Trump: Why Republicans are falling in line
“Is Trump inevitable?” asked Jonathan Martin in Politico. It’s still early, but “a sense of fatalism” is setting in among Republican elected officials and party leaders about the former president’s chances of winning the GOP 2024 presidential nomination. House members are “lining up to take their turn at Mar-a-Lago” to kiss Trump’s ring, which could lead to “a snowball-down-the-mountain effect.” An NBC poll revealed that a substantial plurality of 46 percent of Republican primary voters would vote for him, while an NPR–PBS NewsHour– Marist poll found that 63 percent of Republicans think Trump should be re-elected even if he’s convicted of criminal charges. There are plenty of moderate Republicans who think nominating Trump would be suicide, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Trump alternatives are struggling. So with the MAGA base clamoring for their hero, many Republicans are making the cynical calculation it’s not worth “fighting political gravity.”
Still, a Trump-Biden rematch is not what most Americans want, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. In coming months, there will be “pushback and little rebellions”—and openings for other candidates, perhaps even from a third party. Only a few people have announced primary challenges to Trump, with DeSantis and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) expected to announce this month, and in politics, “anything can happen.” Some Republicans complain that Democratic prosecutors and the media are “making us renominate Trump” by treating him unfairly, said Jay Nordlinger in National Review. That’s nonsense. Republicans have twice nominated Trump for president “because they wanted to,” not because anyone forced them. “If we wanted better politics, we would have them.”
We are heading toward another Trump nomination for a simple reason, said Jason Linkins in The New Republic. His claim that he won in 2020 remains “a canonical belief among Republicans.” So his rivals cannot state the primary reason to nominate an alternative to Trump: “His attempt to hijack democracy makes him unfit to serve.” The nominating process is “controlled by a cult of personality,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, and people who voted for Trump twice don’t want to be told they were wrong. So “the Party of Lincoln” may wind up renominating “a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the United States,” leaving voters with “a stark and existential choice.”