Conventional wisdom has been telling us that Donald Trump has pretty much locked up the Republican nomination for president. That is understandable, because the Trump MAGA base has virtually eliminated the traditional Republican Party and replaced it with a personality cult unable to think independently, realistically or rationally.
Republican lawmakers and potential candidates understandingly fear the power and the loyalty of Trump supporters, and feel they are trapped with no escape route, and thus have no choice but to leap on the Trump bandwagon.
But conventional wisdom is not always right and is most certainly wrong now when it comes to Trump's likelihood of capturing the party's nomination. He will have a tough time hanging on much longer. His unprecedented faults and vulnerabilities are showing more and more, and getting worse as time rolls on.
Two things happened this month that clearly display the ways Trump is losing his mojo. His easy victory in the Iowa caucuses proved to his supporters that he would be rolling all over his rivals in the coming primaries. Indeed, he beat Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley by about thirty points each. Nobody came close to the ex-president.
But a closer look reveals that he barely received half of all GOP votes (51%). It was not a rout at all. Virtually half of GOP voters failed to vote for Trump, despite Iowa being considered a very favorable state for the ex-president. Could it be some of his charm is starting to fade?
Several days later, Florida Governor DeSantis dropped out, a wise decision, as he was not connecting with voters. He had started off as a reasonable alternative to Trump, someone with similar views but more like a traditional Republican and more electable... He failed to live up to those expectations.
Trump's GOP opponents are rightfully frightened of his MAGA base. Just s before the New Hampshire primary, the Republican field had been whittled down to two: Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. Looking at the polls, and because nearly every other important Republican had endorsed him, Trump's nomination seems inevitable. But it isn't.
Nikki Haley in recent months has been rising in the polls (which surely played a part in DeSantis's decision). Trump won the New Hampshire primary handily, but hardly in a rout. Haley managed to get 43% of the GOP vote. Independents, college-educated voters and Republicans unwilling to dismiss Trump's craziness and legal peril, preferred Haley, even without a lot of enthusiasm.
After years of Trump dominating headlines, saying outrageous things, and pushing everyone's buttons, could it be possible that GOP voters are tiring of the Donald's headline-grabbing antics? Trump had been gradually losing some of his magic after barely winning in 2016. Every subsequent election after that has been evidence that MAGA supporters, intensely loyal as they are, were not persuading many others to jump onto their bandwagon. Trump underperformed and failed to help the GOP in every subsequent election: 2018, 2020 and 2022.
On a daily basis, more and more of the hateful, angry, bullying parts of his disturbed personality are coming out. None of this incoherency is new, of course, but it is getting noticeably worse.
Whether it be hateful, angry, bullying, confused, bitter or incomprehensible, Americans are seeing the disturbing signs of Trump's legal pressures, insecurity, old age, and likely, the onset of dementia.
We've all seen it get increasingly worse, as he has had trouble distinguishing between Biden and Obama, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, World War II and World War III, among others. He insists President Biden and Democrats are Marxists, Communists, and pro-terrorist. He has declared that wind turbines off the coast of the US "are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before." He tells us that he won all 50 states in 2020, and he will punish anyone that disagrees with him, and has plans to be a dictator, whether for one day, or longer. "I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far," he told us delusionally. "Nobody's ever been more successful than me. I'm the most successful person ever to run."
As his mental decline becomes more obvious, as his legal woes accumulate (91 felony charges), as his anger and bitterness increase, Republicans might be forced to second-guess their loyalties to this disturbed ex-president and find a way to get him off the ballot. If they don't, the Democratic Party will sail to victory in November. Few Republicans would look forward to that, and will likely seek some way to prevent it. They have to, or there will be a Democratic rout on election day, and it would be hard to find a Republican who wants that.
Sorry, conventional wisdom, you're wrong on this one. Trump has already peaked and is slipping fast. His chances of spending another term in the White House appear more unlikely every day. Assuming the American people are paying attention to what they see and hear, Donald Trump could more likely next year to be sleeping in a cell than in the White House.
Such an outcome would be a much-needed and timely reprieve for democracy, justice, decency, the American people, and the world. And not a moment too soon.
