Even Nikki Haley and Tim Scott now think Donald Trump is screwed
Back when everyone on television was still pretending that Donald Trump’s criminal justice system problems didn’t exist and that he was somehow a lock for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, we kept hearing about how also-ran candidates like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott were merely in the race to try to become Trump’s running mate.
Of course in the real world nothing works that way. Trump was always going to end up indicted by the DOJ, and in Manhattan (and in Fulton County for that matter), those trials were always going to take place well before the 2024 election, and Trump was always going to be looking at prison, not 2024. The reason so many hordes of Republican candidates have entered the 2024 presidential race is that, with Trump headed for the slammer and DeSantis self destructing, it’s looking like it could end up being a wide open field.
Of course these other Republican candidates have to be very careful about how to handle Trump’s indictments. Much as they’d like to ding Trump, they also don’t want to offend his base, because they want his base’s votes once he’s out of the picture. And of course they want to score cheap points with Republican primary voters by falsely accusing prosecutors of being in the tank for the Democrats.
But something has changed today. Suddenly Nikki Haley and Tim Scott are strongly condemning Donald Trump for having refused to return the classified documents. They’ve turned on him. These are opportunistic creeps who selfishly do whatever they think is best for themselves. So maybe they saw the new polling today showing that a whopping 80% of Americans think Trump is a national security risk in light of his indictment. Even 38% of Republican primary voters now think Trump is a national security risk – and that number will gradually climb a lot higher as this criminal case progresses and it starts to really sink in for everyone.
In any case, if you’re rooting for Donald Trump’s political downfall to happen quickly, even before he gets to prison, you have to take it as a good sign that the likes of Haley and Scott are already trying to stick a fork in Trump.
You don’t have to waste time debating about whether this means they’re “good” or “bad” or whether this means they’ve “grown a conscience” or “grown a spine.” These aren’t concepts that even exist on the Republican side. There is only selfish opportunism. And this Espionage Act indictment against Donald Trump is such a bodyblow, selfish opportunists like Scott and Haley are simply seizing the opportunity. You don’t have to give them any credit for condemning Trump, nor should you. But this is an undeniably good sign for our side.
