Editors at National Review Online urge Republicans to think again about giving former President Donald Trump another shot at the White House.
To say Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination is an understatement. He is above 60 percent in national polling averages and leads by roughly 30 points in Iowa. His lead is much narrower in New Hampshire, although the state, where Democrats and independents can vote in the GOP primary, is not necessarily predictive.
Trump feels inevitable, but nothing is settled until Republicans actually caucus and vote. They would be well advised to opt for one of the alternatives who are far and away better on the merits, more likely to win in November, and, if elected, more likely to deliver — free from the wild drama of a second Trump term — conservative results.
Trump’s defenders tend to dismiss the conservative criticisms of him as concerns about his “mean tweets,” or now, to be more accurate, his mean Truth Social posts. It’s true that his fulminations on social media are crude and ridiculous, but this isn’t the fundamental problem. Because he couldn’t bear to admit that he’d lost to Joe Biden in 2020 (after trailing him in every national poll), Trump insisted he’d won and did everything he could to overturn the result, including trying to bully his vice president into violating his oath and preventing and delaying the counting of the electoral vote. When a mob, fervently believing Trump’s lies, fought its way into the U.S. Capitol to try to end the count, Trump did little or nothing to try to stop it.
These were infamous presidential acts and represented serious offenses against our constitutional order. Nothing can justify them, and it’s wrong to simply pretend that they didn’t happen. It’s impossible to imagine Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, whatever their other flaws, engaging in such grotesquely selfish behavior injurious to our republic. On this basis alone, both are vastly preferable to Trump.
