Who Will not be the Republican Candidate for President in 2024? Donald Trump.
The noise being made by Trump and his supporters will fade with time. The Republican Party has flirted with suicide these last four years and I think their more rational practitioners will establish a very stringent suicide watch in these next four years. Many of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and patriotic Republicans have left the fold, but they need a political unit to express their views and enact policy and they could be reenlisted if sense and sensibility is restored, not by the likes of Pence, the sycophant, and bigot, or Pompeo, the smug practitioner of Trumps thoughtless foreign policy, dismantling the bulwark of our international leadership and security, but by a rational, experienced leader with an understanding of the worldview required to lead the United States in the next decades. The failures of Trumpism are too widespread, too averse to human dignity, and too ignoble to return to the White House.
The Republicans have relied on the Electoral College to win the presidency and gerrymandering to gain as many seats in Congress as they do, but a distinctly and persistently minority party cannot endure in power. Moreover, the citizens’ reaction to protracted minority rule will eventually be explosive. This country, despite Trumpian inclinations among a minority of misguided citizens, among whom are a smaller fraction of white supremacists and isolationists, is already profoundly ethnically diverse and moving inexorably further in that direction. It is a trend that cannot be stopped. The forces drawing the disadvantaged and disaffected from around the world to the freedoms of expression, religion, and movement still embedded in the United States and to the economic opportunities of a free and dominantly capitalist economy that responds to innovation and scientific progress are too powerful as attractive forces for foolish stretches of wall building or nativism to impede them. Moreover, we need the desire of the most productive among the world’s peoples to come to the United States to reach for their farthest star and contribute to our vitality and intellectual progress.
These forces will be dominant and the Republican thought leaders will realize that the Trump aberration, despite the number of votes he achieved, is unsustainable. People find it hard to say: “I have been wrong. I have been deceived. I have been mean-spirited. I have been stupid, anti-democratic, self-absorbed. I recognize I have been a deplorable”. Their children may realize it, however, despite parental indoctrination. “You’ve got to be carefully taught” said Oscar Hammerstein II in his lyrics for the Broadway musical “South Pacific” in response to the racist opposition to a pending intermarriage.
In any case, Trump will tweet and try to disturb the new president and his administration. He will retain some loyalists who are buffoons and probably diagnosable with a psychiatric examination of the ilk of: Giuliani, Stone, Flynn, Bannon, and a few other extreme right-wing aberrations in the print press and television, but they will always be around. No, Trump is gone as a potential candidate, but he will be around in the same way that neo-Nazis, the Klan, and neo-Confederates have been around for decades and the “alt-right” has reinvigorated these evil views with a new emphasis on including gender identity among its hateful rhetoric of racism, antisemitism, and anti-internationalism. They will not, however, govern. There are too many good and sensible Americans acting as a counterforce.
Some will argue I am an aging Pollyanna. No, I think I am a democrat with the belief that autocracy is not sustainable. It is too inimical to the needs of people, to their aspirations, and to their idea of a good and meaningful life.
Written December 2020
Addendum
It is now September 1, 2024, and was I wrong! Incredibly, Trump is the Republican candidate for President. The Republican Party is now the Party of Trump: mean-spirited, deceitful, unscientific, inhumane, crude, self-interested, book-banning, flaunting the rule of law, scheming to interfere with elections, disinterested in the prosperity and safety of the American people, indifferent to our critical international alliances and attracted to autocrats who Trump sees as role models. In effect, an election of Trump would represent the return of the barbarians.
Most of those Republicans who called Trump unfit for office have been subdued and now support him. Trump has no interest in being President, but he has four driving forces: his ego, his spitefulness, his need for revenge, and his need to prevent the Department of Justice from convicting him of yet more felonies and instigating an insurrection. If he wins, he fires his legal pursuers and establishes Justice as an arm of the Trump vendetta during his administration. Remarkably, the presidential race is a toss-up at this writing. Even if he loses, it means we have perhaps 40 percent of the population who are supportive of what Trump represents: psychopathy and not rationality and decency. If elected, our President would, for the first time, be a convicted felon and convicted woman molester and under indictment for organizing an insurrection to undo a fair election.
He will lose the popular vote as he has twice before but the Electoral College vote is too close to call at this time. Let us hope that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can carry the day as well as a significant win in the down-ballot candidates for the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state offices.
A Democratic victory would also give the Republican Party a chance to reorganize and reestablish a two party system, a requirement for our democracy, in which the victory of either party is not a threat to freedom of thought and action: one a somewhat right of center and one a somewhat left of center party. This goal would allow reestablishment of compromise between two principal competing political philosophies.