Think the 2020 presidential election was a disaster? You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! Think the Biden presidency is a travesty? Get ready for worse to come.
For the time being, former President Donald Trump is the clear leader in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Despite The Donald’s obvious shortcomings, most of the GOP faithful continue to hang their hats on him kicking Creepy Uncle Joe Biden and his despicable cronies out of the White House on January 20, 2025. Of course, the Republican nominee won’t be formally chosen until the last day of the Republican party’s party in Milwaukee on July 18th. But by that time, the handwriting will be on the wall. For the last half century, the party conventions have been just a raucous rubber stamp. The presidential nominees will have already been determined by the time the primary votes are counted on “Super Tuesday” – March 5th. And unless the Republican primary voters change their current course, the GOP nominee will be Donald Trump. The problem is, the track on which The Donald’s campaign train is rolling is on fire.
Everyone knows that former President Donald Trump is facing a raft of criminal charges which will be coming up for trial in the upcoming months. The Donald and his legal advisors have been doing their darnedest to get these criminal trials pushed back until after the 2024 general election. Presumably, their hope is that if Trump gets elected to the presidency, it will then be possible to delay the prosecutions until after his term in the Oval Office, leaving them four more years to do damage control, and get the current criminal charges and any that might crop up during his presidency shuffled off into oblivion without being tried. After all, if Trump does get re-elected he will take office as a lame duck the very moment he takes the oath. Barring a successful impeachment by the US House of Representatives and subsequent successful Senate trial, the country will be stuck with The Donald for better or for worse for another four years. Consequently, his political enemies will no longer have much motive for continuing to dredge up dirt on him despite the fact that the swamp in which all American politicians wallow is no doubt brimming with plenty of stinky tidbits.
But then last week, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon (a Trump appointee) threw a monkey wrench into the works. One of the criminal charges The Donald is facing pertains to improper possession and storage of classified information at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Trump’s legal team had sought to delay trial on this felony charge until after the 2024 general election, but Judge Cannon has now scheduled the trial before her to begin on May 20th, 2024 – after Super Tuesday but before the Republican convention. The optimists among us might hope that this trial will be a speedy one with The Donald’s criminal fate having been decided before the GOP meets to select its presidential nominee.
But I could never be accused of being such an optimist. I foresee that this trial will drag on through the convention, that the party revelers will duly nominate The Donald, and that Trump will become a convicted felon shortly before the November 5th general election. Thus, the GOP will be left without a viable candidate for the Presidency, which will then revert by default to whoever wins the Democratic nomination. Thus, the country will be plunged back into the divisive, chaotic morass created (or at least exacerbated) with Barrack Obama’s election in 2008.
Of course, the optimists among us might hope for any number of rosier scenarios –
- The Donald might be absolved of these charges and all the other criminal charges that have been brought against him.
- The Donald might win the general election despite being a convicted felon (does the Constitution actually preclude this? – I don’t really know).
- The Democratic nominee will be a sane, competent, moderate leader who can work together with Congress to implement a government the majority of Americans can rally behind – not Creepy Uncle Joe or Commie Kamie.
But as one of my old military leaders was fond of saying, “Hope is not a course of action, Lieutenant!” So what then might be a viable course of action for conservative voters to avoid this coming train wreck? It’s really pretty simple. Republicans need to nominate someone other than The Donald. Election fraud conspiracy allegations aside, Donald Trump has already proven he can’t beat Creepy Uncle Joe and Commie Kamie despite Joe being an obvious blithering, blustering, incompetent idiot, and Kamie being a functional illiterate whose popular support in the 2020 primary season never climbed into double digits. So if conservative voters have any hope of avoiding the coming disaster, we must nominate someone (anyone) other than The Donald. Love him or hate him, he’s a proven loser, and we can’t afford to lose this one. The field of Republican presidential candidates is filled with more viable options than The Donald.