Bring on Glenn Youngkin
At the thoroughly weird, mostly soporific Republican presidential debate last week, no candidate emerged as the leading competitor to candidate Donald Trump. Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis all had their moments, but it looked to us mostly like a seven-way tie for second place, otherwise known in Trumpland as the losing position.
According to polling averages, Trump is currently leading the national GOP primary contest by a stunning 40 points over any second-place candidate, generally assumed to be DeSantis, who is generally assumed to have already peaked.
The GOP has to find some way to dislodge Trump, a looming disaster for this country on so many levels we don’t have space to recount them yet again.
So we think two seemingly contrary things have to happen for the health of the nation and to give Americans a credible choice: Most of the Republican candidates onstage last Wednesday night have to drop out, and someone new has to enter the race.
Talk of Glenn Youngkin came replete with the “reluctant” draftee’s requisite denial of interest and the standard insistence that all that mattered to him was doing the people’s business in the Commonwealth of Virginia, as if that were where his ultimate ambitions lie. Bring Youngkin on, we say. None in the current crop of Republicans looks likely to fell Trump, however fatally wounded he may look to those he has never seduced.
Youngkin has indisputable executive competence: He worked at the Washington private-equity firm Carlyle Group for 25 years, rising to power and becoming sufficiently rich as to never have to lie about the value of his assets like youknow-who.
An argument could be made that Youngkin in Virginia has subsequently thread a very tricky needle when it comes to weaving a bigger and brighter Republican tent than more sardonic and combative DeSantis in Florida; he did not become embroiled with Mickey Mouse, at least.
Time is of the essence here. As many polling experts have noted, Trump’s lead is well on its way to becoming definitive. Why not suit up another combatant?