What if Trump Drops Out?

I handicap the rest of the field.

What if Trump drops out of the presidential race? I don’t think this is likely, but let’s just say this latest indictment – and the other one likely to come – forces him to withdraw. Then what? Which of the remaining GOP candidates has the best shot at becoming the Republican nominee?

Conventional wisdom tells us DeSantis is the favorite but I’m not sure. He’s a little too strident, too lacquered. His go-go boots are a little too white, not that whiteness has ever hurt a Republican candidate. He’s too manufactured. The thing that Trump always had going for him was his authenticity. He’s an authentic, unabashed asshole. His supporters like him for “telling it like it is,” despite the fact that the diarrhea he extrudes from his Big Mac deposit box rarely resembles anything approaching the truth. DeSantis doesn’t have Trump’s boundless capacity for poo-spewing. He’s not, as he wants you to believe, “Trumpism without Trump.” There is no Trumpism without Trump because Trumpism is a unique Frankensteinian head cheese of narcissism, self-pity, grandiosity, and cruelty combined with a boundless enthusiasm for redirecting the truth to accommodate the reality of one’s choosing. That’s not Ron DeSantis, who certainly has the cruelty down pat but who more closely resembles Mike Pence’s starchy adherence to message discipline. DeSantis is a guy so bound to a script not of his own writing that he’s unable to deviate enough to interact with the ad hoc masses he will need to win the nomination. I think he’s this year’s Marco Rubio, the latest fluffed Floridian who will wilt in the national glare.

Who will fill this empty suit?

If DeSantis falls, as he must, the race truly becomes wide open. Tim Scott could rise in the polls as the Sunny D alternative to a field filled stuffed with the sneering and the vexed. The South Carolina senator isn’t yet well-known but he stands out for being both the Happy Warrior and the most visible Black dude in a crowded contest. (The Black talk show host Larry Elder is also running but he’s a novelty candidate - the Republican Cornel West). His race could be a big advantage for him, as I suspect most Republicans hate that their party is associated with white supremacy, voter suppression, anti-immigration, opposition to civil rights, book banning – in particular of books even tangentially related to race and sexuality – and a morbid fear of teaching actual American history to actual American students. Republicans may be looking for a candidate whose race gives them the moral licensing to continue acting like bigots. “How can our bigoted policies be bigoted when we voted for a Black guy?” Scott’s also a capital c conservative who is “a strong supporter of our traditional conservative values [and] believes that government should be protecting our right to religious freedom (Italics his). In other words, he’s a bigot, too, but his bigotry is the religious sort. As such, he’s more than content to go along to get along with the extremists in his party. He has to; he’s going to need them to have a real shot.

Nikki Haley is also a South Carolinian seeking to lay claim to the brass ring. Like Scott, she’s a minority (Indian, born: Nimarata Nikki Randhawa). Haley is a former governor who accomplished the enviable task of working for Trump without being tainted by Trump. She might be the only one. It probably helped that he stuck her at the UN in New York, where she managed to mostly stay out of his stench. Haley could have a shot if she figures out her message which, at this point, seems unfocused and pandering. She made some headlines with Jake Tapper during a townhall when she linked alarming rates of self-harm among teenage girls to their concern about playing sports with transgender athletes. I may not know much, but I feel confident saying that transgender girls playing basketball is probably not the most top-of-mind issue for a generation of teenagers besieged by the clusterfuck of social media, adolescent pressures, and existential dread over a environment Nikki Haley and her ilk seem hellbent on destroying – Haley was the UN ambassador who presided over the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the most significant international climate treaty in history. That fact alone may make her attractive to Republican voters who seem more than ready to welcome the Rapture.

Mike Pence ought to be the Rapture Republican’s candidate of choice. Devoutly and annoyingly religious, he should be the guy best positioned to woo the white Evangelical vote. The problem is, they hate him. Why? Because they think he played Judas to their Christ Donald. It’s the weirdest development in a Republican party no stranger to weird development; rather than support Pence, the man who most closely reflects their professed values, they’ve thrown their lot behind a man who pisses on each of the Ten Commandments on an hourly basis. A more cynical person might draw the conclusion that evangelical piety is no more than a tissue-thin façade masquerading a militant white Christian theocratic movement, and that Trump was the guy most willing to cosplay A Handmaid’s Tale with them in exchange for their unwavering and hypocritical support. But I’m no cynic. I think they just liked that he was mean to dark-skinned people. When Pence is too milquetoast for the Pat Robertson (RIP) set, that’s a problem. Are they really going to show up for Pence? NOt likely. These are the same people still holding a grudge against us Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion two thousand years ago. They’re unlikely to forgive Pence’s betrayal a couple years back.

One guy who could make some early noise is Vivek Ramaswamy, the telegenic entrepreneur who got in early and benefited from early TV exposure. He’s got a lot of potential: young, handsome, rich. Also, he founded an asset management company “opposed to the environmental, social, and corporate grievance framework.” I’m not sure what that framework is exactly, but being against the environment, social responsibility, and corporate regulations??? Baby, that’s catnip! He also wants to raise the voting age to 25. Why? I have no idea what the public rationale behind this idiocy is, but it’s no secret that young people tend to vote Democrat, so there’s no mystery as the private rationale. Abortion? He HATES it and is more than willing to accommodate Russia in their ongoing war with Ukraine. In other words, he’s your typical Tucker Carlson Republican, a dickhead with a checkbook. By that measure, he could go pretty far. On the other hand, his name recognition is low and he’s totally untested in politics. He could either be the Republican Pete Buttigieg* or the Republican Howard Schultz. At this point, it’s hard to say but I like his chances of a deep run.

Chris Christie has no shot.

Asa Hutchinson is also in the race. I forgive you if you didn’t know. The former governor of Arkansas and congressman, he’s this year’s Mitt Romney, a respectable country club Republican who says all the right things about unity and comity and low taxes and makes all the proper tut-tutting about the current state of politics, etc. etc. etc. Notably, he’s also the only candidate (so far) to call on Trump to drop out of the race after his latest indictment. In the pre-Trump years, Hutchinson probably would have been taken seriously as a respectable, middle-of-the-road statesman, but these days his song has about as much appeal for the rabid base as a Pat Boone record. How can any Republican who sounds reasonable about anything hope to get nominated? Answer: they cannot. Trump’s great accomplishment was to turn the tables on the political dynamic which, for so long, postulated that the Democrats were the grievance party. No more. Now it’s the Republicans who have become the long-suffering victims of leather-harnessed, God-hating throngs of wokes forcing them to bake birthday cakes for drag queens. They don’t want a guy in a sweater vest (I don’t know if Asa Hutchinson wears sweater vests). They want a frothy mouth-breather leading the pitchfork-wielding mob to Sodor, by way of Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua. They want spittle! And Asa Hutchinson is no spittler.

There are other candidates: the governor of North Dakota just got in – nobody knows why. Some guys named Ryan Binkley and Perry Johnson (? and ?) and the aforementioned Larry Elder. Maybe Ted Cruz will jump in at some point. If he does, he probably has a good chance, since he finished second to Trump last time he ran and he’s just odious enough to be appealing.

All in all, I would say it’s a pretty weak field. That’s not to say any of them couldn’t beat Biden, himself a pretty weak candidate. As always, it’s going to come down to a few hundred thousand people in a few states. Why it should be this way makes no sense to me but that’s the way it is, at least until somebody figures out how to get rid of the ludicrous Electoral College. That’s not going to happen, of course, because then the Republicans would actually have to become a party of governance instead of grievance. So we’re stuck with this lot. God help us all.

*I want to point out that I almost spelled Mayor Pete’s name right on the FIRST try. Bonus points to me.