'Bewildering loser' Trump scorched by conservative for refusal to step aside

In a blunt-talking column for conservative National Review Online, Donald Trump was strongly advised to step aside and let a new generation of Republican lawmakers vie for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination to avoid another humiliating defeat.

What occasioned the column by senior editor Charles Cooke was the former president's assertion at CPAC on Saturday that, until he jumped into politics, the Republican Party was "...ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots, and fools.”

As Cooke sees it, Trump's attack on the party that embraced him will continue to haunt all involved and does not bode well for the future as he continues to weave a path of destruction.

"This was not an offhand comment. Increasingly, Trump likes to point to Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and even Ronald Reagan as examples of what has historically been wrong with the GOP — as well as a warning of what the party will become again if any of the other candidates for the Republican nomination prevail in 2024," he wrote before later adding, "As for the deployment of 'Reagan Republican' as an insult? Suffice it to say that if that’s where we are now, the world is truly upside down."

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Defending the specific targets of Trump's attack -- former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), ex-Gov Jeb Bush (R-FL) and longtime campaign adviser Karl Rove -- Cooke wrote "let’s assume for a moment that Trump is correct, and that, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush were, indeed, squishy conservatives. What, exactly, is this supposed to tell us about [Florida Gov. Ron ] DeSantis, or about anyone else whom those people have praised?"

As Cooke views the future, a presidential nomination for DeSantis or Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin would bring back unaffiliated voters Trump has driven away.

"In 2021, Glenn Youngkin won a majority of independents in Virginia. In 2022, Ron DeSantis won over hundreds of thousands of Florida voters who had not backed him in 2018. Are we really to assume that these achievements represented black marks against those figures?" he wrote. "If we are, I’m starting to understand why, despite all the evidence that it isn’t working, Trump continues to behave as he does — and why, on each of the last three times he has attempted to compete in American elections, he has proven himself to be such a bewildering loser."

You can read more here.