Long before many rivals for the Republican party's 2024 presidential nomination have officially announced, Donald Trump is appearing to be the odds-on favorite at the top of the ticket even though his prospects for the general election don't look good.
In a column for the New Republic, analyst Jason Linkins suggested that Trump hasn't even hit his stride yet when it comes to campaigning and yet he is pulling away, primarily because his rivals refuse to use the wealth of ammunition he has provided against him.
As Linkins wrote, Republicans continue to sit on their hands while a twice-impeached former president surges ahead despite 34 felony indictments and the "dark cloud" of his inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 hovers over him.
Looking back, he wrote, "In 2016, the Republicans in the field allowed Trump to seize a surfeit of unearned alpha mystique by largely failing to retaliate — not with equal force, anyway — when he landed his crude and sometimes shocking blows. They treated him on the debate stage like an interloper with poor manners, and begged whatever referee happened to be standing by to please enforce the Marquess of Queensbury rules tout de suite, like a gang of gilded fops from some forgotten Molière comedy."
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History, he notes, appears to be repeating itself.
"This might be the reason that Trump — who’s not done much campaigning, doesn’t have a market-moving social media presence anymore, and demonstrated little kingmaking ability during the midterm elections — is somehow cleaning everyone’s clocks in the shadow primary," he continued before adding, "Trump lost the 2020 election; his attempt to hijack democracy makes him unfit to serve. This party is filled, stem to stern, with people who believe Trump is the rightful president. They have allowed a defeated president to take on the sheen of an incumbent, and the base — so far —is following these cues."
He added "... the scene is grim. Instead of capitalizing on Trump’s indictment by going in for the kill, Trump’s competitors are defending him," and then warned, "None of the rest of the field look like they’ll successfully reconcile their support for Trump’s stolen-election claims with their desire to supplant him. And so the most likely person to defeat Trump will, once again, be a Democrat."
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