The bells are ringing. The lights are flashing. The sirens are wailing.
And, yes, the red flags are flapping. I mean, the danger is in plain sight for anyone who bothers to look.
And yet as Chris Christie noted as he bowed out of the Republican presidential primary race on Wednesday, no one is listening to his warnings about a second Donald Trump presidency. No one seems to even notice.
Not the GOP voters who will inevitably line up behind Trump. Not Trump’s so-called primary rivals who are clearly afraid to tell anything remotely close to the truth about the twice-impeached, 91-times-indicted former president, who also happens to have been officially judged an insurrectionist. You might want to add that he calls those imprisoned for the violent January 6 assault on Congress “hostages.”
Christie never had a chance to win in this contest. But he has spent months on the campaign trail anyway, saying to boos and jeers from Republican audiences that an unhinged Trump is unfit to be president. For Christie, a former Trump supporter and an admitted former Trump enabler, this has been both a truth-telling tour and an apology tour.
And now Christie states the obvious, “Anyone who is unwilling to say that (Trump) is unfit to be the president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.”
Christie has been there, having shamelessly endorsed Trump in 2016. But now he’s still trying to shame Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, the only semi-legitimate Trump opponents left in what passes for a primary race, for failing to take on Trump.
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So it is that on Monday, unless the polling is completely wrong, Iowa Republicans will take the first official step of 2024 toward reinstalling Trump as the GOP nominee for president/would-be dictator. Even though the temperatures are forecast to be around zero as Iowans gather at caucus sites, the weather can’t be as chilling as the prospect of a runaway Trump victory.
I don’t need to list all the times that Republicans could have walked away from Trump and failed to do so. I don’t need to list all the leading Republicans who stood by as Trump took over their party and reduced it to a platform for bigotry, hate, vengeance, lawlessness, demagoguery and now a full-on authoritarian threat to democracy.
But this Republican primary, coming nine years after Trump walked down the gilded escalator to announce his first presidential campaign, is probably the most damning example of Trump enablement.
Never Trumpers call it the pretend primary, and that’s exactly what it has been. You could also call it the hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil primary, in which would-be opponents have refused to actually run against Trump. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
If you watched the final pre-Iowa Republican debate, in which only Haley and DeSantis were on stage, you knew right away that Trump’s various, uh, foibles might not get a full hearing.
Jake Tapper, one of the CNN moderators, asked Haley whether Trump had the character to be president. Her scathing reply: “Well, I think the next president needs to have moral clarity.”
And then as if to clear things up, she added: “His way is not my way.”
And if Trump, who has refused to debate, had been watching — he was actually doing a fact-free, counter-programming town hall on Fox, which, by the way, had double the ratings of the debate — he would have had to laugh.
I mean, Haley’s non-answer came just days after Trump went full birther again, this time sharing a post from a far-right-wing website claiming that Haley wasn’t eligible to run for president despite the fact that she was born — although we haven’t seen her birth certificate — in South Carolina. But, the non-reasoning went, her immigrant parents weren’t yet American citizens.
You either laugh or cry, or if you’re Haley, you suggest some future president needs to have moral clarity. That future president might also want to read up on the 14th Amendment, and not just Section 3, which the Colorado Supreme Court has used to rule Trump ineligible for the Colorado ballot. Section 1 clears up the non-issue of Haley’s birthright citizenship.
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But it gets even worse. Conspiracy theorist and devout Trumpist Laura Loomer, who was also a failed GOP congressional candidate, tweeted an accusation that Haley had somehow manipulated the bad weather in Iowa. Seriously.
Meanwhile Haley and DeSantis, whose flailing campaign is a lesson in Florida-man hubris, took turns calling each other liars, even as neither mentioned the other, uh, liar in the race — and I don’t mean Vivek Ramaswamy. DeSantis did take the time, however, to bash Disney for — get this — “transing” kids, whatever that is.
At this point in the non-race, Haley is the only non-Trump candidate with any kind of momentum. And yet.
She just moved ahead of DeSantis in an Iowa poll. Of course, that would be a distant second, 30 points or so behind Trump. But if DeSantis doesn’t finish at least in second place in Iowa, where he has basically based his campaign for months, he would surely have to drop out.
And New Hampshire seems to be Haley’s best state, where polls give her a chance. If she can get a strong second in Iowa and then maybe even a win in New Hampshire — where Christie voters should go to Haley — then …
Then, almost certainly nothing.
That’s the problem. The idea that Trump would be vulnerable against Haley in a two-way race is hard to accept. In fact, Jonathan V. Last wrote in Bulwark that winning New Hampshire would be a disaster for Haley, who would then come under the full force of Trump’s venomous — or should we say verminous? — campaign blasts. And if she survived New Hampshire, she’d next have to go to her home state of South Carolina, where Trump is easily leading in all the polls.
Let’s be honest. You heard Christie’s hot-mic evaluation of Haley’s chances: “She’s going to get smoked.”
And the thing about this race, though, is that Trump has never been an easier target — or a more dangerous one — than he is today.
Let’s just take this week. No, let’s just take this week in Trump’s courthouse appearances.
There he was on Thursday in New York, where the civil fraud trial against him, his sons and Trump’s company was winding down. The judge had reluctantly given Trump permission to address the court following his lawyers’ closing arguments, but only if he followed the rules. Guess what: He didn’t. He ranted. He raved. He trashed the judge. He trashed the New York attorney general, who is asking for $370 million in penalties.
He said the trial was a fraud. He said if there was any fraud, it was a fraud on him. He said, and I quote, “They should pay me for what I’ve gone through.”
Far worse, though, was his Tuesday appearance at the Washington federal appeals court hearing on his claim of absolute presidential immunity, meaning he could never be tried for his many (OK, alleged) crimes in his role as president. Trump sat in the courtroom and watched as his lawyer tried to make the case that a president could only be tried for a crime after his presidency if he had been impeached and convicted while president.
This led one of the three judges on the panel, Florence Pan, to ask how that might work: “Could a president order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?”
That’s a question that may never have been asked before in a courtroom. And the lawyer, D. John Sauer, obviously didn’t know quite what to say. He finally ventured that, of course, such a president would be “speedily impeached.”
Judge Pan then made the question even more explicit: “I asked you a yes-or-no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached — would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”
Sauer had walked into a trap. “If he were impeached and convicted first,” Trump’s lawyer said.
Pan replied: “So your answer is no.”
His answer is that if the president left office before getting impeached, or before getting convicted anyway, the president could get away with literal murder. I don’t think Trump would go that far.
Every other crime? The judge mentioned bribery and, say, selling pardons. Let’s just say it’s all up for grabs.
Which, sadly, seems to be more than you can say about the GOP primary.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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