The party should be entering a new, more discretionary phase in its relationship with Trump. The best argument for him once he was nominated in 2016 was that he was the only alternative to Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 that he was the only alternative to Joe Biden.
That isn’t the case now.
Republicans could have their pick of a plethora of alternatives in 2024 who don’t personalize everything, who don’t create a haze of chaos and melodrama around everything they do, who don’t routinely turn on people who work for them, who don’t put their interest in vengeance over the interests of the party, and who don’t carry more baggage than the underbelly of an Airbus A380-800.
There are about 20 other potential Republican candidates and none of them, not a single one, has lost an election to Biden before, and none of them has to expend any energy trying to explain away such a defeat to the broader world or to him or her self.
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