The National Review came out swinging against former President Donald Trump on Tuesday when it issued a “firm, unmistakeable, no,” to his 2024 campaign announcement.
Simply titled “No,” the op-ed authored by the National Review editors argued that while the former president enjoyed many accomplishments in his first term, including the appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices and the degradation of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East, he simply has too much baggage to pull off a 2024 win.
“To paraphrase Voltaire after he attended an orgy, once was an experiment, twice would be perverse,” the editors began. “A bruised Donald Trump announced a new presidential bid on Tuesday night, an invitation to double down on the outrages and failures of the last several years that Republicans should reject without hesitation or doubt.”
Despite the editors’ appreciation for what the former president accomplished — which they humbly admit having underestimated after opposing him full-throttle in 2016 — they ultimately believe that his administration came with far too many downsides to warrant another go-around, from the constant rotation of cabinet officials to the loss of Republican power in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. On the issue of the 2020 election and the former president’s “Stop the Steal” efforts, the editors gave no concessions and charged that Trump engaged 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.”
The National Review also blamed the dismal results in this past midterm election on the former president’s choice of candidates, citing it as evidence that he will not be able to deliver a victory over Joe Biden in 2024.
“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 editors wrote.
While the editors understand that conservatives rallied around Trump in 2016 and 2020 due to the excesses of progressivism, they urged Republicans to strongly consider the consequences of supporting him in the primary should other alternatives (they do not say who) appear. They also do take issue with the former president’s age (he will be 78 years old) and the fact that he will only be eligible for a single term.
“The primaries won’t present a choice between Trump and progressives with calamitous priorities for the nation, but other Republicans who aren’t, in contrast to him, monumentally selfish or morally and electorally compromised,” the editors concluded. “It’s too early to know what the rest of the field will look like, except it will offer much better alternatives than Trump.”
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