So that was a whole lot of nothing

| 9:57 am EDT August 24, 2023
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I watched last night’s Republican 2024 presidential primary debate so you didn’t have to. If you didn’t watch, suffice it to say that you didn’t miss anything. Ron DeSantis managed to sound angrily defensive and flatly scripted at the same time, and couldn’t stop bobbing his head. Mike Pence is the same old charisma-less extremist as ever, and he still can’t take a firm position on Trump. The same exact thing can be said about Asa Hutchinson, and he even looks like Pence with a combover.

Then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s a completely unhinged conspiracy theorist lunatic who sounded like he was trying to do his best Alex Jones impression. The mainstream media (on the left and right) has tried so hard to make Ramaswamy a ratings-friendly figure. And yet he comes off as such an absurd joke that Saturday Night Live would have a hard time inventing him.

Just when the level of absurdity reached such a fever pitch that you began rooting for Chris Christie to clear the decks, he began attacking Vivek Ramaswamy – not by pointing out that Ramaswamy is a certifiable nutjob, but by… comparing him to Barack Obama? That was all Christie could come up with? Christie could have knocked Ramaswamy out of the race last night. But instead Christie went for the cheap and stupid insult just for kicks, and got nothing out of it.

Then there were people like Nikki Haley, who basically urged the other Republican candidates to stop talking so loudly about the fact that they’re all on the unpopular side of issues like abortion and climate change. Haley is also on the wrong side of these issues. She doesn’t want her party to be so obvious about it.

Then there was North Dakota Doug Burgum, who seemed entirely out of place on stage, as if he’d been randomly picked from the audience to fill an empty podium. He had such shades of John Kasich in 2016, you half expected Burgum to claim that his dad was also a mailman.

But even if these candidates weren’t each a joke in their own right, their candidacies would still be invalidated by the fact that they’re losing badly to a guy who’s getting arrested today. Donald Trump, who’s going to prison, is the most laughably non-viable “frontrunner” in the history of politics. And yet, even with about 50% of Republican primary voters saying they want anyone other than Trump as their nominee, those voters are declining to coalesce behind any of these other candidates, because they’re all punchlines.

Meanwhile Donald Trump was also busy making a punchline out of himself. In spite of some right wingers laughably claiming that Trump’s online interview with Tucker Carlson got 74 million or 100 million viewers, those are imaginary numbers. Trump sounded half senile and half dead during his interview, as he usually does in his public appearances these days, and even a friendly Carlson struggled to prop Trump up.

By the way, that’s the real reason Trump couldn’t even consider participating in last night’s debate. Trump comes off like a senile joke these days even when his hand is being held. If he’d been on that stage last night, with all those competing candidates who wanted to test the waters of at least taking some kind of shot at him, Trump would have melted. There’s no way Trump’s babysitters could have let him go on stage last night. Nor can they ever let him participate in any debate ever again, unless they want his “campaign” to immediately implode. But they can’t keep making up arbitrary excuses to hold him out of every primary debate, or it opens the door for Trump’s competitors to gain traction with messaging about how he’s gone AWOL and isn’t really running.

Not that any of it matters. None of what played out last night is going to change the fact that Donald Trump is going on criminal trial four times between now and the election, and will end up in prison. Everyone else who’s “running” is just waiting for Trump to get flushed down the criminal justice system toilet, in the hope the momentum will fall to them. Of anyone who’s serious about winning the 2024 Republican nomination probably wouldn’t even be in the race yet anyway.

If there’s a danger in any of this, it’s that once Trump’s viability gets drained to zero, it could create a vacuum for some outsider, some right wing public figure who’s maybe not even in politics, to step into the race at the last minute and inherit the nomination without any proper vetting. But for now the 2024 Republican primary race is all just a joke, both for Trump and for the other candidates. None of them are viable, and none of this is relevant.