That’s a wrap, folks — the match is set. Nikki Haley has dropped out of the Republican presidential primary after an entirely predictable walloping on Super Tuesday. This means that Donald Trump is the last man standing in the 2024 race on the GOP side, an outcome that had been foreordained ever since the day he got indicted by Alvin Bragg.
There is much talk of whether or not Nikki Haley will endorse Trump. (Haley will not endorse Joe Biden; only fools or self-avowed apostates could or would do such a thing.) I do not particularly care myself — in fact, I was resigned to the possibility long ago — but I doubt it; I suspect she will remain tactfully silent until/unless Joe Biden has an actual stroke on camera, forcing the matter. She is obviously uninterested in serving in a second Trump administration.
Which of course brings us to the historically remarkable dilemma: Joe Biden carries himself precisely like the sort of guy who might have a stroke on camera at any minute. Meanwhile, hardly anybody of any talent or legal and moral conscience is going to want to serve in a second Trump administration. This is our real-life version of Sartre’s No Exit, except that for us, hell is not “other people.” Our hell is the same people. One way or another, the race that nobody in America claims to have wanted has materialized with ease: Either a senile, personally corrupt puppet president run by his handlers or a stupid, personally corrupt president who is congenitally incapable of listening to his advisers will be president in 2025.
Charlie Cooke wrote eloquently yesterday about how the stakes for November’s election could not be higher for the loser, who will see his life’s work repudiated in real time. I would emphasize that the stakes are even more dire for the winner, who is about to drink from one of the most obviously poisoned chalices in recent political history, given American discontent and global instability.
America is offered a choice: Either elect a man who is arguably non compos mentis and prepare for Kamala Harris’s presidency, or elect a man who threatens to set multiple constitutional crises in gear simply by the act of taking office. That’s it, that’s all that’s on the itinerary for us in November. Trump versus Biden. The course is locked in. There can be no deviation from the path now, absent death or disability. One way or another, the result will incinerate the social fabric of the country. Set the controls for the heart of the sun.