The writing has always been on the wall: Republicans will almost certainly rally to Donald Trump's side now that he's running for president again, even though they know he's a loser who will make their already unpopular party even more loathed. Sure, after Trump's long and boring announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night, pockets of Republican resistance remained, mostly in the form of milquetoast claims that better alternatives exist for the 2024 GOP nomination. The editors at the National Review even tried to make their rejection sound firm, running an editorial simply titled, "No." But of course the same group of people rejected Trump's run in 2016, only to become some of his biggest apologists over the next four years. We've seen this story before. We know how it ends.
The GOP's lingering wariness around Trump has little to do with the fact that he attempted a coup that resulted in a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. Instead, they're worried about how said coup is affecting the electoral prospects of Republicans. Midterm candidates who campaigned on Trump's Big Lie tended to lose their elections. Republicans now know that Trump's whiny lies about the 2020 election are a political flop. They also know there's no way Trump will talk about much else for the next two years. So they're worried.
