Now that Donald Trump has authored Republicans’ third national electoral rebuke in four years, the party that collectively surrendered to his dangerous buffoonery has devised an equally brilliant strategy for emerging from its resulting marginalization: They’re simply going to “move on.”
“Republicans are ready to move on without Donald Trump,” said a Fox News column declaring the resoundingly re-elected governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, “the new Republican Party leader.” Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who campaigned for Trump in 2020, warned that “a true leader understands when they have become a liability.” And Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a member of the party’s vestigial rational wing, told CNN that the midterm election was Trump’s third strike and he was therefore out.
But politics ain’t baseball any more than it’s beanbag. Republican elites planning to “move on” to a glimmering post-Trump future should ask Atlantic City and Mike Pence how that turned out.
For all the party’s fond hopes of declaring the end of a disastrous era by op-ed or executive order, it has yet to secure the cooperation of at least one prominent Republican: Donald Trump.
A week after the election embarrassment was widely pinned on him, Trump showed precisely how much respect he had for his fellow partisans’ determination to leave him behind by traipsing into the political wreckage to announce his next presidential campaign. Underscoring the sense of shamelessness, the announcement coincided with the publication of a memoir by Pence, the vice president threatened with hanging at the hands of Trump’s supporters, and took place at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida compound where he could be federally charged with hoarding classified documents.