GOP 'risking a political wipeout' because it hasn't learned lesson about Trump: columnist

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.