The 2024 presidential campaign has at least fitfully started on the Republican side, which promises to be one hell of a shit show now that Donald Trump has officially announced that he is running again. I’m sure that Democrats have some concerns about Joe Biden if he decides to run again, especially if he maintains his low approval ratings. Many Democrats assume the election of anyone (except maybe Kamala Harris) is in the bag if Trump is nominated again—that is to say if he isn’t indicted on criminal charges by then and can’t issue himself a presidential pardon, as he has contemplated before.
But if it is someone else, Biden has had his moment of glory that he has been seeking since 1987, so why mess it up? If his approval numbers are really down by late 2023, someone with energy, quick with the comebacks and comports him or herself as the “adult” in the room—which shouldn’t be difficult if a Trumpist is nominated by the Republicans—could improve the likelihood of convincing enough voters that this is what they need to do because they want to do it, not because they have to in order to save democracy.
But back to the Republicans and their quandary. When it was suggested by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press after the midterm elections that it would be a problem for Republicans if they continued to prop-up Trump as the “leader” of the party, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana exclaimed that the Republicans were not a “cult” beholden to one person. Since Trump is currently not a sitting president, he is not automatically Der Fuhrer, said Cassidy despite what people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are saying.
Cassidy suggested that the party lacked a coherent policy message during the midterms, which isn’t hard if Republican voters get all their “news” from Fox News. Indeed, we even heard someone like Trump sycophant Maria Bartiromo complaining that there was too much focus on “hate” instead of “inflation”—but it was Bartiromo and her colleagues like Tucker Carlson who were injecting plenty of hate, principally against migrants, into their campaign rhetoric, so they have only themselves to blame if some people were wondering if that was just a far-right ploy to disguise the fact that they have no real policy agenda, save to be contrary to anything Biden is doing. Indeed, voters can’t really be expecting a Republican “majority” in the House to compromise on policy-making, only to use their obstructionism as an excuse to do their usual thing, which is to take a paycheck doing as little as possible except expectorating conspiratorial nonsense.
But “help” is on the way in the form of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—except that this is more helpful for Democrats if his throwing his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination means a pie fight…
…that even those who think they can fake standing “above” it (like Cassidy) can avoid eventually getting their just “desserts” for long:
Hey, if you remain at the "party" what do you expect will happen? The rest of us can certainly be “entertained” by such a contest between DeSantis and Trump, who obviously is outraged that anyone would have the gonads to challenge his supremacy (such is Trump’s extreme case of narcissism). Both Trump and DeSantis would be vying for the extremist core of the Republican base, exploiting the ignorance and paranoia of white nationalism about “the border” and ending immigration to prevent the “great replacement,” which they use to disguise the fact that the remainder of their policy agenda is culture war propaganda and dancing to the anti-regulation tune of corporate paymasters.
This isn’t a meeting between a matter/anti-matter universe that will destroy each other; this is like the negative ends of two magnets repelling each other. They are the “same,” yet they have no reason for being unless they repel each other. The only way to do that is to be more extremist than the other, because simply being less “extremist” on some issues than the other loses them “credibility” with the base, and is seen as merely disingenuous by everyone else.
DeSantis—or any other Republican candidate—may derive some “hope” from Trump’s embarrassing, slurfest performance announcing his bid peppered with his usual lies and conspiracies that caused boredom and dismay even amongst his devoted listeners, and even Fox News was accused of denying Trump his “freedom of speech” rights when it cut away during its live telecast as Trump began sounding like he was on the influence of controlled substances and losing focus. Even previously loyal evangelical Christian hypocrites are now trying to find a way of disembarking from his leaky ship, claiming at this late date that they were “misled” by Trump and felt “used” by him, which begs the question of why they have supported a man who was clearly morally and ethically challenged his entire life.
Sen. Cassidy can certainly bemoan the fact that until the Republican Party finds a way to cast-off the influence of Trumpism—if not in the form of Trump himself, but also DeSantis or anyone else that espouses its fascist impulses—the “cult” of Trumpism will linger like a sewage leak in the basement until someone decides it is time to clean it out. Unfortunately for now it seems that most Republican voters avoid going into the basement to see that there is a problem down there, and it will only be when the stench of it is too great even for them to bear will they decide that it is time to clean it out.
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