2024 Elections

On Monday morning, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) told the host of CNBC's "Squawk Box" that she would vote for DonaldTrump if he is the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, just moments before saying it would be devastating for him to be the nominee and that he can't win because of his legal problems.

Responding to her bizarre flip-flop, former RNC chair Michael Steele lambasted her for still campaigning for the nomination that he said she has no chance of landing while sucking up to the former president.

In the clip shown by MSNBC's Chris Jansing, Haley exclaimed, "I would support him [Trump] because I am not going to have a President Kamala Harris. We can’t afford that. That is not going to happen,” before admitting, "We can’t have, as Republicans, him as the nominee. He can’t win a general election. That’s the problem. We’ve got to go and have someone who can actually win.”

Asked for comment, the clearly exasperated Steele went off on a tirade.

'You know better than me trying to parse this bubblegum speak coming out of the mouths of these people," Steele began. "It's just banal attempts to sort of placate. It's frustrating because, do you want to be president?"

His voice rising, he continued, "Well you have to go through the guy sitting at 52 percent right now among the Republican base. Otherwise, get out of the race! Stop wasting our time! You know, if you're not going to take him on, then why are you in the game?"

Continuing in that vein he added, "Are you waiting for the justice system which you demonize and belittle and berate to do the thing you won't do? I mean, which do you want? You can't have it both ways. And the justice system is not going to deliver Donald Trump on your political platter -- it's just not going to work that way."

"The reality of it is, you either want the job or you don't. If you do, that means you're going to have to sound a lot more like [Ex-New Jersey Governor] Chris Christie than the way you're sounding right now," he explained.

Watch at this link.

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According to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, the Republican Party is headed for a reckoning in November of 2024 if Donald Trump is at the head of its ticket.

On Monday she wrote that there is a very real prospect that the face of the GOP will be a man who is not only under federal and state indictments but may already have been convicted and facing jail time.

And for that, she wrote, Republicans have only themselves to blame for not using his two impeachment trials and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as a reason to move on.

As she noted, in the 2020 election when he lost to now-President Joe Biden, moderate Republicans and independents refused to vote for him. She said having a criminal record is not going to make them flock back to his side.

"Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump," she wrote.

"They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him."

"Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out," she elaborated. "Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight."

She added that it will likely cost them a shot at the White House as well as hurting down-ticket Republicans hoping to reclaim the Senate and retain their slim majority in the House.

Writing, "If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position," she concluded, "Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned."

You can read her whole piece here.

Using his experience as a former Republican Party campaign consultant and his knowledge of aviation instrument flight rules (IFR), Rick Wilson made the case that the reported campaign "reboot" by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is headed for a crash that will doom his first foray into national politics.

In a series of tweets, Wilson claimed that DeSantis, who is collapsing in the polls, doesn't seem to understand why his campaign to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee is faltering.

As he sees it, DeSantis is "doubling down" on the very things that are hurting his bid for higher office.

He began by writing, "So there's a mistake that covers both instrument flying and politics. It's called 'chasing the needles.' That's what you're seeing now with the DeSantis campaign," before adding, "In instrument flying you use a display that shows you how high or low you are relative to the glideslope and how far left or right of the runway you are. A stable approach means you fly the glideslope down to the airfield. If you get off the glideslope or localizer here's both a temptation and a tendency to 'chase the needles" to make it work and get on track. This is a bad thing."

"DeSantis is recalibrating, trying to reset, rebrand, redo the last disastrous months. His campaign is chasing the needles," he continued before elaborating, "In my IFR training, I thought I could goose the plane on to the needles and save a bad approach. When you're under the hood (a view limiting device that makes you rely on the instruments only) it's not just hard, it's stupid. 'Go missed' and reset for real."

Getting to the point he continued, "But DeSantis can't and won't. He's doubled down and his dumb 'Nevuh Back Down' persona misses a fundamental of human behavior; correcting a mistake is a strength, not a weakness. He's off course, and instead of a real reset (firing the people who get him in trouble) he keeps trying to meme his way into the hearts of the post-alt-right natcons. "

"QED, his defense of the indefensible 'slavery had its good points' argument. He's chasing the needles into the ground," he concluded.

Reflecting on concerns about Donald Trump's trial date in a Florida courtroom where special counsel Jack Smith will attempt to make the case that the former president stole national defense secret documents and defied efforts by the government to reclaim them, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance acknowledged that it is very likely the date will get moved and then cautioned to expect a very long delay that could extend until after the 2024 presidential election.

At issue, she explained in her Substack column published on Monday, is the simple fact that federal judges like U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon have busy schedules and fitting in what is expected to be a month-long trial is no easy task.

As it stands now, the Trump trial is expected to begin in May of 2024 after the DOJ asked for a December 2023 date.

As Vance explained, finding a block of uninterrupted time won't be easy.

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"If Judge Cannon were to decide that... a delay in the trial date was necessary, it’s unlikely that would mean the trial would get pushed back a few days, or a week," she wrote. "That’s because federal judges don’t usually have big open blocks of time on their calendar."

She added, "Setting a new date would mean looking for open space on the Judge’s calendar. Trump’s lawyers said the trial would take months, but even if we go with the government’s more reasonable suggestion of weeks, a delay could easily move the trial back until after the election."

"While Judge Cannon may have deemed it unnecessary to consider the 2024 election at 'this juncture,' that doesn’t mean she won’t revisit her decision down the road and permit Trump to campaign instead of appear in court. But even mundane delays could derail the speedy trial the Special Counsel has worked so had to obtain here," she concluded.

You can read more here.