In the era of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become hilariously, utterly blind to the consequences of its transformation from conservative leaders to Trump cult bootlicks, toadies, and ball-washing yes-men. They whistled past the graveyard in 2018 right up to a colossal congressional and down-ballot ass-beating on Election Day, but the real future they face is almost unimaginably bad.
Donald Trump is locked in his now-tiresome rage spiral as economic, foreign policy, and moral failures of his crapulous administration mount. The endless, wearing cycle of “fail, lie, deny, ragetweet, lather, rinse, repeat” is an ugly, constant whine in our lives.
Democrats are caught up in the 2020 race for the nomination, full of passions for candidates, ideas, and issues that won’t matter in the general election next November. Trump is still in a position to win due to their usual campaign ineptitude and the lack of a superstar candidate with the talent of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
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Forget 2020 for a moment, though, and contemplate the grim future of the GOP’s 2024 field.
Today’s Trump party is filled with young, ambitious men (and a few women) who both live in terror of offending this thin-skinned President, and have bought into the idea that there is some underpinning force to Trumpism beyond Trump. You can see it in their relentless jockeying for his approval, their grotesque, self-abnegating efforts to be loved by the Donald without publicly embracing all the things about him that are killing the GOP with voters.
You see, they know that Trump and Trumpism represents an electoral cancer, leaving the GOP with older, dumber, and whiter voters in a shrinking base, aging and raging all the way to the actuarial graveyard. In some kind of Underpants Gnomes political theory, they hope they can win the Trump base while simultaneously convincing Hispanic, African-American, and women voters that their ass-kissing of Trump was just an act.
Good luck with that.
Trump owns the GOP brand and voters won’t forget that the 2024 Republican field, as Trump’s eager enablers, spent the last few years proclaiming Trump’s ass tastes like honey and his farts smell like a field of spring flowers. These men never hesitated to talk tough in private, but strapped on the kneepads and kowtowed in public. The Republican brand is now defined by outrageous cruelty, overt white nationalism, and pussy-grabbing, porn-star screwing boorishness.
Those problems are baked in the cake, and since damn near every currently seated Republican has lacked the courage to stand up to his howling mob of gibbering Fox monkeys, you own them now. They’re yours, for decades. Try washing that stink off.
Most of these folks—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, and Mike Pence, to name a few—are demonstrably smarter than Trump (but then again, so is my toaster) and imagine a path to the presidency.
The error the 2024 candidates are already making is that there’s any conservatism left in the conservative party. Limited government? Nope. Trump is rapidly expanding the power and capacity of the state, deregulation flummery aside. Fiscal discipline or reform? In the face of record debt and deficits run up by President Free Money? Hardly. Constitutional fealty? Elephant, please.
What’s left? Ragey grievance politics against duh elites and duh media. It’s a mirror image of every Bernie Bot SJW and cliche of the liberal mainstream media. They’re nihilists now, a Karl Hungus party that isn't about anything but is constantly angry about everything.
There are three 2024 scenarios that Republicans pretend they won’t face, but that represent the further decline and fall of a once-great party of conservative ideas.
First, the clues have been there all along that the real 2024 primary will be between Donald J. Trump, Jr. and everyone else. It’s becoming more obvious by the day; the Trump princeling has been on the road doing fundraising and political events for Republican candidates, he’s a favorite of the friendly friends at Fox & Friends, and his new book, Triggered, is coming out soon. He is fluent in the language of whining, dickish grievance-mongering, which has replaced modern conservatism.
This erudite tome is considered one of the most consequential and powerful books on conservatism since… oh, who am I kidding? Expect the usual pastiche of large-print, sub-Fox-level agitprop screeching in a slim volume that will be sold in bulk and appear on tables at garage sales within the year, spines intact. Whether the GOP wannabe 2024 field knows it or not, it’s DJTJ’s opening shot for the 2024 nomination.
For GOP candidates who think they’re going to finesse this one somehow, or blow up Trump Jr. in 2024, may I remind you of the hell of 2016? This time, the cult you fear so much will listen to its leader and support the dynasty. Trump’s royal fantasies won’t wait, and no matter how much any other GOP candidate has polished Donald Trump’s knob in the past years, he’ll throw them under the bus for his spawn.
The second 2024 headwind comes in the scenario of a Democrat actually winning in 2020. The 2024 Trump Party candidate will not only face an incumbent Democratic president, but one who was specifically elected on a referendum against Donald Trump and his philosophy and record. Caught between the pincers of winning the Republican primary and competing in the general election against the Democratic nominee, every single one of these candidates will spend the year before the election posturing and posing as the sole heir to Donald Trump’s legacy.
Making the pivot to the general election won’t just be difficult; it will be laughable. Imagine trying to make the jump from “I would let Donald Trump dry hump my wife in broad daylight if he would tweet something nice about me” to the era of “Trump has passed and I will lead a Republican party as it seeks to bring all Americans together as one to face the great national challenges ahead of us.”
Listen, guys. If you’re that flexible try out for the Olympic men’s gymnastics team and leave politics to the rest of us.
The final (and by far the worst) is the possibility—remote, but ride with me for the purposes of this black comedy Gedankenexperiment—that Trump loses in 2020 and decides to run again in 2024. With his firm grip on the cult, it’s not unlikely that he would run again to keep up the grift and to keep the steady drip of ego-stroking rally crowd heroin flowing into his veins. He would continue to do his rally-and-ragetweet strategy, getting older, weirder, and worse on every axis, but who’s gonna tell Grandpa Ranty it’s time to move to a home upstate?
When the GOP was a party, this could have been addressed. Now that it’s a personality cult and a dynasty, y’all are stuck with him.
