Conservative editorial board obliterates Trump’s 3rd presidential pitch: 'Firm, unmistakable no'

16 November 2022

When former President Donald Trump officially announced, on Tuesday night, November 15, that he plans to run for president in 2024 and is seeking the GOP nomination, it was obvious that not everyone on the right would welcome the announcement.

The Washington Post, on November 14, had published an op-ed in which right-wing Fox News pundit and former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen implored Trump not to run and warned that he would “likely lose” in the general election if he received the GOP nomination. And prominent Republicans ranging from Sen. Mitch McConnell to author Ann Coulter have made it clear that they would much prefer Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a GOP presidential candidate in 2024.

The conservative National Review, founded by the late William F. Buckley back in 1955, is speaking out as well. In a scathing editorial published the night Trump made his announcement, the Review’s editorial board argues that Republicans “should reject, without hesitation or doubt,” Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The Review’s editorial board applauds some of Trump’s policies but quickly adds that

“the Trump Administration was chaotic even on its best days because of his erratic nature and lack of seriousness.”

“He often acted as if he were a commentator on his own presidency, and issued orders on Twitter and in other off-the-cuff statements that were ignored,” the Review’s editors recall. “He repeatedly had to be talked out of disastrous ideas by his advisers and Republican elected officials. He turned on cabinet officials and aides on a dime. Trump had a limited understanding of our constitutional system, and at the end of the day, little respect for it. His inability to approximate the conduct that the public expects of a president undermined him from beginning to end.”

The conservative Review editors stress that Trump has way too much baggage, including his “shameful attempt to overturn the result of” the 2020 presidential election.

“He didn’t come close to succeeding, but it wasn’t for lack of trying,” the Review editors note. “The episode ended with Trump, in a grotesque abuse of his powers, trying to bully Vice President Pence into unilaterally delaying or changing the count of electoral votes on January 6 and with an inflamed pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol while the president gave no indication that he particularly minded.”

The Review editors go on to note that despite the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, Trump “has maintained his grip on” the Republican Party and has “done all he can to force it to accept his delusions and lies about the 2020 election.”

“Trump’s success in imposing his fixations and candidate choices on the GOP played a large role in the GOP debacle in the midterms,” the Review editors argue. “This political backdrop raises the possibility that his low-energy announcement speech may be a damp squib. Certainly, GOP voters should give up on the idea that Trump is a winner.”

The editors continue, “After securing the GOP nomination with plurality support in 2016, Trump didn’t exceed 47 percent in either of his campaigns, winning in 2016 with 46.1 percent and losing in 2020 with 46.8. This is, to say the least, a very narrow electoral path, and one must assume that with all that’s transpired since 2020, Trump is weaker than in his first two races…. The answer to Trump’s invitation to remain personally and politically beholden to him and his cracked obsessions for at least another two years, with all the chaos that entails and the very real possibility of another highly consequential defeat, should be a firm, unmistakable no.”

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