Trump or Bust
Trump is the most "electable" Republican because he will not allow anyone else to win.
John Rich’s country music career has been kind of meh since “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” but he might have a future as a political analyst.
That is, he understands that for all the talk about “electability” in the GOP Presidential nomination contest, Donald Trump is pretty much the most electable nominee by default.
Not because he’s guaranteed to beat Biden (on paper, at least, he’s the one whom Biden has the best chance of beating), but if DeSantis or Haley or Scott Baio win the nomination that’s his by birthright - which they would do through cheating!!! of course - Trump will at most grumble and stay home and not help the nominee at all, and could very well actively sabotage the campaign.
I mean, in his Troof Social post reproduced above, he all but comes out and says it. And even if only a handful of the ride-or-die MAGA faithful follow his lead and abstain or vote for the Constitution Party candidate or whatever instead of backing DeSantis, that would be enough to torpedo any challenger to Biden.
We hear a lot about how just a few tens or hundreds of thousands of votes in a few states could have made the difference in 2020, handing Trump re-election despite losing the popular vote again.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans can spare a single vote. If the GOP nominee in 2024 can only hang on to, say, 90 or even 95 percent of the Trump coalition, that’s the difference between a respectable electoral-college loss and a Dukakis ‘88-level wipeout.
Right now, a not-Trump nominee is looking at holding together 76% of that coalition. Which would…also result in a Dukakis ‘88-level wipeout. (1972 or 1984? Even if the GOP vote fractures, I still can’t see Biden winning states like Wyoming or Idaho. America is much more polarized among partisan lines now, and there are some states which will go red or blue for the foreseeable future.)
Donald Trump is taking Ron DeSantis’ potential Presidential bid extremely personally and wants to not just defeat him but humiliate him.
That’s according to Rolling Stone. Nevertheless, I believe it’s very possibly true that Donald Trump is taking Ron DeSantis’ potential Presidential bid extremely personally and wants to not just defeat him but humiliate him.
DONALD TRUMP LOATHES Ron DeSantis for the Florida governor’s “disloyal” challenge to Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party. The former president’s ire, however, is dwarfed by the intense desire harbored by some of Trump’s key aides and allies to see DeSantis politically ruined.
These advisers, lawmakers, and operatives personally know DeSantis or used to work for him. Now, some of them are working to reelect Trump and have brought their intimate knowledge of DeSantis’ operations, and also what makes Trump’s likely 2024 primary rival tick. Just as importantly, some of the Team-DeSantis-turned-Team-Trump contingent have talked to the ex-president about how best to relentlessly mess with DeSantis, assuring Trump that the Florida governor is uniquely “insecure” and “sensitive,” and that it’s easy to get in his head, two such sources who’ve spoken to Trump tell Rolling Stone.
It’s one of the reasons why the open political warfare between Trump and DeSantis is only expected to get nastier in the coming months. “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride,” says a third source, who used to be on Team DeSantis and is now in the Trump orbit.
This person continues, “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently: ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that … People who were traveling with Ron everyday, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”
[…]
In recent months, Trump has spoken to an array of advisers, friends, and Republican lawmakers who’ve known or worked closely with DeSantis, and has at times solicited gossip and salacious, unverified details of the governor’s personal life. On top of that, the former president has brainstormed with several of these confidants various ideas for aggressive mudslinging messaging. According to two other sources with direct knowledge of the matter, among the potential targets they see are DeSantis’ physique, attire, appearance, voice, and social skills. They also believe he looks humorously clumsy in his ongoing feud with Disney.
Sometimes, Trump has privately noted that some of these elements would work well if incorporated somehow into eventual 2024 attack ads against DeSantis.
“Donald Trump is an animal. He’s a fighter. In 2016, he went further than what a so-called respectable politician was supposed to do, in how aggressive his attacks against opponents were. It offended some people, but now, he’s pushed the boundary of propriety so far that others are willing to go there in campaigning,” Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who remains close to the ex-president, tells Rolling Stone. He adds that some Trump allies are interested in perhaps even harsher attacks than Trump is. “There are people — including at the peripheries of the 2024 campaign — who go after DeSantis even harder, and get even rougher on the governor’s allies,” Caputo says.
Indeed, Trump has already demonstrated that virtually nothing is off limits in his campaign against DeSantis, who hasn’t even officially declared his 2024 candidacy yet. (The governor is clearly running a “shadow campaign” at this time, however.) Last month, the ex-president publicly suggested DeSantis might be gay. The month before that, Trump implied the Florida governor is a pedophile. That the allegations are baseless is not much of a concern to the 2024 Republican frontrunner.
Even now, I would take DeSantis over Trump if they were the only two choices on offer. People compare DeSantis to Viktor Orban, but I’d prefer the actual Viktor Orban in the White House to four more years of…that.
And yet, seeing Trump mock DeSantis for the blatant pandering that won him the Florida Governorship is a bit satisfying. I can’t deny that.
For all the talk about how a few votes going another way can have massive ramifications, DeSantis just barely beat out Democrat Andrew Gillum in 2018. Imagine what smooth sailing it would be for the hapless Florida Democrats if only Gillum had won and [record scratch]
One think DeSantis and Trump still have in common: they are often extremely fortunate in their choice of enemies.
Social media consultant: “Hey, Nora, your tweet sneering about the ‘whiteness’ of young hockey players killed in a bus crash got a lot of engagement, but I don’t know how you can possibly top that.”
Nora Loreto: “I got this.”
Loreto is getting a lot of pushback online from people who say she would have opposed fighting the Nazis had she been around at the time, but that’s not fair. Her opposition to fighting the Nazis would have ended abruptly on June 22, 1941.
What good conservatives who want the kind of worthwhile government we used to have, when the eagle could fly on both wings, need to understand is that Trump, Orban, DeSantis, Haley, Scott, or any others are unacceptable if that's your goal. The Republican Party has to be beaten senseless until it goes the way of the Whigs and the way opens for an Actually Conservatve party to be organized. That means vote for Democrats until that happens.