The 2024 GOP primary is over

Let's stop pretending the Republican base or Donald Trump will act rationally.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

It’s like he was leaked from a lab just to defeat Donald Trump in a GOP presidential primary.

He’s an extraordinarily popular swing state governor re-elected with a margin of victory so big it feels like a typo. Big donors swoon over him because he doesn’t resemble a bloated, reanimated corpse scavenging the earth for his fourth wife, his real hair, and Diet Cokes. Instead, he looks kinda like them–or their sons they made go to Harvard to punish the Ivy League for existing. And though he knows how to serve the base a diet of pure red meat cooked on noxious gas stoves, he represents the return to normalcy that Republican power brokers lust for after a couple of excruciating losses.

Of course, I’m describing Jeb!, AKA John Ellis Bush.

But if you thought was I was talking about Ron DeSantis, you’ll get the point of my new piece for John Stoehr’s Editorial Board. You should subscribe to the Editorial Board if you can but here’s the crux:

DeSantis is certainly younger, more engaged and more sadistic than Jeb!. The GOP seems willing to consider some kind of collective action this time to stop Trump.

But they have something to lose.

He doesn’t.

Trump would wreck the party before surrendering.

Don’t get me twisted: I think they’re both terrible—and DeSantis may even be worse than Trump, if not as a person than as a politician. But…

It’s like comparing Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. They both suck, and Orban wants to be Putin. I’m just sick of people underestimating Trump and overestimating the Republicans. 

Never trust the immune system of the Republican Party. They’re not going to go all rational and pick the “safe” pick the way Democrats did in 2016 and 2020. And if DeSantis wins it will be by a hairplug, essentially dividing the party. So it won’t just be Trump making the decision to self-destruct the GOP. Somewhere deep in my gut, I think Ron may not even run, the cannier move rather than risk getting Jeb-ed.

So, until you see substantial evidence that DeSantis is winning the GOP primary and Trump is willing to somehow let that happen and give up the one job that prevents him from being indicted, the GOP primary is over.