By Damon Linker The Week
I’m very much in favor of treating the conventional political wisdom with a healthy dose of skepticism, so I was eager to read a recent, short tweet thread from Nick Gillespie, an editor at large for the libertarian magazine Reason, asserting former President Donald Trump will not be the GOP nominee in 2024. That’s a dissenting line I expect to hear with increasing frequency as we approach the next presidential election cycle.
A defeated one-term president doesn’t often receive his party’s nomination after his loss. But Trump isn’t a standard presidential candidate. For one thing, he’s managed to forge a powerful and seemingly lasting bond with a sizable faction of his party’s voters. For another, he claims — and seems to have convinced an awful lot of Republicans — that he actually won the 2020 election. In that story, he’s a winner out for revenge rather than a loser who rather pathetically refuses to accept his own defeat.
Yet Gillespie isn’t buying it. In his view, Trump never came close to winning a majority of the popular vote; he’s damaged his brand further with his lies about election fraud in 2020; and his hold over the Republican base is waning.
