When Donald Trump was getting ready to announce his 2024 candidacy for president, he undoubtedly expected the response to be deafening—but in a good way. Ticker tape parades thrown in cities across the country. Evangelical ministers devoting entire sermons to him. Throngs of people lined up outside of Mar-a-Lago to see him in the flesh and thank him for his service. Even the haters and losers would agree that this was the best thing to happen to America in a long, long time.
Unfortunately for the former guy, that’s not exactly how things have panned out. Instead of being graced by displays of overwhelming admiration, Trump has had to resort to threats to try and get Republicans to endorse him. Instead of calling Trump “God’s gift to man,” men of the cloth are running for the hills. And instead of seeing in him someone who could easily beat Joe Biden and help the GOP retake the White House, conservatives are terrified another Trump nomination will doom them at the ballot box come November 2024.
“I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate,” Eric Levine, a top Republican fundraiser, told Politico. “He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser…And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.” As Levine and other Republicans have noted, a big, not-at-all unfounded fear is that a crowded GOP field for the party’s nomination will lead to a vote-split that could benefit Trump greatly. And according to Politico, that’s led to some uncomfortable conversations.
Some of these top Republicans are meeting with potential candidates and telling them that if they want to run, they should by all means do so—but that they should also be prepared to drop out well before voting begins in order to make sure that the GOP puts their best candidate forward against Biden…Leading donors who have spoken with the top-non-Trump contenders like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence say that all get it, that none of them are looking to play the spoiler and are aware of the dangers to the party, if not the country, of a Trump Redux.
“Does Mike Pence really want his legacy to be that he got four percent of the vote and helped [elect] Donald Trump?” asked one adviser to a major Republican giver. “Same goes for [Mike] Pompeo, same goes for [Nikki] Haley. They want to get traction, of course, but there is a higher motivation to pull out more quickly based on what it would mean for the country and the party.”
Yet if the Haleys and Pompeos of the world end up running, they are doing so to win, and despite what they tell donors now, once they start getting a warm reception on the stump it can be hard to stop.
For his part, Trump appears to understand that more candidates can only help him, hence outright encouraging Haley to run. (The exception, of course, is Ron DeSantis, whose potential candidacy appears to petrify the ex-president, hence his suggestion this week that the Florida governor groomed teenage girls while working as a history teacher at a Georgia high school.) Another not insignificant problem facing Republicans who want to keep Trump as far away from the White House as humanly possible? That they don’t know whom to throw their weight behind to beat Trump in the primary. The latest polling puts DeSantis neck and neck with the ex-president, but as Politico notes, the governor “is untested on the national stage, and there are persistent whispers that he can be clumsy about the normal give-and-take of politics.” While a former Trump adviser told the outlet that “the great hope for DeSantis is that he breaks through quickly, and that convinces everyone else there is no path,” it obviously remains to be seen whether that will happen.
As for a general-election matchup, Republicans may fear Trump can’t beat Biden—and if 2020 was any indication, he can’t. But a Washington Post–ABC News poll released this week suggested it would be a toss-up, with 48% of registered voters saying they would go for Trump versus 45% for Biden—a gap that falls within the margin of error. Which is obviously worrisome from a fate-of-humanity perspective.