'I am not playing along ...Trump can't win': noted conservative insists all is lost in 2024

In a column for the National Review likely to infuriate some readers, longtime conservative contributing editor Andrew McCarthy claimed that -- based upon a recent poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal -- he sees no path to a Donald Trump presidential victory in 2024 if he is the Republican Party's nominee.

Under a blunt and to-the-point headline that stated, "Why Trump Can't Win," McCarthy noted that he is not a "Trump-hater" and claimed he has a well-documented history of defending the ex-president -- but he is not willing to go along with the conservative pack and put on a happy face about Trump's prospects in 2024.

To make his case he pointed to the former president's dismal Wall Street Journal polling numbers and then added, "What the poll 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."

According to the conservative journalist, he doesn't expect a Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) insurgency to knock Trump out of the running and that, as far as he is concerned, Trump has already hit his "high-water mark" with potential voters.

Getting to the point, he explained, "I realize that this is the point where I am supposed to nod to the remorseless fact that nothing in life is certain. Accepting that caveat, I am supposed to concede that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, anything could happen, so of course he has a chance to be elected president again. For their own very different reasons, Trump diehards and Democrats insist that we grant this admission, intended to admit the rest of us into their national suicide pact: Sure-loser Trump gets nominated, then barely compos mentis Biden romps to a second term."

To which he added, "No, I am not playing along."

"I concede only that we cannot say with certainty who will be elected president in November 2024 — or even who the nominee will be for either party. That said, I am as certain as I am writing this that Donald Trump will never again be elected president of these United States," he insisted.

Pointing out that he stuck with the former president in 2020 after two impeachments, McCarthy stated he personally "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," he elaborated before apologizing, "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)."

"This has nothing to do with whether you thought Trump was a good or bad president. It is about recognizing — now, before it’s too late — that he will never be president again," he wrote before concluding, "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."

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