A hypothetical question that’s rapidly becoming irrelevant
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Josh Marshall makes the obvious point that the GOP race for the 2024 presidential nomination is pretty much already a joke:
I assume Tim Scott is running the My Best Black Friend Proves I’m Not A Racist grift pulled off so successfully by the very late Herman Cain, the very first winner of his eponymous award, and then by the surgeon whose name I can’t remember and am not going to google who was handed some cabinet position by Trump. I have no idea what Nikki Haley is thinking, although all these people are megalomaniacs of course, so further analysis is probably pointless.
Jon Chait has an at this point probably pointless piece on whether Democrats and democrats should hope that DeSantis beats out Trump for the nomination. He gives a very diffident and contingent answer of yes to that question, on the basis of the following assumptions:
(1) While from a policy perspective the median outcome of a DeSantis presidency would probably be worse (more competence; less laziness), the tail risk of another Trump presidency would be higher, because Trump was beginning to learn how to actually use the levers of power during his first term, and he’s more unhinged and chaotic evil than DeSantis.
(2) DeSantis would be easier to defeat in the general election than Trump.
(3) The aftermath of another Trump defeat in the general would be a lot worse than defeating DeSantis, who is still young, has a future, and doesn’t want to risk going to jail.
FWIW, I think (2) and (3) are clearly correct, and am agnostic on (1).
In any event it’s all academic in the worst sense because short of an act of God or that extremely scary guy in the Harrison Ford scene in Apocalypse Now Trump is going to be the nominee, and Marshall is probably right that there isn’t even going to be a real GOP primary race.