'Flopped and floundered': Columnist laments squandered chance to have benched Trump

While it's true that Donald Trump took advantage of a particular rot within the GOP that helped him rise to power, his presidency was not inevitable, argues columnist Jamelle Bouie for The New York Times.

"If Republican elites had coalesced around a single candidate in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, they might have derailed Trump before he had a chance to pick up steam," Bouie writes. "If Republicans had chosen, in the aftermath of the 'Access Hollywood' videotape, to fully reject his presence in American politics, he might have flopped and floundered in the November election."

If Trump had lost in 2016, there's not a guarantee that his reactionary politics would have disappeared, but the influence of his politics would have been much less powerful without him at the helm in the White House, Bouie contends.

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"As it stands, he had that power and stature, and there is now a reason the most MAGA-minded Republican politicians — or those with aspirations to lead Trump’s Republican Party — work tirelessly to mimic and recapitulate the former president’s cruelty, corruption and contempt for constitutional government," he writes.

Bouie acknowledges that it's not likely that Trump ultimately will be removed from any state ballot and that the only way to "move past" Trump once again will be at the ballot box. But at the same time, it's worth defending a "flawed" Constitution.

Read the full op-ed over at The New York Times.