As Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy this week in order to try to protect himself from both indictments and rivals, other potential GOP candidates are thinking that the time to strike is now in order to knock Tang the Conqueror off his golden toilet.
Five days after a disappointing midterm election result and two days before former president Donald Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, Republicans are grappling with an almost existential quandary: Who can lead the party to a post-Trump future?
In private conversations among donors, operatives and other 2024 presidential hopefuls, a growing number of Republicans are trying to seize what they believe may be their best opportunity to sideline Trump and usher in a new generation of party leaders.
Many blame Tuesday’s midterm results — Republicans made smaller-than-expected gains in the House and failed to gain control of the Senate — on the former president, who during the primaries elevated extremist candidates who fared poorly in the general election. The discouraging election outcomes, combined with Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden, have increased both public and private talk of considering a post-Trump world.
Many of the party’s top donors are actively trying to back other candidates and are tired of Trump, according to Republican officials and operatives in touch with them, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
Many donors and operatives are already raving over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has fashioned himself as a Trump-lite Republican and cruised to a nearly 20-point victory over Democrat Charlie Crist on Tuesday night, flipping Miami-Dade County — a heavily Hispanic, densely populated county that has not been won by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in two decades.
Other potential Republican candidates — from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to former vice president Mike Pence to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — are also quietly taking stock of what their own presidential bids might look like.
“The issue set was clearly in our favor — on inflation, on the border, on crime — and yet we failed to meet expectations,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff. “The question is: Are there different candidates out there where the issue set still works, but with a different style that is also more in our favor?”
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Uncertainty also looms over the Republicans eager to move beyond Trump. After all, Trump’s poor showing Tuesday and the calls for him to recede have echoes of previous moments when Trump seemed politically doomed, only to resuscitate himself: The early days of his first presidential bid, when he dismissed the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam prisoner of war, as “not a real war hero.” The final days of his 2016 campaign, when an “Access Hollywood” tape emerged showing Trump crudely boasting about groping women. In the aftermath of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack, when Trump, having lost the presidency, encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.
The issue is that any of the non-Trump Republicans would be worse in every way than actual Trump himself. Without Trump's crippling ego, emotional instability, and his litany of personal grudges weighing his rivals down, they would be able to focus almost exclusively on rewriting America into an avowed white supremacist theocracy instead of weekly stories on nuking hurricanes or buying Greenland.
Yeah, I want to see Trump fail, but as I've said time and time again, Trump is only the symptom of a diseased, cancerous GOP infected with racist, religious zealots who want to purge America of anyone who isn't willing to serve their horrible version of Jesus. Even with Trump facing charges, the party will eventually pick someone to be their ridiculously racist avatar, and the battle will be joined again.
Apparently, that battle begins now.
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