Would nominating Donald Trump a third time destroy the Republican Party, leaving the field completely to hard left progressives? Peggy Noonan says that it would.
Here is her reasoning, from Chris Christie and the Republican Party’s Peril. :
If the party chooses Trump in 2024 it will mean it has changed its essential nature and meaning, and that it is split in a way that can’t be resolved by time. Republicans of the suburbs, of the more educated and affluent places, won’t agree to be the official Trump Forever Party. They just won’t. They will leave. Some will go third-party and try to build something there. Some will blend into the Democratic Party and hope they can improve things there.
Trump supporters will stay on in a smaller, less competent party. But they will, as time passes, get tired of losing and also drift on somewhere.
But there will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race, which, again, means the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone.
So the question right now isn’t so much whether you like Nikki or dislike Ron, it is: Do you wish the Republican Party to disappear as a force in American political history? If you answer honestly that you do, you will be leaving the entire national field open to the Democratic Party, where the rising energy will continue to be from the hard left. (The old boomer moderates of both parties are aging and leaving.) Do you want to abandon America to progressive thinking? If you do, you are no longer a politically involved conservative, but more like a nihilist. It’s all ugly and corrupt, blow it up. Like a young Antifa activist.
Read her entire column. Discuss.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In