National Review Senior Writer Begs GOP to Reject ‘Insane Mess’ and ‘Proven Loser’ Trump For 2024
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
Enough with that loser, says a National Review Senior Writer about former President Donald Trump’s flirtations with a 2024 re-election bid.
“No to Trump in 2024” is the title of senior writer and former editor Charles C.W. Cooke’s op-ed strongly urging Republicans to move on from Trump, and he pulls no punches in declaring the former president a poor choice to head the ticket ever again.
“Why on earth would conservatives chose that guy?” wrote Cooke, denouncing the idea as “absurd, risible, farcical, outré” and “a punchline, a mania, the preserve of the demented fringe.”
Trump, Cooke continued, is “an extraordinarily selfish man” and while he understood those who supported some of his policies, it was “quite another [thing] to put yourself through four more years of the man when you don’t have to.”
The Republican presidential primary is not a case of having to pick the “lesser of two evils,” Cooke argued, like could be said about the 2016 or 2020 general elections, and even that justification “was a great deal stronger before Trump refused to accept, and then tried to overturn, the results” of the 2020 election.
Cooke described his ideal 2024 candidate as “[a] Republican who is likely to win — and who, if he wins, will not be an insane mess.”
“And please don’t tell me that the GOP should choose Trump again because ‘he fights,'” Cooke continued, listing other potential Republican presidential contenders who would come without “Trump’s baggage, his torpidness, his ill-discipline, his self-indulgence, his abject disregard for our constitutional order, or his pathological, unyielding, surrealistic dishonesty.”
Republicans no longer had to accept Trump’s “lunacy” in order to get policies they liked, wrote Cooke. “Embrace the glorious future, in which you are no longer obliged to tie the agenda you favor to a hand grenade.”
Also disqualifying in Cooke’s view, was that Trump not only lost to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but that he “disgracefully lied about it for a year,” “inspired a riot in the service of that lie,” and spent the last two years “issuing unhinged press releases” and “attempting to undermine” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
“The man lost,” Cooke concluded. “He’s a loser. It’s time we picked a winner for a change.”
