The other candidates can’t escape Trump, even as they try to depose him.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n 2016, Republicans chose an inveterate liar to lead their party. Eight years later, they will need a candidate who is merely dishonest to finally rid themselves of him.
It is clear at this point that the majority of the GOP is ready to move on from Donald Trump, a man so dishonest that he makes George Santos look like George Washington. Finally, Republicans think 2024 is their chance to rid the party of its cancer.
Would that it were so simple.
Much as a floating rat’s head would make a full batch of scotch undrinkable, Trump has poisoned the remainder of the 2024 GOP presidential field, forcing candidates to defend preposterous positions, to rationalize lies, and to adopt personas that contradict their former selves.
This sets up a paradox for voters on the right who want to see the Republican Party return to some modicum of normalcy: The most attractive GOP candidate might be the one who is least believable. The less it seems like a 2024 hopeful actually buys into their own nonsense, the more electable they become.
Take, for example, soon-to-be-official candidate Nikki Haley, who seems as if she has been running for president since LeBron James’s rookie NBA season. For years, Haley represented the best of the GOP. As South Carolina governor, she was a fiscal and social conservative who wasn’t afraid to buck her party, such as when she ordered the Confederate flag removed from the state capitol following a horrific church shooting in Charleston.
When Donald Trump emerged as a serious presidential candidate in 2016, Haley vigorously opposed his nomination, saying he was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president.” She savaged Trump’s positions on immigration and his coarse rhetorical style. “That’s not who we are as Republicans,” she said. “That’s not what we do.”
But in 2017, Haley became a member of the Trump cabinet, when she began serving as ambassador to the United Nations. And since then, her relationship with Trump has been . . . inconsistent.
Despite criticizing Trump for his dealings with Russia, for accusations of sexual harassment made by women against him, and for his role in the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, Haley nonetheless has praised the former president.
“He has the ability to get strong people elected, and he has the ability to move the ball, and I hope that he continues to do that,” Haley said to the Wall Street Journal in 2021. “We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”
According to a quick Google search, during Trump’s tenure, Republicans lost control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the presidency. So if Haley believes that Trump helps get people elected and that the party is worse off without him, her next stop should be a padded room, not the White House.
In a famous article written by Politico’s Tim Alberta, Haley did somersaults to avoid criticizing Trump over his contention that he actually won the 2020 election. Haley repeatedly waved off criticisms of Trump for spreading lies about the election, suggesting it wasn’t as bad as it seemed because “to his core, he believes he was wronged.”
“This is not him making it up,” she said.
Of course, Trump was entirely making it up.
However, if one imagines that Haley is just being untruthful and doesn’t actually believe Trump is good for the Republican Party, or that the chemical imbalance within his brain makes it more acceptable for him to unleash his followers on the Capitol, it makes her a much more attractive candidate.
Or take Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the man seen as the most likely heir to Trump’s populist legacy. Just last week, Trump released old video of DeSantis saying he strove to be just like former House speaker Paul Ryan, the torchbearer of the type of old-school, small-government, traditional conservatism that has now fallen out of favor. Running for the GOP nomination as a Paul Ryan Republican in 2024 is akin to running for president of PETA while wearing a Lady Gaga–style meat dress.
Spoiler alert: Ron DeSantis has now climbed to the top of Trump challengers by advocating the muscular, big-government-style “conservatism” espoused by the former president. So if he hasn’t actually changed, is DeSantis fibbing about who he is now, or who he was when traditional conservatism was the path to upward mobility within the party?
The thing that sets DeSantis apart is that he is willing to go the extra step to embrace this new identity. Like an undercover cop trying to convince the gangsters he’s one of them, he has roughed up a few civilians to prove he’s for real. (And in the governor’s case, those “civilians” include Disney and cruise ships.)
The desire to court Trump’s voters has even corrupted the seemingly incorruptible. Senator Tim Scott, who frequently criticized the former president and delivered an entire Republican response to the 2021 State of the Union speech without once uttering the word “Trump,” would seem to be perfectly in line to move the party beyond its recent putrescence.
But, of course, the cost of a ticket to the 2024 GOP primary is pretending that Trump had nothing to do with the 2021 Capitol insurrection. And when Scott had the chance to separate himself from the orange menace, he voted to acquit Trump, knowing a vote for conviction would sentence him to a 2024 in which he watched oleaginous invertebrates like Chris Christie and Ted Cruz run for a spot in the White House while he was left out.
Again, in order for trad-cons to support Scott, they have to think he is simply a disingenuous political operator and doesn’t actually believe Trump was unworthy of punishment. (Scott said he was “unconvinced that the Senate has the authority to hold a trial against a private citizen,” which is both untrue and a cop-out used by many of his colleagues.)
Scott isn’t alone, as the sweet MAGA siren song has even gotten to Trump’s most aggressive critics. Last week both former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (who refused to vote for Trump in 2020) and current New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu (who once called Trump “f***ing crazy”) said they would support Trump if he were the eventual nominee. Both Hogan and Sununu equivocated by saying they didn’t believe Trump would be the GOP’s pick.
The GOP’s poisonous dalliance with Donald Trump has, like a weekend with Charlie Sheen, left all of its members with a permanent rash. The other 2024 candidates are now playing a political Squid Game in which each has to sacrifice his or her dignity to avoid offending Trump’s die-hard voters. The viability of each candidate will depend on how much boob bait the voters are willing to tolerate.
In the end, Republican voters will have the choice between a serial liar and a candidate who is badly damaged because of the lies he or she has gone along with for the last eight years. Let us pray that voters have the wisdom to choose correctly.