Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Calls on GOP Voters to Dump Trump in 2024: ‘More Democrats Than Republicans Will be Elated’ if He Runs
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board called on Republican voters on Monday to dump former President Donald Trump ahead of his expected announcement Tuesday that he’s running for the White House in 2024.
The Journal remarked that “more Democrats than Republicans will be elated because they see him as the easiest candidate to beat one more time.”
The outlet noted that Trump’s motivations to announce despite advisers pushing him to announce after the Dec. 6 Georgia Senate runoff are “to try to clear the Republican field of potential competitors, especially Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin, who have shown they can win in competitive states” and “to get ahead of a possible Justice Department indictment.”
While the editorial board noted Trump’s accomplishments as president, including “taxes and deregulation, energy security, judges, the Abraham Accords, correcting illusions about Iran,” they pointed out “his character flaws —narcissism, lack of self-control, abusive treatment of advisers, his puerile vendettas—interfered with that success.”
The Journal implied that, considering President Joe Biden’s “unpopularity,” Trump’s comeback would be successful if he had conceded in 2020 rather than promote the Big Lie that he won. Election denialism, said the board, is a losing issue as proven in last week’s midterms, where the GOP underperformed and the Democrats kept the Senate.
The outlet stated that “[e]ven if by some miracle Mr. Trump won, he would have a hard time filling an Administration with top-notch people. He could only serve one more term. Republicans would be nominating an immediate lame duck.”
The editorial board also warned that an indictment of Trump “could help him again” as “[t]hat is precisely what Democrats want as they hope Republicans renominate him.”
At the end of the day, said the Journal, the buck stops with the voters:
The real restraint on Mr. Trump has been the voters who gave him his chance in 2016. Then they checked him by ousting a GOP House in 2018, defeated him for re-election, and last week trounced nearly all of his hand-picked candidates in swing races.
The GOP, and the country, would be best served if Mr. Trump ceded the field to the next generation of Republican leaders to compete for the nomination in 2024. If Mr. Trump insists on running, then Republican voters will have to decide if they want to nominate the man most likely to produce a GOP loss and total power for the progressive left.
