Former President Donald Trump will announce his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday, and many Republicans are wincing. They point to his re-emergence and cringy attacks on successful and popular Republicans just before the midterms as the reason for the failure of the red wave to materialize. While I doubt Trump was to blame — the fix was already in, in the form of an overwhelming number of mail-in ballots that had been cast way before — that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this article.
And obviously, there’s no point in talking about winning future elections until we have a plan for neutralizing Democrats’ weaponization of mail-in and absentee ballots. That said, Trump’s early entry into the race could be robustly helpful to the good guys in the race for the White House. Here’s how it could play out.
As he has already made abundantly clear, Trump will be his own bad self throughout his campaign. If anything, he seems to have become even more abrasive than he was the last time he was on the trail. Good.
You see, the Left has so contorted and poisoned itself with Trump hate and has fixated on the man for so long and with such burning intensity, they are obsessed. And so long as Trump showboats and cavorts about, they will be transfixed. Trump’s rhetorical excesses are sure to be a focus for Big Media and establishment political operatives as long as his candidacy lasts. And if he wants to put himself out there this early in the game and draw all the slings and arrows, that’s his business. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Trump, it’s that he loves to fight.
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The thing to remember is that there is a lot of time between now and Nov. 5, 2024. A lot can happen. And while I maintain that Trump is a great American hero and I’ll vote for him if he is the nominee, I don’t think he will be the nominee. And that’s how his candidacy will be helpful to whoever ultimately is nominated: Trump makes any other Republican candidate look reasonable and eminently electable.
It’s true that Trump’s commonsense, America-first policies enjoy greater and wider approval than Trump himself. The man is so polarizing and such a turnoff to so many voters that they can’t even hear what his ideas are over their aversion to him. He represents nothing but a loud, rude threat to civility to many. And as such, he will be the face of the “far right extreme” to less politically aware voters, the type who only vote every four years.
Which makes the eventual Republican nominee look downright centrist — that elusive “third way” candidate everyone claims to want who can lead America back from the darkness of division and polarity. A Republican candidate who comports him or herself respectably will be all the fig leaf people need to vote for popular, commonsense, conservative policies while telling themselves it’s okay to vote Republican because it’s not the bad orange man.
There are several reasons why Trump might not be the nominee. He could lose the primary. Or he may have a health concern or other personal reason for not running. As I say, a lot can happen between now and Nov. 5, 2024. The race for the Republican nod will sort itself out, likely with someone other than Trump on the ballot. And if Trump wants to be the bad guy for now and make the eventual nominee look reasonable and electable by comparison, I say let him.
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