Trump treatment. That is, DeSantis is suddenly receiving heaping servings of bad press such as Republicans have come to anticipate as their due from a media overwhelmingly inclined to favor the Democratic Party, as polls consistently show. The party's more shrill voices already are resorting to the promiscuously applied F-word label for DeSantis, "fascist."

DeSantis can only hope that Republicans, given their supposed natural preference for orderly, traditional political comportment, will prefer his less bombastic style to Trump's nonstop, smart-mouth taunts and no-limits, carnival-barker hyperbole.

Not likely, though.

With his populism — his faux populism, his critics hasten to insist — Trump seems already to have driven the GOP's country-club boyars to the outlier margins of politics.

He has replaced those stereotyped Republicans with another stereotype — with NASCAR and bowling-league MAGA crackers. Or so the Democratic Party's snotty new college-degreed elite, self-anointed vanguard of the party proletariat, tell it.

DeSantis seems to have but one avenue for advancement open to him. That is to gain on a Trump hobbled by further prosecutions and lawsuits. This, however, seems doubtful, given Trump's rising poll numbers in spite of — or because of — his recent partisan politics-tainted legal setbacks.

DeSantis’ predicament is that any supposed advantage gained as a result of Trump's legal woes likely would be more than offset by a resentful reaction in MAGA Republican ranks.

Putting DeSantis at even further disadvantage despite his strengths as a candidate is a truth Republicans, especially the old country-club boyars, know full well but dread even to think about.

In the unlikely event that DeSantis should somehow edge out Trump for the GOP nomination, the petulant Trump, being Trump, might well proceed to run as an independent candidate, spelling doom for the party ticket. And possibly doom for the party itself.

You can almost bet the farm Trump would do it.

Trump, being Trump — he of the ego inflated far beyond maximum PSIs — might well not be able to resist doing so.

He fully believes that the election — indeed, every single thing — is about Trump and Trump alone. And Democrats, in their own way, say the same thing: "It's all about Trump.

He's an existential menace to democracy and must be taken down. By whatever means."

Trump remade the Republican Party. Now he's in a position to unmake it,

And you can wager that, Trump being Trump, he’d damn well likely not hesitate to do so should the GOP nomination not go his way.

Meanwhile, yes, the mud is flying. Watch out, ladies and gentlemen, for collateral splatter.

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