'Kid gloves': Analyst explains how Republicans rolled over and let Trump keep the throne

Former President Donald Trump appears to be sailing to re-nomination for the GOP in 2024, despite a litany of legal problems including four separate criminal indictments and a sweeping civil fraud trial in New York that could strip him of his business empire.

But it didn't have to be this way, wrote political commentator Molly Jong-Fast for Vanity Fair on Tuesday. Trump was in a more vulnerable position earlier this year, and his Republican rivals could have taken him down if they were serious about it. But they weren't.

"It’s worth reflecting on how Republicans got to a place where they are about to nominate someone who is a frequent flier in the American court system, facing 91 criminal charges spanning four state and federal indictments," wrote Jong-Fast. The principal issue is that "nobody in the GOP field ever seriously took him on — even after January 6, when Trump sicced his supporters on the Capitol. But they also failed to highlight that Trumpism doesn’t necessarily scale, as the 2022 midterms proved."

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As recently as this summer, Jong-Fast wrote, polls indicated fewer than two thirds of Republicans even wanted Trump “to run again.” And yet, "instead of making a case as to why they were a viable alternative to Trump, the non-Trump field treated the ex-president with kid gloves; they almost completely ignored the orange gorilla in the room and instead bickered with each other — so much so that they appear to have lost the plot entirely." Trump was simply able to ignore them all, not even attending the debates, and doing his own thing at rallies and on social media, as if he were already anointed the nominee.

Making matters worse, the GOP candidates didn't even put forward any vision of breaking with Trump; instead, they all ran on simply doing the same policies, but without any of Trump's charisma. This not only failed to make any of these candidates stick out, they further legitimized for voters that Trump's agenda itself was justified as a direction for the party.

"Instead of attempting to outline a vision of a kinder, gentler, more responsible, and less-racist Republican Party, they offered something that GOP primary voters clearly don’t want: Trumpism without Trump," concluded Jong-Fast.