These are ugly times for the former president.
There was last month’s infamous soiree, when Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago, with Ye, formerly Kanye West, the man whose fame as a rapper has been dwarfed by his antisemitic and racist declarations. Ye’s partner in shame, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, joined in the fun.
On Dec. 3, Trump sparked an uproar over one of his favorite lies — that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his personal social media platform.
Two days later, he delivered another lie, by denying he ever said it.
Trump’s hearty endorsement of Herschel Walker, the former NFL star, sealed Walker’s loss to U.S. Sen Raphael Warnock in the Dec. 6 Senate runoff in Georgia.
Walker is just the latest in a long list of Trump acolytes who flamed out in the midterm elections: Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania; in Wisconsin, Tim Michels; Nevada’s Adam Laxalt and Kari Lake in Arizona, among others.
Then came news that the House Jan. 6 Select Committee will soon release its long-awaited report that is sure to excoriate Trump’s handling of the Capitol insurrection.
Trump’s hits keep on coming. On Wednesday, the revelation that investigators have found more classified documents in a storage unit near Mar-a-Lago.
And last week Trump failed in his push for a special master to oversee the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into sensitive documents previously found at Trump’s Florida estate.
All that bad news rolled out after Trump’s “big” announcement that he would launch a third run for president in 2024. Even though party leaders and allies pleaded with him to wait.
Warning signs abound. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has not officially announced his own presidential campaign, but is widely considered Trump’s most formidable 2024 rival.
A new poll tells the story. In a one-on-one matchup, DeSantis tops Trump by 5 points in a Yahoo News-YouGov survey “among registered voters who describe themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.”
The national poll, which was conducted Dec. 1-5, found that 47% of registered voters preferred DeSantis as the presidential nominee, compared to 42% for Trump. That’s a big turnaround from a similar poll taken in mid-October, when 49% of voters chose Trump over DeSantis, with 37%.
Trump’s suit may be getting tattered and torn, but when it comes to the GOP base, he may as well be wearing a white top hat and tails.
That’s why recent comments from U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah are a timely shoutout to the GOP. No one is a more establishment Republican than Romney, his party’s 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
Romney is no friend to Trump, and unlike too many other GOP weenies, has not shied away from criticizing him.
But the Utah senator and former business owner is clear-eyed about Trump’s presidential aspirations. He notes that Trump still has vise-like hold on the party’s base.
“I think we’ve got, I don’t know, 12 people or more that would like to be president, that are thinking of running in 2024,” Romney said last week at a forum hosted by The Washington Post. “If President Trump continues in his campaign, I’m not sure any one of them can make it through and beat him. He’s got such a strong base of, I don’t know, 30% or 40 % of the Republican voters, or maybe more, it’s going to be hard to knock him off as our nominee.”
Romney concluded: “If he becomes our nominee, I think he loses again.”
The GOP establishment has figured that out, but will that truth ever filter down to the rank and file? Do they even care?
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist.
