Fox News Legal Analyst Pans Trump 2024 Bid: He ‘Can’t Win’
Conservative legal pundit and Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy called for Republicans to abandon the notion that Donald Trump could ever be elected president again.
McCarthy wrote a column for National Review to explain “Why Trump Can’t Win” and that Trump’s political momentum is fleeting. He assessed that Ron DeSantis will jump into the Republican primary eventually, and it’s “way too premature” to say Trump kneecapped the Florida governor’s candidacy when he hasn’t even declared yet.
“The governor is clearly doing everything a politician in his position would do to prepare a formal candidacy, but the best case for him as president is that he’s inclined to solving problems rather than tweeting about them,” McCarthy writes. “His best move is to finish the ongoing legislative session and rack up more accomplishments. That will take a few more weeks.”
McCarthy assessed that DeSantis’ announcement is bound to be a game-changer, and if he pulls ahead of Trump when he does, “that would be a hopeful sign that Republicans still have a self-preservation instinct.” Even though he acknowledges that Trump currently polls better than DeSantis, McCarthy argued that the ex-president has already hit his ceiling while DeSantis has untapped potential.
From the article:
What [The Wall Street Journal] fails to convey is that there is no potential of upward climb for the universally known former president. Donald Trump cannot win a national election.
It is in the interests of the media–Democratic complex to obscure this fact for now because Democrats desperately want Trump to be the Republican nominee. But the question for every Republican is not “Trump or DeSantis?” Nor is it, “How would you vote in a matchup between Trump and Biden?” It is: “Regardless of whether you would vote for Trump in a matchup with the Democratic nominee (likely Biden), do you believe Trump could beat the Democratic nominee in a national election in which the vast majority of voters will not be Republicans?”
McCarthy declares, “I am not playing along” with the scenario craved by Trump diehards crave, where he wins the GOP nomination and “barely” defeats President Joe Biden. He underlined this by pointing out that he voted for Trump and defended him from scrutiny in the past despite his “incorrigible flaws.”
I can’t do that anymore. I believe Trump should have been impeached on an array of high crimes and misdemeanors in 2021 (not just the ill-conceived, politicized “incitement of insurrection” article pushed through by House Democrats), and then convicted by the Senate and thus disqualified from future public office. I have to answer for having rationalized Trump’s unfitness for office, to the extent that his post-2020-election enormities were merely a more blatant demonstration of that unfitness, which was obvious all along (and that other commentators were savaged for having the temerity to notice). Still, my argument now comes down to what it came down to before the 2020 election: The greatest peril for the country is four (more) years of Democrats in power. The difference this time ’round is that Trump’s nomination would guarantee that this peril becomes our reality.
Trump won an Electoral College majority by a statistical miracle in 2016, earning just 46 percent of the vote in what was essentially a two-person race against a historically bad Democratic candidate who still beat him by 3 million votes nationally. Since then, all he and candidates associated with him have done is lose — which means that all they’ve done is help Democrats win.
With Trump’s zaniness and Tourette tweeting undermining his administration’s policy successes, Republicans lost 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms, handing the chamber to the Democrats (though a thin GOP Senate majority slightly grew — Trump would take care of that for the Democrats in 2020). With the advantages of incumbency, Trump nevertheless got beaten in 2020 by another terrible Democratic nominee — a senescent one who barely left his basement to campaign.
McCarthy goes on by lamenting the GOP’s “desperation” and “delusion” by entertaining Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. He maintains his core argument, however, that Trump is the Democrats’ “chief enabler,” that he’ll “never be president again,” and that all he does in the grand scheme of things is cost Republicans winnable elections.
Of course, if Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Trump, his base will mau-mau the GOP’s expanded legions of Trump naysayers, arguing that their refusal to “come home” will only result in Biden’s reelection (this will be quite rich coming from Trump enthusiasts who, like their hero, will not commit to supporting any Republican nominee other than Trump). Yet, for most Republican naysayers, the Trump base’s tantrums will fall on deaf ears. Trump is no longer hypothetically unfit to be president; he has been empirically proven to be unfit. Most rational people are not going to vote for an unfit candidate. They won’t think of it as, in effect, electing the Democrat. They will rightly think of it as rejecting a political system that puts them to a choice between two unfit candidates…
The point is not how Trump is polling today against DeSantis and Biden. It is that he cannot win a national election. That is why Democrats are working so hard to lure Republicans into nominating him. The question is not how you personally feel about Trump, or what you think about the accomplishments of his presidency. The question is whether you are content to have Democrats unilaterally rule Washington. That’s what a Trump nomination would guarantee.
