Republican primary voters have a choice to make. They either make trump the nominee and lose to Biden again, or they make someone else the nominee and lose to Biden again but by a huge margin.
Somewhere between a third and half of Republican voters are hardcore Trump loyalists. In a hypothetical scenario in which someone were to challenge Trump for the nomination and actually win it, Trump would absolutely tell these people not to vote for the usurper in the general election, assuming he wouldn’t mount a third party challenge just for the sheer vengeful nihilistic thrill of doing so, which is in turn another hell of an assumption. And if either of theses scenarios were to play out, the Republican party would be wrecked electorally, for years and possibly decades.
Which is why nothing like this — short of some accident that removes Trump from the scene — can happen. Trump is going to be the nominee, which is probably going to be an electoral disaster for the Republicans. It’s true that people in general are growing very tired of his act, but people in general don’t pick the Republican presidential nominee: the madding base does. And stopping him from getting the nomination — assuming that doing so is even possible, short of spectacularly extra-legal interventions — would produce an even bigger electoral disaster.
It’s enough to make a cat laugh. Still, the ultimate danger here is that if a legitimate election is all but guaranteed to be a disaster for an authoritarian anti-democratic political movement, then the obvious solution to this conundrum remains obvious.
All Republicans can do now is hope that the DOJ somehow puts him behind bars.
