National Review Online
Wednesday,
January 10, 2024
To say
Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination is an
understatement. He is above 60 percent in national polling averages and leads
by roughly 30 points in Iowa. His lead is much narrower in New Hampshire,
although the state, where Democrats and independents can vote in the GOP
primary, is not necessarily predictive.
Trump
feels inevitable, but nothing is settled until Republicans actually caucus and
vote. They would be well advised to opt for one of the alternatives who are far
and away better on the merits, more likely to win in November, and, if elected,
more likely to deliver — free from the wild drama of a second Trump term —
conservative results.
Trump’s
defenders tend to dismiss the conservative criticisms of him as concerns about
his “mean tweets,” or now, to be more accurate, his mean Truth Social posts.
It’s true that his fulminations on social media are crude and ridiculous, but
this isn’t the fundamental problem. Because he couldn’t bear to admit that he’d
lost to Joe Biden in 2020 (after trailing him in every national poll), Trump
insisted he’d won and did everything he could to overturn the result, including
trying to bully his vice president into violating his oath and preventing and
delaying the counting of the electoral vote. When a mob, fervently believing
Trump’s lies, fought its way into the U.S. Capitol to try to end the count,
Trump did little or nothing to try to stop it.
These
were infamous presidential acts and represented serious offenses against our
constitutional order. Nothing can justify them, and it’s wrong to simply
pretend that they didn’t happen. It’s impossible to imagine Ron DeSantis or
Nikki Haley, whatever their other flaws, engaging in such grotesquely selfish
behavior injurious to our republic. On this basis alone, both are vastly
preferable to Trump.
One
reason no one has gotten much traction against Trump, besides the backlash
against the indictments, is that the electability argument has been rendered
null and void by his strong polling in a hypothetical matchup with President
Biden. The Democrat is so weak he could lose to Trump, but the former president
is still a risky bet compared with another Republican candidate without his
baggage. As Biden demonstrated in his Valley Forge speech last week, Democrats
plan to make the race all about Trump if he wins the nomination, in a repeat of
their winning formula from 2020 and 2022. Nominating someone else would
instantly deny the Democrats their most powerful weapon in the cause of winning
an otherwise unthinkable Biden second term — Trump’s radioactive persona.
In
his first term, Trump notched some important conservative wins and even forged
some creative victories (think the Abraham Accords). He’d be an enormous
improvement over Joe Biden on many policy questions. But much energy would be
wasted on his personal vendettas and fighting back against the Left’s
sure-to-be-unhinged reaction to his return to the White House. He’d have
trouble attracting talent to serve him. His bad instincts on trade and NATO,
tendency to personalize everything including foreign relations, contempt for
rules that get in his way, and erratic nature would risk real harm to the
country. He’d be an easily distracted 78-year-old one-termer sure to get wiped
out in the midterms, once again.
Again,
whatever their downsides, both DeSantis and Haley would avoid almost all these
pitfalls. DeSantis, in particular, is an accomplished governor of a major
state, with an impressive agenda of conservative reform under his belt. He is a
serious-minded policy maven who wouldn’t fail as president for lack of
discipline or knowledge.
None
of this is to deny the outrageous lengths to which the Left has gone to target
Trump, most recently by denying him access to the ballot in two states, with
perhaps more to come. Much of the GOP has rallied to Trump and considers the
fire he draws from his enemies a sign of his strength and efficacy. The enemy
of my enemy is my friend is one of the most ingrained dynamics of collective
life. But Republicans have better friends available to them, who haven’t
disgraced themselves by trying to deny the results of an election, who would be
quite likely to vanquish Biden, and who would be capable presidents.
It’s
not too late to choose one of them, and forge a better path for the party and
for the country.
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