Millions of President Trump’s hardcore fans are grieving at his now very obvious loss for reelection, and that’s fine. It’s a tough pill to swallow, made no less difficult by Trump’s own refusal to concede.
But the sooner his supporters accept it, the sooner they can move on and prepare for the next fight. It’s always around the corner.
The presidency is settled, but the Senate is not. Republicans have a lock on 50 Senate seats in the new Congress. They need at least one of the two that are still up for grabs in Georgia. Winning one of those races is the only way to check the Biden administration and stop whatever weird trans-, non-binary, check-your-privilege nonsense that House Democrats are dying to push through.
With a Republican Senate, the 2020 race will have been a wash, more or less.
Believe it or not, the 2024 race for the White House has already begun anyway. And now it’s time for another very large pill: Trump running again is not a good idea. And that’s coming from someone who wrote a book titled Grow Up and Vote for Trump.
That’s not to say he should have no role in the campaign. His backing would be indispensable in the primary. But we’ve run the Trump experiment, and the results are in.
People like what he stood for and what he did for the economy. The public was willing to forgive many of his shortcomings. In the end, voters, for good or for ill, have had enough of the roller coaster. They decided that Trump should no longer be president.
Fortunately, Trump has already changed the Republican Party, and thank goodness for that. His impact cannot be overstated. Gone are the days of the GOP’s undying loyalty to the Chamber of Commerce and the conservative wing of the party that loves sending our young men and women to foreign countries for their little war games. The next Republican presidential nominee, whoever that is, will need Trump’s supporters, and they’re not going to want to go back to any of that.
Fortunately, again, there are a host of high-level Republicans well-positioned to pick up where Trump left off — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, to name two.
Trump came out of nowhere, exposed a lot of our country’s problems, and was even good enough to fix a few of them. His presidency was a success. Now it’s time to move on.
