The next Donald Trump is here already
All along I’ve been calling out the danger in merely assuming that Donald Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee. At no point has he polled at more than around 50% in that primary race, which proves that the Republican primary voting base is a much larger entity than Trump’s own base. And as it becomes more obvious that Trump really is going to prison, more of those primary voters are going to be concerned about basically forfeiting the election by nominating Trump anyway.
The concern all along has been that, with Trump laughably non-viable and the rest of the Republican field laughably weak, someone else will swoop into the race and inherit the nomination by default. The people on TV still want us to believe that Trump’s hold over Republicans voters is somehow magical and unique and permanent. But all you have to do is look around to see that that’s not the case.
Just look at the first Republican debate. Most of the candidates were middling duds. Then there was Vivek Ramaswamy, who came off like a complete joke. The guy has no idea what he’s talking about, and any sane reasonable person would immediately dismiss him as some kind of unhinged crackpot. So naturally, right wing Republican primary voters suddenly seem to be flocking to the clown.
Ramaswamy is a reminder that there’s always another Donald Trump coming down the line. Trump may have had a unique psychopathy. But there’s nothing unique about right wing losers being drawn to whatever wacko con artist who comes along and tells them that being losers makes them special.
While Ramaswamy is enough of a Sarah Palin level punchline that he’ll probably implode of his own accord, he’s an example of the kind of horrifying yet unvetted outsider who could end up landing the Republican nomination once everyone figures out Trump is going to prison. Imagine someone like Ramaswamy becoming the 2024 Republican nominee without his finances or personal scandals being vetted, because the media was too busy yelling “It’ll be Trump no matter what” to bother doing its job vetting the other candidates.
Come to think of it, the people telling us that Trump’s hold over right wingers is unique and built to last, are the same people who once told us that Palin’s hold over the right wing base was unique and built to last. The media always paints this simplistic absolutist picture of the right wing political figure of the moment supposedly having an unshakable grip on the right wing voting base, and it never works out that way.
Right wingers will dutifully worship a con artist for only as long as that con artist remains the best at selling the convenient lies that right wingers wish were true. Once that con artist has too much baggage to be able to keep selling the lie effectively, right wingers look for a new messiah.
Trump, senile, lazy, and buried in baggage, is only still in the default position because no one new has been able to come along and effectively sell the lie yet. If Ron DeSantis weren’t such an unsavvy dimwit, he’d have already taken that mantle, and no one would even be talking about Trump by now. The same goes for if Vivek Ramaswamy weren’t so cartoonishly bad at this.
To suggest that Donald Trump’s hold over the right wing voting base is unique or permanent in nature, is to ignore everything that we’ve seen play out before Trump and since Trump. There’s always another right wing carnival barker coming down the line, with less baggage and more enthusiasm. Vivik Ramaswamy is already the next Trump. It doesn’t matter that he probably won’t last a month. It proves that the door is wide open for someone else to slip into the Republican primary race and end up with the nomination – and that’s probably not a good thing.
