For reasons unclear to me, most commentary about Donald Trump these days discusses his prospects of winning the Republican presidential nomination and his prospects of being indicted for various crimes as if these matters were unrelated — as if the latter did not bear significantly on the former.
I don’t think Trump has any realistic chance of winning a national election. I also believe that Republicans, pro- and anti-Trump alike, will grasp this in enough time and in enough numbers that he won’t win the nomination. I believe that is happening already. Yet he could win the nomination: His base is sufficiently devoted that, if other promising candidates falter and if the field is too big, he could rack up primary wins with just 20 to 30 percent of the vote. I don’t expect that to happen, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. That is why I’ve argued that the biggest problem for Republicans when it comes to Trump — again, for fans and abominators alike — is investigative metastasis.
Comments