What should we do in response to this inevitability? My answer is simple: We should pick one of those alternative candidates — the one who is closest to one’s own views and who has a reasonable chance of winning — and vote for him. If there is a tension between our preferences and how things are unfolding on the ground, we should acquiesce to how things are unfolding on the ground. If, as in 2016, the field is crowded and split, we should help to uncrowd it by coalescing around the non-Trump candidate who seems to have the best shot. And if we don’t like the alternatives other than as a means by which to beat Trump, we should make our peace with that in pursuit of the lesser of two evils. In some quarters of the American Right, I have observed a tendency toward what might best be described as “De-Ba’athification” — that is, toward the purist, almost epidemiological desire to reject any political candidate who can in any sense be contact-traced back to Donald Trump or to his presidency. As it was with Iraq, this approach is profoundly mistaken, for the most likely alternative to the Republicans who coexisted with Donald Trump is not some slate of immaculately conceived neophytes; it is more Donald Trump.
In the more immediate term, conservatives who wish to see Trump retired in 2024 ought to stop talking about him all the time, in favor of building up other politicians who are engaged in active controversies right now; they ought to think more seriously than they have about why Trump rose to prominence in the first place; they ought to explore what Trump failed to do with his time in office, and how someone else might improve upon it; they ought to get into the habit of talking to their neighbors, friends, and co-ideologues about why a third nomination would be a terrible idea; and, above all, they ought to concentrate on the issues that conservatives care about — inflation, wages, education policy, abortion, zoning, the courts, energy production, immigration, and the scourge of race-and-gender-obsessed identity politics — and make clear that they care dearly about them, too.
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