Donald Trump has a Plan to Win the Republican Nomination that Could Sink the GOP in 2024

Donald Trump's plan to win the Republican nomination is pretty obvious, and it may further damage the GOP in 2024.

Trump expects that at least six to ten Republicans will challenge him in the primaries including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former Vice-President Mike Pence, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Ted Cruz, former MD Gov. Larry Hogan, and Sen. Tim Scott, to name but a few. For Trump, the more the merrier. Trump believes that he still controls a third of Republican voters and recent polling seems to support that.

New York Times: "The exact number of Republicans who remain dedicated to Mr. Trump is imprecise. Several of the party’s pollsters have estimated it could be between one-third and 40 percent of their voters. An NBC News poll this month showed that 30 percent of Republicans said they supported Mr. Trump more than the party,...

According to AP VoteCast, which interviewed more than 94,000 participants in the midterm elections, 66 percent of Republicans said they considered themselves supporters of the Make America Great Again movement,..."

With six or more competitors, Trump knows that his base would be enough to win most primaries and eventually the nomination. The former President also understands that much of his MAGA base is comprised of what Hillary Clinton termed the "deplorables;" the white Christian nationalists, climate change deniers, QAnon followers, the anti-vax folks, and the stolen election, deep state conspiracy theorists. A motley crew perhaps, but a sizable chunk of today's GOP.

To hold on to this group, and fend off challengers, Trump will move even further to the right in the coming months. He will welcome more mainstream Republicans to join the race, but he won't allow any of them to poach his MAGA base. You can already see signs of his strategy forming. In the last week, Trump has promoted oddball QAnon nonsense on social media and dinned with a white nationalist [Nick Fuentes] and a rapper known recently for his anti-semitic views [Ye, AKA Kanye].

Rolling Stone: "Donald Trump spent his morning promoting QAnon-affiliated posts on social media, boosting a theory that holds that a global cabal of pedophiles control the world and pursue immortality via extracting juvenile hormones."

As the contest heats up next summer, Trump will roll out the usual GOP plans to complete the wall and magically cut taxes without increasing the deficit, but he will also continue to signal his base of "deplorables" that he's not abandoning their more warped beliefs. And the advantage that the former President has over DeSantis, Pence, Pompeo, et al is that everyone expects Trump to say and do offensive things; it's who he is. Meanwhile, his competitors will be held to a higher standard if they have any hope of attracting mainstream Republicans and independents.

In the end, Trump fully expects that his MAGA base will be more energized to vote in the primaries than supporters of his more vanilla competitors. And, it's quite possible that he doesn't much care if his nomination sinks any chance the GOP might have of winning the White House or Senate in 2024. It's his party until he willingly passes the torch.

#politics #Trump

By: Don Lam & Curated Content