Republicans will regret a second Trump presidency for three major reasons: conservative

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.

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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."

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