RUTHFULLY YOURS

DeSantis is now the favorite among many Republican voters and almost all conservative commentators for the Party presidential nomination. Such passionate advocates seem to have missed two essential points:

• In a rigged electoral system, no Republican candidate, not even DeSantis, can be expected to win a national election. DeSantis cruised to victory in Florida because, as governor of the state, he had the means and the authority to ensure a clean election. But he would be helpless against a massive crime organization, aka the Democrat Party, which effectively controls the electoral infrastructure, the physical apparatus, the paid loyalty of election workers, and the federal agencies that oversee the process. If the system is not repaired and made answerable to the people, there will never be a Republican president again.
• Should DeSantis run in 2024 and lose — which is increasingly likely in the current adulterated circumstances — the sequel would be devastating. Florida would be at the mercy of the next gubernatorial race since DeSantis is a unique political figure and could not be readily replaced. Additionally, DeSantis himself would have become a kind of displaced person, neither an American president nor a state governor. An invaluable political talent would have been sacrificed to the untutored enthusiasm of his supporters. If the American republican experiment is now in dire straits, it would then be expeditiously destroyed. A slim hope will have become an utter disaster.

Trump has obviously made his mistakes. As Alicia Colon writes on American Thinker, “There is no question that Donald Trump is a flawed human being like most successful businessmen.” She goes on: “Whenever I read the complaints from Trump haters, it’s all about his personality, his tweets, his misogynism, his sexist remarks, blah, blah, blah. This is infantile, high school criticism that has no place in political punditry.” Similarly, as J.B. Shurk writes, everything that the establishment class “has fraudulently peddled against Trump—that he’s imperious, mercurial, uncouth, unworthy to hold office, a Russian spy, a warmonger, an insurrectionist, a ‘denier,’ a criminal—is nothing but an endless barrage of psychological warfare directed against MAGA voters.”

Trump’s flaws of character — and who is without them — do not alter the fact that Trump is an indomitable fighter and the most successful president in recent history. His ego is concomitant with his strength; the two cannot be separated. To turn against him now and indulge in gutter journalism, righteous schadenfreude, or in considerations of realpolitik largely because a number of his chosen endorsements succumbed to a corrupt and rigged electoral machine is a sign of conservative defeatism and, in some cases, of self-enamored mobbing. We were quite happy with his major and unprecedented policy successes: making America energy-independent, restoring the manufacturing base, revisiting trade deals to benefit American workers, creating a surge in employment and prosperity, laboring to put a stop to illegal immigration, appointing conservative judges, rebuilding a depleted military, and establishing renewed American pre-eminence on the international stage. Now we are ready to consign him to the golf course. How quickly gratitude turns to recrimination.

Rather, this would be the time to rally the troops and to work indefatigably, as I argued previously, toward cleaning up the Augean Stables that are now the condition of American politics. Trump is still “the Donald.” Republicans need to get their act together instead of unintentionally justifying the betrayal of the RINO Machiavellian elites and foolishly consolidating the Democrat campaign against the very nation they presumably hold dear.