How Trump’s indictment worries brought the GOP presidential primary 'to a crashing halt': conservative

Right-wing cheerleaders for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, from firebrand author Ann Coulter to the Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, view the Florida governor as the GOP's best chance to move on from former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Coulter, a former Trump supporter turned Trump critic, has been insisting that Republicans are "over" Trump and that he is "so done" in the GOP.

But The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson, a Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist, has a totally different viewpoint. In a November 2022 interview with The Guardian, Wilson predicted that Trump will crush DeSantis if the Florida governor runs for president — and that Republicans will ultimately "bend the knee" to Trump in the 2024 election.

Four months later, in an article for Resolute Square published on March 23, Wilson argues that Republican responses to the possibility of Trump facing a criminal indictment only underscore his unending stranglehold on the GOP. Wilson emphasizes that if Republicans were serious about moving on from Trump, they wouldn't be rushing to his defense over reports that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr. is moving closer to an indictment in connection with alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

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"As an anthropologist of what was once called the Republican Party and arguably the person deepest inside the twisted mechanics of Donald Trump's mind," Wilson writes, "the last week has been no surprise…. In the last seven days, the primary for the Republican nomination for president came to a crashing halt. First, all the wannabes, also-rans, and VP aspirants — looking at you, Nikki Haley — bent the knee, caught in the cruel political singularity of Trump's utter dominance of the MAGA base. Every single one of them took the weapon of Trump’s lavish and constant criminality and tossed it on the ground. They joined the hallelujah chorus in the House of Representatives and attacked District Attorney Alvin Bragg instead."

Wilson continues, "Ron DeSantis, dream date of the establishment, came closest to an attack, swiping at Trump with a mumbled line of 'I don't know what goes into paying off a porn star.' It fell so utterly flat with the Republican base voters, the MAGA online horde, and the mainstream media that he repeated it again to Piers Morgan on Fox Digital with the same…exact…intonation."

The former GOP strategist goes on say that DeSantis' efforts to show MAGA voters that he’s a "proud isolationist Putin-symp" aren't resonating with them. And Wilson adds that a recent Morning Consult poll showing Trump ahead of GOP primary voters by 28 percent is "bad news" for "an army of desperate conservative writers trying to build a post-Trump future."

"As (Trump) continues his deliberate, constant destruction of DeSantis," Wilson predicts, "the billionaire class will stop answering the phone — slowly, then all at once.… Trump will play the outrage card over and over. As he starts providing the networks with prepackaged rally content, even Chris Licht's CNN — perhaps especially Chris Licht's CNN, given its vanishing ratings — will flood the zone with Trump coverage once again. The spectacle is too much to resist. Trump will return to Twitter with an army of 89 million followers and blast his attacks, accusations, fantasies, grievances, and assorted word salads into the minds of his followers."

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Read Rick Wilson’s full article for Resolute Square at this link.