I think it will still be Trump. Even if he’s in jail (which I doubt – he might be in trial, but I doubt everything will be over by the conventions).
With my understanding of the Republican voter base, I can’t envision a likely sequence of events (outside of Trump’s death) that results in someone else getting nominated. He’s going to win most or all of the early and mid contests, barring something unforseeable. And I think he’ll win them by a lot. After that, what stops him? Most Republican voters like him, and like his assholery, and aren’t willing to settle for a fake when the real Trump is right there.
But here’s what scares me: There are a couple of dark horses waiting to gallop in at the last minute and assume the mantle. People like Glenn Younkin, current Governor of Virginia. He ran as a moderate Republican in 2021 and won. But the minute he got into office, he showed his true colors as a MAGA follower. He opposed vaccine mandates, banned mask mandates and enthusiastically engaged in culture war fights. He’s a scary guy, but he knows how to come off as reasonable in public.
If he jumps in late, there will be insufficient time for many voters to vet him and they could well succumb to the same “we want something new and flashy!” phenomenon that put Younkin into the Virginia Governor’s mansion over Terry McCauliffe.
Also, don’t discount the power of the No Labels Party and the impact it is likely to have on the outcome of 2024. They purport to be a broad, moderate party that will work across party lines – but their funding largely comes from very familiar Republican sources looking to tilt the balance against Biden. To be sure, some of their funding comes from Democratic sources, but the amounts donated by Dems pales in comparison to what has been donated by Republicans.
Right now, I think people like Younkin and his supporters are laying in the weeds, waiting to see what happens with Trump after indictments fall in Georgia and the election interference probe by DOJ. But Republicans mean to win in 2024. None of us should become or feel complacent just because DeSantis is flaming out.
I agree. The GOP will not take any action to prevent DJT from winning enough primaries to be the nominee, period. He OWNS Ronna McDaniel and the RNC. She will never turn on him.
I’ve have been saying for months the only way he doesn’t get the nomination is if he withdraws (never going to happen) or is dead. I am sticking with that position.
Normally, I would say that something like that is possible, and I think it could be next year (at least in terms of someone like winning the nomination), but it will depend on whether the RNC does acquires a quick case of the rationals and decides it doesn’t want to nominate someone who 100% is going to prison and who will 100% lose in the general AND drag every other Republican candidate down with him on flaming coattails–or not.
Mitch McConnell and a few other semi-sane Republican senators do not want that to happen. Can they stop it?
I hate to give GOPers any credit at all, but I think that this time around they will, just barely, avoid sacrificing their power and money on the altar of Trump’s ego. If that is the case, then can someone like Younkin swoop in and win?
Maybe win the nomination. But I think any effort to get rid of Trump will be doubly devastating:
The mess of preventing him from being nominated, which will make the GOP look weak and bad to “independents,” etc.
A MAGA base demoralized by the elimination of their christ.
To prevent the above, Trump would need to drop out now and begin working hard to soothe the MAGA nutters. He’s not going to do that. So the GOP will be destroyed in the 2024 election.
I’ve seen one of their spokespeople on TV a few times (sorry, blanking on who it was), and he didn’t convince me at all. I know he was a “former” Republican and couldn’t articulate why anyone would vote for his party…let alone their candidate. They don’t even have one yet, do they?
What’s interesting to me about De Santis’ ongoing flameout is that it suggests to me that Trump’s “policies” of anti-immigrant, anti-woke, and anti-education aren’t actually popular as policies.
Trump’s followers just love watching the show, listening to the man bloviate. You or I or De Santis can preach the same garbage and it doesn’t sell.
Which suggests that maybe, just maybe, if Trump ends up silenced somehow, the MAGA crowd simply crawls back under their rock and ditches politics for another 50 years.
Which suggests there might a path forward for what used to pass for ordinary general-purpose Republicanism. but only after Trump is done talking forever.
That makes a lot of sense. Trump even pointed that out at one of his little rallies where he said, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that [transgender issues]. You see I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that [mimicks golf clap]. I talk transgender everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.” I’ve argued that many Trump supporters just want to watch the world burn, but those others aren’t as entertaining as Trump himself so who wants to support them?
Most of the successful candidates, like Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, genuinely liked campaigning and talking (and listening) to the-people. DeSantis looks like he’s in the dentist’s chair. He doesn’t like the people and I think he senses that the people don’t like him. He hates to be there, just like his audience. When he laughs and tilts his head back with his mouth wide open, he looks a braying jackass, totally phony and contrived. He’s just a lousy candidate, as President Jeb Bush can attest.
He knows he has one chance- having DJT convicted. Yet for the sake of the brain dead MAGA base, he has to act the prosecutions are without merit. When you have to act like the one thing that gives you a chance is wrong, you’re not going to sound convincing.
Assuming both top runners collapse, who gets it? I have no idea.
Many good points. I was of the mindset that we needed to catalog every failure in the DeSantis campaign because he would be a formidable candidate. He is far worse than advertised, and the staff layoffs seem to indicate the big money donors have soured on him and he is such a terrible retail politician, he’s not creating a groundswell of small donors. There is a yawning chasm behind him - so unless Trump is in chains I would bet that Trump is the nominee.
Barring that, I can see Aspenglow’s point about Youngkin being true as well. Youngkin is not as horrifyingly stiff as DeSantis but he also has the awkward albatross of the anti-woke policies that are Orwellian and more importantly, just not that popular.
LSLGuy has got it right, I think. Trump is a talk radio host, in essence, and they don’t want someone to actually do these things about immigration, wokeness, etc. They just want him to bitch and moan about it and be able to say “yeah! He’s right!”
No Labels scares the shit out of me. Thankfully the RFK Jr candidacy is dissipating like a silent but deadly fart, and Marianne Williamson isn’t catching on. But a Larry Hogan-type candidate could siphon centrist voters from Biden and create very serious problems. Anybody who supports a functioning democracy needs to kill this No Labels shit now and reboot it if, and when, the GOP ever recovers from the Trump-dysentery that they are in now.
In essence, they’re Nazis. It’s the same psychology as those who supported Hitler. They are authoritarians who want to worship a charismatic figure and see him punish/oppress/defeat the feared and hated Other. That psychology existed thousands of years ago, it existed in 1933, it existed in 2016, and, barring some large and quick shift in human evolution, it will exist a thousand years from now as well.
I think Trump’s policies were not meaningless among the MAGA base, but yeah, they were not and are not popular enough among the larger American populace to win a candidate the popular vote, and I doubt the GOP can eke out an Electoral College squeaker as they did in 2016 in 2024.
But you are right that without the charismatic figure–Hitler, Trump, etc.–the whole thing doesn’t work. None of these other assholes can be Trump. Any one of them will inevitably fail to beat Biden.
Well I hope you’re right. As long as the drain is from folks who would not vote for Biden. I can’t see a progressive voting for either Huntsman or Manchin, but Larry Hogan is actually a Republican who seems like a decent human being. But surely he knows that third party that draws away from Biden is a existential threat to democracy…
As a Democrat, I can’t think of anything that would make me vote for Larry Hogan. I’m on the Left Coast, so he’s barely familiar to me, but just being an o.k. guy is not enough for me to switch to some really sketchy third party.