One is “as stale as a month-old crust of sourdough.” The other is a flash in the pan with three strikes against him. As I’ve been saying for many months, neither Loser nor MoRon will be the nominee. That’s very bad news for the #KremlinPunk — and a serious problem for Biden.
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“Voters, however, become contrary when told that the game’s outcome is known in the top of the first inning. Hence what G.K. Chesterton called the game of “Cheat the Prophet”: People listen politely to explanations of what is inevitable, then make something else happen.
“The 2024 Republican nomination question was supposed to be: Could anyone harpoon the Great Orange Whale? Who knew that he would harpoon himself, repeatedly? Or that DeSantis, playing Captain Ahab, would pay Trump the sincerest form of flattery by imitating his persona as an unhappy warrior? The nation is dispirited by the prospect of an all-too-familiar binary choice (between Joe Biden and Trump). Republicans might soon recoil from another: between Trump and DeSantis. Both candidacies are brittle.
“Trump, as stale as a month-old crust of sourdough, is running to win the 2020 election. His crybaby crusade might cause even his star-spangled supporters to wonder how to square their proclaimed love of the nation with their hero’s insistence that it is so saturated with corruption that his landslide win could be erased without a peep from courts. Including some with his — how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless judge — appointees.
“Trump’s self-harpooning includes expressing contempt for Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, because she refuses to endorse him, even though he alone, he says, is responsible for her election. And he is too grand to appear with rival candidates at events, perhaps even the Aug. 23 debate in Milwaukee.
“In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan, who was not considered the inevitable GOP nominee, made only eight Iowa campaign appearances, spending a total of 49 hours in the state (according to Steven F. Hayward’s “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980”). And Reagan skipped the Des Moines Register’s Jan. 5 debate, which 58 percent of Iowa voters watched. Voters do not dislike inevitabilities more than they dislike politicians who seem to feel entitled to special dispensations. Reagan’s post-debate support plummeted from 50 percent in November to 26 percent a week before the caucuses, which he lost to George H.W. Bush.
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“DeSantis, after nearly two months of intensified exposure to non-Floridians, resembles a political Edsel. That was the new car model that debuted to much fanfare in 1957, backed by Ford’s marketing might. It expired in 1959, becoming a byword for disastrously misreading consumers. DeSantis is running hard to be president of Iowa, or of that minority of Iowans who will vote in the January caucuses and think Trump is ideologically squishy (e.g., regarding wokeness) and insufficiently abrasive (e.g., regarding gay rights).
“The Republican nomination contest is accelerating, as is Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the latter underscoring the stakes of the former. During Spain’s civil war, a rebel general boasted that he had four columns marching on Madrid and “a fifth column” in Madrid, meaning supporters of the army’s insurgency. Vladimir Putin’s fifth column is not in Kyiv but in the Trump-DeSantis faction of the Republican Party.
“Putin has two hopes for a less than completely mortifying rescue from his Ukraine blunder. One is the election of Trump, whose frivolousness about national security complements his weakling’s admiration for a bully. Putin’s other hope is the election of DeSantis, who says (or said, before retreating when criticized) Russia’s attempt to erase a European nation is a ‘territorial dispute.’ And whose pandering to Trumpkins prevents him from denouncing House Republicans who are as eager to abandon Ukraine as they would have been to abandon Czechoslovakia in 1938.
“A New Hampshire student, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that followed Trump’s incendiary harangue and disrupted the certifying of electoral votes, asked DeSantis last month whether Trump “violated the peaceful transfer of power.” DeSantis’s less-than-courageous answer: “I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day.” Good grief. He wasn’t anywhere near Gettysburg in July 1863 and had nothing to do with the moon landing in July 1969, but that does not preclude him from having thoughts about these events.
“Political prophesy is optional folly, but: There are not enough Republicans, in Iowa or the nation, enamored of the snarling contest between Trump and DeSantis — their competition to see who can despise the most American defects — to nominate either of them. Which is grim news for President Biden.”
– George F. Will, 7/15/23. Disclosure: The columnist’s wife, Mari Will, is an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.).
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