Column: If the GOP candidates won’t take on Trump, why run at all?
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.â€
As if prosecuting Trump on its face is a bad thing, and Joe Biden the bad guy.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
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.
It might not hurt for Trump’s lagging rivals to wrap themselves in the Gipper’s mantle. But it certainly won’t help.
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.
Why run if you won’t do what’s required to win? Some, it’s speculated, are aiming to be Trump’s vice president. Ask Pence how that worked out.
Democratic operatives worry about Biden’s age, his poll numbers and the contenders who might be losing their shot as the president runs again.
So wary are Trump’s “challengers†of offending his supporters that they can’t bring themselves to condemn him for the exceedingly credible allegations narrated in the indictment, or even to address the damning evidence. Instead they echo Trump’s own B.S., depicting him as a victim of special counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department, the FBI and ultimately Biden, who’ve somehow conspired to “weaponize†the levers of government, third-world style, to bring down a political rival.
“How do you beat someone if you won’t talk about them? How do you beat them if you won’t distinguish yourself from them?â€
So asked former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of just two truth-tellers in the Republican race, when he spoke Monday night during a CNN town hall. The other truther is former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, an ex-federal prosecutor who’s said, “It’s obviously a very solid indictment. The grand jury†— not Biden, not the Justice Department — “found probable cause for it.â€
Unfortunately, Christie and Hutchinson aren’t enough to take down Trump when the seven others are pulling punches.
Donald Trump is an abnormal candidate who must not be normalized in some run-of-the-mill Q&A with voters. Can CNN avoid the media’s 2016 mistakes?
Pence over the weekend ventured that the indictment was perhaps “the latest example of a Justice Department working an injustice.†You’d have to think he believes that — I don’t — to understand why Pence would attack and undermine the nation’s chief law enforcement institution rather than the man who not only allegedly purloined military secrets but also, as Pence has said, endangered him and his family on Jan. 6, 2021.
Before DeSantis as much as read the indictment, he tweeted, “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society.†Although DeSantis is daily the focus of Trump’s campaign snark, he’s led the defanged pack of Trump rivals in whataboutism, drawing false comparisons between Trump’s treatment by the Justice Department and that of Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.
The response of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who was Trump’s United Nations ambassador, is evolving, shall we say. She initially blamed “prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics†for Trump’s indictment. By Monday, she went so far as to say on Fox News that “if this indictment is true … President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.†Yet on Tuesday, she told right-wing radio hosts that, as president, she’d be “inclined†to pardon Trump if he’s convicted.
It was refreshing to hear a Republican like Chris Christie take on the lies and narcissism of Donald Trump in a CNN town hall.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott accused Biden and the Justice Department, without evidence, of “targeting and hunting Republicans.†For what it’s worth, back when prosecutor Smith took over the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, he looked at the evidence and dropped separate investigations of several senior Republican members of Congress for corruption.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum declines to ever name Trump when he campaigns; all he’s said is that Republican voters think the indictment against He Who Shall Not Be Named is unfair. At the opposite extreme, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, gets the prize for the most egregious pander to the MAGA base: He appeared outside the Miami courthouse where Trump was arraigned to reiterate his promise to pardon Trump on Day 1 of President Ramaswamy’s term.
Sure, Trump is innocent until proven guilty. But that’s in a court of law. It’s his political rivals’ job to argue in the court of public opinion — for themselves and against Trump, to try to change minds about the twice-indicted (so far) former president.
Maybe an anti-Trump message is unsellable to Republican voters. To many, it will be. But if the rivals won’t try, they should just limp away from this so-called race. That might not be unprecedented, but it would be welcome.
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