The GOP does not lack for better options. So why should we put ourselves through all that again?
The GOP does not lack for better options. So why should we put ourselves through all that again?
‘D onald Trump hasn’t said for sure whether he will run in 2024,” reports NPR. “But he’s having a hell of a lot of fun teasing it.”
Donald Trump? In 2024? Why on earth would conservatives choose that guy?
I’m serious: Why? Why would we do that when we have a choice? The idea should be absurd, risible, farcical, outré. It should be a punchline, a mania, the preserve of the demented fringe. Politics matters. And because politics matters, it is a bad idea to allow politics to be held hostage by someone who, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t really care. Donald Trump is an extraordinarily selfish man, and he is only too happy to subordinate your interests to his own. Why let him? It is one thing to say, “Well, he may have been a fickle boor, but I liked some of what he did once he was in office”; it’s quite another to put yourself through four more years of the man when you don’t have to. Whatever justification there may have been for picking the “lesser of two evils” in the 2016 or 2020 general election — a justification that was a great deal stronger before Trump refused to accept, and then tried to overturn, the results of the latter — it cannot obtain in 2022.
Don’t tell me: Because I’m responding to Trump’s repeated hints, I must be “obsessed” or “deranged” or “jealous.” Or, perhaps, I “want Joe Biden to be president.” Well, no, actually, I don’t. But regardless, Biden is not going to be on the ballot in the next Republican presidential primaries, is he? General elections can be complicated because they require the public to decide whether it wants the Republican or the Democrat, both of whom have already been nominated by their respective parties. But primaries? Primaries are different. In the next Republican primary, the question will be, “Given a free choice, who do you want to run against Joe Biden?” My answer will be, “A Republican who is likely to win — and who, if he wins, will not be an insane mess.” Is that not yours?
And please don’t tell me that the GOP should choose Trump again because “he fights.” The Republican Party now has a whole host of other candidates who “fight,” and none of them come with Trump’s baggage, his torpidness, his ill-discipline, his self-indulgence, his abject disregard for our constitutional order, or his pathological, unyielding, surrealistic dishonesty. What, pray tell, did Donald Trump say as president that Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have? What law did he sign that Greg Abbott would have vetoed? Which of the judicial picks that the Federalist Society prepared for him would have been rejected by Tim Scott or Marco Rubio or Kim Reynolds? Trump’s apologists tend to cast him as an unfortunate package deal: You want the policy, you get the lunacy, too. But that isn’t true anymore — if it ever was. Embrace the glorious future, in which you are no longer obliged to tie the agenda you favor to a hand grenade.
Also important: That none of the other candidates have lost an election to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and then disgracefully lied about it for a year; that none of the other candidates have inspired a riot in the service of that lie; that none of the other candidates have sat in their country club for the last two years issuing unhinged press releases, delivering impotent endorsements, and attempting to undermine Mitch McConnell, the most effective Republican senator of the last 50 years. Yes, some of the criticisms of Donald Trump were unjust — as have been some of the open-ended investigations into his conduct — but Trump is hated by an awful lot of Americans for good cause, and there is absolutely no reason for those Americans to be asked to sweat their vote again next time around. The GOP does not lack options. It does not need to return to this well.
The United States is an enormous and well-populated country, and it really ought to be able to do better than to run a second election between Joe frickin’ Biden and Donald frickin’ Trump. Change, not re-runs, ought to be the GOP’s theme. Change — away from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Change — away from blowhards in their late 70s. Change — away from political leaders who do not do the required reading and who can barely string a sentence together. Donald Trump has spent the last 15 months pretending that he won the 2020 presidential election because he understands that, in the modern era, a nominee who loses an election is a nominee who does not get picked to run again. The Republican Party did not go back to Gerald Ford in 1980, or to George H. W. Bush in 1996, or to Bob Dole in 2000, or to John McCain in 2012, or to Mitt Romney in 2016, and it should not go back to Donald Trump in 2024.
The man lost. He’s a loser. It’s time we picked a winner for a change.