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player ready...Donald Trump is being roundly blamed for his party’s midterm election debacle. Many of his pet candidates — election deniers, MAGA men and women, and those on the extreme and wacky end of the Republican Party — lost.
Now party heavyweights are stepping out to declare that Trump time is past, that to win back the White House, the GOP needs a new standard-bearer who will move on from stolen elections, border walls and a focus on “radical socialism.”
Even former Vice President Mike Pence finally worked up the chutzpah to criticize Trump for nearly getting him killed in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“The president’s words were reckless, and his actions were reckless,” Pence said in an ABC News interview last week. “The president’s words that day at the rally (before the riot) endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building.”
Oh my!
In the wake of Trump’s announcement that he would run for president in 2024, Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson had harsher words for the former president. “The message he delivered last night — which was self-serving, which was chaotic — was the same one that lost the last election cycle and would lose the next,” he told The New York Times last week. “We need alternatives.”
Hutchinson spoke while in Iowa, where he is “testing the waters” for a 2024 presidential run, according to the Times.
Top GOP politicians are shooting darts at Trump, arguing the former president is a destructive relic. They are right, but they have ulterior motives — that is, presidential ambitions of their own.
Trump should ignore the chatter of the growing mob. And secretly urge them on. If Trump runs against the “No-Trumpers,” he wins.
As we know from his first presidential run, Trump thrives on competition. He annihilated his opponents on the way to the 2016 presidential nomination. Like a runaway train, Trump mowed them all down, one by one, fueled by his made-for-TV star power, scorching nicknames and the MAGA movement.
Trump’s early declaration comes just a week after the midterms and signals a crowded and long 2024 primary season. Legions of boldface names such as Hutchinson are positioning themselves for possible runs for the Republican nomination.
They will pile up, and pile on.
Just to name a few top-tier Republicans who may take on Trump: Pence; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin; Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; South Carolina U.S. Sen. Tim Scott; and Chris Christie, the TV talking head and former New Jersey governor. Many more are reportedly eyeing 2024.
Yet when it comes to many in the party’s conservative wing, Trump is the one and only real deal.
The actual number of Trump loyalists among GOP rank-and-file voters is hard to nail down, The New York Times notes. But “several of the party’s pollsters have estimated it could be between one-third and 40% of their voters,” the newspaper reports.
An NBC News poll taken in early November “showed that 30% of Republicans said they supported Mr. Trump more than the party, a number that hovered around 50% for the final two years of his presidency.”
AP VoteCast interviewed 94,293 voters who participated in the midterm elections and found that nearly 66% of Republican voters said they support the MAGA movement.
Add it up. In a crowded primary, with perhaps a dozen or more competitors, 30% to 40% of the vote is a surefire win.
Trump supporters are deliriously loyal. They will never leave him. They will wallow with him in the religion of victimhood, forever convinced that the impeachments, investigations, subpoenas and even a future Trump indictment all add up to a “trumped-up” conspiracy.
Trump’s base would vote for him even if he were in prison (and that’s a real possibility).
While Trump’s rivals span the ideological spectrum, many will echo Trump’s attacks on President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, wokeness and all things liberal. They want him gone, but they crave his staunchly loyal base of supporters.
But MAGA love is not transferable, and that’s all good for Trump.
Conventional wisdom says DeSantis is the locomotive that could smash Trump’s aspirations to return to the Oval Office. On Nov. 8, DeSantis notched a nearly 20-point win in his reelection campaign for Florida governor, and he is raking up lucrative financial commitments from the Republican Party’s billionaire class.
Many tout DeSantis as the leading alternative to Trump who could clear the field. That scares Democrats to death. I hear abject fear of DeSantis in the voices of the Democratic activists I talk to and from the TV talking heads on the liberal-leaning cable news shows.
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Democrats, take heart. All those hyperambitious presidential wannabes are not going to step aside for DeSantis.
Trump should cheer the competition. Tee up the race with plenty of stiffs, and bring ’em on.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at [email protected].
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