-by Patrick Toomey
At this stage, Trump is the symptom and Trumpism is the disease. I have no clue as to whether he will run in 2024, and I doubt it matters much at this stage.
Whoever the GOP nominee is (likely DeSantis if it's not Trump) will be at least as dangerous. If you took Trump, took away the laziness & lack of discipline, took away the serial marriages, took away the multiple civil and criminal legal difficulties, and added a Harvard law degree, you'd have DeSantis. Florida Democrats have essentially mailed it in on the governor's race, and DeSantis is currently up now by roughly as much as Hochul is in New York.
Trump, DeSantis, or whoever the GOP nominates in 2024 will head a party in which the lunatics will be running the asylum in the House. I was worried when Newt brought in his firebrands in 1995*-- the 2023 GOP House Brownshirt Brigade will be several orders of magnitude worse. According to Fivethirtyeight, there's a 45% chance (trending upward) that GOP will control Senate, too.
Herschel Walker, the worst Senate nominee I can ever recall, is in a dead heat with a fundamentally decent man who seems to be running a decent campaign. We already have (Rick) Scott and Tuberville in the southeast corner of this country-- we could actually have someone who's visibly worse.
A mere decade ago, Todd Akin's "honest rape" comments proved to be fatal in a Missouri Senate race. Today, a militantly anti-abortion candidate having paid for an abortion is essentially background noise. The fact that he is not remotely qualified to serve on a local school board, much less in the Senate, is fecal icing on a rancid cake. There are others (e.g. Vance in Ohio's Senate race) who are almost as dangerous.
This is the fourth straight election cycle in which the Democrats have run against Trump the person instead of running against Trump the ideology. That strategy failed in 2016. It worked reasonably well in 2018. It got Biden elected in 2020 while Democrats lost a net of 13 House seats. It presumably will produce a GOP House majority this cycle, and control of the Senate remains an open question. It is a questionable strategy that outlived any potential usefulness long ago.
We live in a political world that I barely recognize, and I'm not sure how much I want to recognize it. While that world has gotten visibly worse since Trump rose to the top in the 2016 GOP primaries, it was pretty bad already. Barring the rebirth of a Democratic Party that comes remotely close to the ideals (and to the conviction and the courage) of the party of FDR, that world will continue to worsen.
*In 1995, John Boehner was one of Newt’s firebrands. The GOP firebrands of 2015 forced Boehner out as Speaker.
It has been apparent for years decades really that the Democratic Party can't be the party of Wall Street AND the party of working men and women.
coupla things:
1) "*In 1995, John Boehner was one of Newt’s firebrands. The GOP firebrands of 2015 forced Boehner out as Speaker."
note: the nazi firebrands of 2015 were the teabaggers.
Which illustrates what I've noticed about the nazis since 1980: they puke up a radical insurgency... and 2 years later the insurgency has assimilated the entire party, rather than the inverse -- the way the democraps assimilated bernie and the 'squad'.
2) Here I must disagree with PToomey. Trumpism is not the disease. It is a very predictable symptom of the manifold underlying cancers:
a) stupidity and evil among americans who vote. the whole Q thing and the fact that 10s of millions will still vote for democraps eve…