Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) wants Republicans to rally around former President Donald Trump and encourage the other candidates running against Trump in the GOP primary to bow out, so the party can unite. According to Scott, who himself was the former governor of Florida and is a staunch Trump ally, the Republican Party should drop its primary and rally around Trump because Trump is dominating the polls.
Of course, Trump was the leading doubter of all polls throughout most of his political career — until the 2024 cycle, that is.
The fact of the matter is that no votes have been cast in the GOP primary. Indeed, none will be cast until mid-January. It is likely that most eventual primary voters are paying only superficial attention to the campaign. As we near January, that will change.
So, basically, all these polls showing Trump with a dominating lead over his challengers are hogwash. They are meaningless and will fundamentally change just a few weeks before the first votes are cast in the first primary in Iowa (a state in which Trump has historically struggled). Everyone, including Trump, knows this. And that’s the tell that the Trump campaign for president is nowhere near as strong as their supporters would have you believe.
A Business Model Threatened by the Voters
What’s happening here is that many of the Republican Party “insiders” have essentially gone all-in with Trump. Their entire careers are now firmly glued to Trump’s success. If he fails to obtain the presidency again, their careers will suffer immensely.
Bottom lines will be harmed.
Entire websites dedicated to extolling the virtues of Trump over all else will become less relevant, as the true believers among their readers and viewers will look around and begin questioning why Trump has failed (if he does, in fact, lose).
Rick Scott is one such power player who has invested all his political capital into the Trump Train. And, to be clear, Trump was not a bad president. There were a handful of policies that the forty-fifth president aced like no other.
But overall, Trump’s record as both a presidential candidate and a president is mixed. He only ever won his first major election in 2016. All other elections, whether he was indirectly involved (the 2018 and 2022 midterms) or on the ballot himself, were disasters for Trump.
Donald Trump Doesn’t Win
Beyond that, Trump presided over the most egregious abuse of government power during the COVID-19 pandemic in the form of the national lockdowns, and the ensuing economic collapse, the worst since the Great Depression. He has never been made to answer for these failures.
In fact, Donald Trump has purposely eschewed answering these questions, which is one reason he hides down at Mar-a-Lago while the other Republican candidates have done the right thing by attending all the GOP debates and answering the tough questions that voters deserve to have answers to.
These questions must be answered, though.
Trump Needs to Answer Tough, Honest Questions About His Record
Already Trump has astonishingly abandoned some of his most honorable stances. Recently, Trump mocked those voters (like yours truly) who believed his claim from 2016 that not only would Trump build the wall, but he’d get Mexico to pay for it.
To compound matters, Trump then attacked his primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for what Trump says was a mean-spirited six-week abortion ban bill that DeSantis signed.
Of course, Trump made headlines during his presidency when he became the first president to address the March for Life anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C.
Now, he blames pro-lifers for having lost the 2022 Midterms for Republicans (when, in fact, the ones who truly lost it for the GOP were the Trump-backed candidates).
Let’s do a brief recap here: Sen. Scott, a Trump crony, wants the democratic process that is the GOP presidential primary to be shuttered and all Republicans to just suck it up and rally around Trump — before a single vote has been cast.
If he were to be listened to, no Republican voter would be able to see the forty-fifth president properly explain himself for his severe failures in his final year in office. We would have no guarantee that Trump wouldn’t simply replicate the mistakes of that last, tumultuous year in office yet again if he were to be re-elected.
There is absolutely no upside for GOP voters to be forced to choose only one candidate this early in the process. The fact that Trump surrogates are saying these things in public shows they are afraid that the race is not locked up; that most voters won’t even decide until a few weeks before the first votes are cast.
It’s an embarrassingly transparent, anti-democratic stance to take. All Republican voters should be aware that these calls for unity are false and are merely designed to prevent actual democracy from occurring.
As Republican voters, we have a right to decide the future of our party, and not have it be determined by meaningless polls or steamrolled by fearful, septuagenarian politicians who simply want to return to the White House to soothe their own wounded ego and pardon themselves.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor and an energy analyst at the The-Pipeline, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert occasionally serves as a Subject Matter Expert for various organizations, including the Department of Defense. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon. This opinions express in this piece are the author’s own.
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