Nine Trump challengers say they want to be the GOP presidential candidate. But the campaigns most of them are running say they don’t really want to win.
Much like most of the other Republicans supposedly taking on Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination, his former veep, Mike Pence, made a show on Saturday of lamenting Trump’s “unprecedented indictment by a Justice Department run by the current president of the United States and potential political rival.”
As if prosecuting Trump on its face is a bad thing, and Joe Biden the bad guy.
Well, here are a couple other things that are unprecedented:
Trump’s conduct, for one. After he left office, still refusing to concede defeat, he willfully retained hundreds of classified documents, including military plans of attack; stored them unsecured, including next to a toilet; showed some of these documents to visitors; and conspired with an aide to withhold the subpoenaed goods from the U.S. government. All of this is described in his own and his associates’ words and alleged in the criminal indictment for which he was arrested and arraigned Tuesday.
And then there’s the unprecedented spectacle of candidates choosing to run against Trump, but then not actually running against him. Sheepish deference to Trump describes most of the nine Republicans supposedly vying to prevent him from winning their party’s presidential nomination.
This phenomenon defies the very point of electoral politics: persuading voters why they should elect you and not some other person — an objective that usually gets pressed all the harder against a front-runner or incumbent. (Trump, who’s conned most Republican voters into believing he won in 2020, is in effect an incumbent as well as the far-and-away front-runner for the 2024 nomination.)
How in the world do Pence and the rest of these long shots — all but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis languish in single digits in the polls, and he’s 30 percentage points behind Trump on average — think they’ll overcome him without at least trying to persuade his supporters of the truth: The former president is manifestly unfit to be president again.
