And Then There Were None

Still from Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976).

2/ clear that the bottom has fallen out of DeSantis’s campaign. Given how badly he’s doing there’s a good chance he won’t even run. Unless Trump dies there’s every reason to think he’ll be the gop nominee and there won’t even be much of a primary campaign at all in early 2024. pic.twitter.com/CajhxyJ33O

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 16, 2023

Welp.

The Haley story is from today's Washington Post, and not quite as interesting as it may at first sound. The story is that she has three fundraising committees, a regular presidential campaign committee, a "leadership PAC" from before she got into the presidential race, and a "joint committee"; the joint committee donated almost $3 million of its $4.4 million haul to the other two, and Haley's people counted that money twice when they reported to the press that they'd raised over $11 million in their first six weeks when they'd actually raised more like $8.3 million, and effectively $6.8 million, since the leadership PAC money can't be used for the campaign.

I don't believe that's a crime, if they did it on purpose, but it's pretty stupid either way. The main takeaway isn't even about that; it's about how when they boasted their six-week totals proved Haley was the favorite non-crazy alternative to Trump and DeSantis, they were wrong. They didn't raise nearly that much money, and there is no favorite.

So Trump's really got the nomination sewn up. He'll be able to devote all his time between now and the convention to sorting out his legal issues, the rape suit and the bank fraud suit, the campaign money laundering indictment, and whatever other indictments appear over the next months. He may have succeeded in destroying the Republican Party in its current iteration, as he bragged to RNC donors in Nashville yesterday

“Republicans were a party known for starting wars overseas, cutting Social Security and Medicare at home, and pushing mass amnesty for illegal aliens,” Trump told donors during the closed-door gathering, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by POLITICO.

Declaring that the “old Republican Party is gone, and it is never coming back,” Trump in Nashville urged Republican donors to help put him back in the White House through electoral strategies he once decried, like robust mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

though it's not clear that what it's been replaced with is a political party at all; as Thomas Edsall reports in Clausewitzian terms, they may have become a war party:

“On the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a November 2022 Politico essay, “How Political Violence Went Mainstream on the Right.”

Those joining violent political events like the Jan. 6 insurrection, Kleinfeld continued,

are more likely to be married middle-aged men with jobs and kids. Those most likely to support violence on the right feel most connected to the Republican Party. This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.

Of course for Edsall and Kleinfeld, Trump didn't do that, Democrats did, by "driving many people into the arms of the far right" with their relentless cancelculturing, forcing all the married middle-aged (white) men with jobs and kids into a kind of Sherwood Forest of social desperation.

I don't want to be overly sanguine about this, but I don't think these guys are going to do too well in the 2024 elections. One of the sources of Trump's appeal in 2016 that doesn't get enough attention is his success in that primary campaign in routing the normie Republican candidates, from J!E!B! and Walker and Rubio to Kasich and Cruz. Republican voters couldn't stand any of them, and that's how Trump got the nomination. They wanted that party destroyed, and they loved Trump for doing it. 

Now that that's finished, and all that's really left of the party leadership is the Trump lapdogs, as wan and undignified as Trump's opponents were in 2016, and I don't see how the married middle-aged (white) men with jobs and kids are going to get drawn into politics with that. I don't see very many of them getting drawn into war either; there can't be that many of them left over from January 6 who are willing to take the risks. The attraction to violence noted by Edsall is mostly directed to TV consumption, not action. And the culture war founders as their wives and kids really care about abortion rights and trans liberation. I really don't see what the party can do about it.