DeSantis 2024?

[KLB]

I wonder if people are going to adjust to this new reality where the two parties don't totally align as conservative/liberal. There really seems to be a shift towards populist/totalitarian. Will it survive this election?

 

[indyblue]

I wonder if people are going to adjust to this new reality where the two parties don't totally align as conservative/liberal. There really seems to be a shift towards populist/totalitarian. Will it survive this election?

Along that vein:

Republican Loyalty and the Self-Delusions of ‘Never Trump’ - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

Presidential politics since Goldwater demonstrates the fecklessness of Republican Party turncoats. They are worse when the nominee is Trump.

spectator.org

The ‘Never-Trump’ Posture​

With this hardcore background to steady me, I have never had the faintest “Never Trump” impulse come over me these past nine years, even though, at the outset, I had mixed, unsettled views. If one longed for a candidate with the bearing and clarity of Barry Goldwater, or with the expansive, disciplined mind of Richard Nixon, to say nothing of graces we remember as Reaganesque, Trump was not the man.

Along with a majority of Republicans, I suppose, I’d have preferred a more orderly and polished version of the same candidate, if such a being could even exist, with roughly the same agenda of issues that the party’s presidential candidates, consultant class, and assorted big thinkers had long ignored or else tried too hard to finesse.

I didn’t exactly rejoice at Trump’s arrival but I didn’t mind it either. If he signaled a sudden re-shifting of allegiances in an otherwise static political landscape, a newfound connection with the concerns of voters my party had either neglected or taken for granted, and best of all an end to our reputation for milquetoast, “country-club Republicanism,” I certainly welcomed all that.

In fact, as the large field of 2016 Republican candidates narrowed to a few, I called myself a “Never Kasich” man when the grating then-governor of Ohio offered himself as the last establishment hope against a Trump nomination — foolishly and characteristically inviting the very outcome he was resisting.

Plenty of fellow conservatives I respect simply don’t like Trump, regard him as a “bad man” even if he might at times serve good principles, won’t take the tradeoff in order to elect a Republican, and even now still aren’t sure they can bring themselves to support him against Vice President Kamala Harris.

That’s just never been my take at all. I find qualities to like and admire in the untamed spirit of Donald Trump — his entertaining disregard of PC etiquette, his resilience, incredible stamina, and defiance against calumny and opposition, among other traits — and the impression is partly based, for what it’s worth, on a couple of brushes with him in 2016 and after his presidency. (As if to compel another vignette for this piece, we were introduced in Phoenix at the former residence of Barry Goldwater.)

Yes, we Trump voters could all do without the time-wasting rally riffs, the disconcerting asides, the kind of pointless conflict with fellow Republicans that in 2020 cost a Senate seat or two in Georgia, some of the Truth Social stuff, and other downsides on a lengthy list that anyone, and above all his own campaign advisors, could draw up

 

[DadSmith]