The real reason Ron should run
We don't know for sure Trump can be on the 2024 ballot at all.
After a spectacularly disappointing midterm election1 for the Republican Party, in no small part because of the wingnut candidates forced upon them in winnable races, the de facto leader of the GOP has turned his guns on…the one Republican who overperformed:
Every Trump-skeptical Republican and anti-anti-Trump conservative knows Donald Trump is now vote-repellent for anyone who’s not already a dues-paying member of the cult.
But it’s still a cult, and even now, Trump still has to be considered the clear front-runner for the party Presidential nomination in 2024.
As Peter Savodnik notes, the Republican Party is not so much a political party as a lifestyle brand, like Jeep or Patagonia or Kirkland Signature. No policy, just vibes:
But there was a logic to the fact that some Republicans who were meant to trounce barely eked it out, while others went down in flames.
That was because their politics seemed more like a feeling than an agenda that you could market and sell to other voters who might not normally vote Republican. Like the Contract with America, or the Great Society, or the Fair Deal or the New Deal.
The feeling had been building for many years, before Trump, before the Tea Party, all the way to the aughts or even the nineties, they said, when it seemed as if everything began to happen: the exporting of blue-collar jobs, the acrimony, automation, globalization. “We’ve been angry since forever,” a man in an American-flag tie told me, laughing. (“And another thing,” a man in a cowboy hat said, “we were in high school or just out of high school then, and that’s the time of your life you always look back on and wish you could go back to.”)
Anyway, bottom line, they knew for sure what they did not want.
[…]
The Arizonans I talked to, like the Trump wannabes—Lake, Masters, Bolduc, Mastriano —were still enraged, overflowing with contempt for “the elites,” “the deep state,” “the administrative state,” Washington, New York, the whole of California. It was the old rage that had been curdling since the dawn of web 1.0, since Ross Perot warned of that giant sucking sound, since the American hinterland had started to atrophy, and the old economic order disappeared. It wasn’t an agenda. It wasn’t a way forward.
This can work if things really, really go to shit, but America isn’t yet close to that point. The price of everything except the Costco hot dog is going up, but the wheelbarrows-of-cash-to-buy-bread phase has yet to materialize.
So, most Americans might dislike Trump, but the ones who do like him are ride-or-die. And they still make up a clear majority of the Republican Party. If Ron DeSantis decides to challenge him for the 2024 Presidential nomination, his chances will be about the same as the Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl this year.2
But if he doesn’t go for it, he’s tacitly admitting that Trump is the alpha dog. He’ll fight against Disney and Dr. Fauci, but not the Orange God-King.
So I think he, or another ambitious Republican who hasn’t yet completely burned his or her bridges with Trump3 has to go all-in if for no other reason than to lay the groundwork for a future run (like Reagan in 1976) or to show they can, in fact, control a large enough faction of the party to make themselves indispensable (think Pat Buchanan or Bernie Sanders).
But there’s another reason to throw down against Trump, and I’ll lay the groundwork by linking to this 1991 Saturday Night Live sketch called “Campaign ‘92: The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush.”
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