2024 Elections

With the Republican Party set to coronate Donald Trump as the party's 2024 presidential candidate this week, conservative columnist Bret Stephens of the New York Times suggested conservatives withhold their support and see what the Democrats do now that President Joe Biden is on shaky ground with some members of his party.

In a column on Saturday, Stephens claimed a second Trump presidency portends disaster not just for the country, but for the GOP which will be saddled with a president believing he has no boundaries.

As Stephens explained, there are three major reasons the return of the ex-president to the Oval Office is a recipe for disaster, warning, "Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in."

According to the conservative, a resurrected Trump will "energize the left" which could lead to massive civil unrest and possibly deaths — particularly if he tries to make good on his threat of mass deportations.

ALSO READ: Give me the stuttering old man over the racist, sexist, lying fascist

Stephens painted a possible scenario by writing, "Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue."

Add to that, he wrote, Trump may not come into office with a mandate, leading to more congressional gridlock which will be blamed on Republicans and come back to haunt them in the 2026 midterms.

"The sorts of things that Republicans liked the most about Trump’s first term — the tax cuts of 2017, the picks for the federal bench and the Supreme Court, the almost successful effort to overturn Obamacare — would be dead on arrival if Democrats keep or take power in one chamber or the other," he predicted while also noting the ex-president will hurt down-ticket Republicans.

"Legislative paralysis alone won’t paralyze Trump. If anything, it will make him that much more dangerous," Stephens warned before bluntly stating that this time he won't have level-headed advisors like "Jim Mattis, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster or John Bolton" around to quash his worst instincts.

"I expect that a second Trump term will mainly be shambolic, angry, divisive, not catastrophic but profoundly corrosive," he wrote before stating, "If this is considered a conservative win, I wonder what a loss looks like. As for conservatives who have said they’d rather take their chances with a second Trump term than with a second Biden (or Harris) one, they might keep an open mind to see if the Democratic convention yields a younger, moderate, pragmatic nominee."

You can read more here.

With the November presidential election just months away, a large swath of Donald Trump allies already have in place plans to contest results in multiple states which will lead to chaos before Congress attempts to certify the election results.

Noting that the former president's supporters approached contesting his loss in a haphazard way following the 2020 election that culminated in an assault on U.S. Capitol, the Times is reporting they have a detailed roadmap for pushing back this time should Trump lose again.

As the Times' Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti report, "The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee," adding, "unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system."

RELATED: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

The Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell made it clear this week that conservatives feel they'll have to push back at the election results, bluntly stating, "As things stand right now, there’s zero chance of a free and fair election. I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”

The Times report notes, "Democrats, civil rights lawyers and even some Republicans say that the threat is clear: Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week."

Republican election expert Ben Ginsberg warned, "The fundamental principle of the system — the rule of law, the finality of the results, the ability to challenge an election but then accept the results if the challenges fail — is being stood on its head”

You can read more here.