What If They Gave a GOP Primary Debate and Nobody Cared?

Update 1/15/24: Thanks again to Batocchio for including my blog in the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. If you can do me a favor, visit me here as I'm trying to narrow down blog articles to submit to the Annual Royal Palm Literary Awards for 2024, please let me know either in the comments or by dropping me a tweet (yes I know it's dying but I still check it for shits and giggles).

Just for the record, last night the Republicans hosted a presidential primary debate of all the possible candidates trying to usurp donald trump from the front-runner spot heading into 2024.

If it looked like an empty stage, that's because it kinda was.

With trump refusing to show up for these things - having already locked up the MAGA voting base and unwilling to get caught by moderators to explain his pending criminal trials - it's been a parade of second-and-third tier pretenders hoping to be the last one(s) standing if/when trump gets convicted and unable to run anymore or blocked from the ballots.

Or at least it was a parade. The standard attrition process of the primaries saw many of the wannabes who couldn't keep up their fundraising to pay off six-figure consultant fees falling to the wayside.

Remember all the clowns back in August 2023? The likes of Doug Burgum (who?) and Ada Hutchinson (why?) and Tim Scott (this one was actually a personal shock, I thought he had a sugar daddy keeping him afloat) and Mike Pence (ahahahahahahahaha) all trying to appeal to the trumpian base and failing.

The ones that had remained weren't exactly the charismatic types to keep the audiences entertained. Vivak Ramaswamy did his best to mimic trump's raging persona but as a pitiful tone-deaf elitist trying to insult everyone else he was too ridiculous to accept. Chris Christie at least had the bullying persona down to an art, but as his game plan was to attack trump as a danger to the party itself there was no way Christie was going to win over the base (what's heart-breaking is how his message didn't gave favor from whatever moderate anti-Trump voters remain in the GOP). It didn't help Christie's message that he himself surrendered to trump back in 2016 and was last seen staring at the cameras during his "endorsement" of a raving trump with an expression that screamed "my God, I sold my soul to the biggest moron in the nation."

Neither Ramaswamy nor Christie were on the stage, as both couldn't qualify for this round. As such, Christie announced just before this debate he was dropping out. In the process, Christie denounced the remaining survivors as incapable of stopping trump and basically left it all open for trump to win even without being present.

That left the challengers to Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

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Yeah, the GOP's screwed. I didn't even have to watch that debate to know how quickly it devolved into direct insults and inability to focus on issues.

Having said that, it becomes interesting to see how the non-trump elements of the voting base come to terms with either backing a nightmarish homunculus like DeSantis who can't even fake basic human emotions or body language, or a pandering Lost Cause supporter like Haley who at least retains some semblance of functioning brain cells. The terrifying thing is that nobody really cares at this point.

But it is looking nobody will force a contentious Republican primary. The nature of the Winner-Take-All system that will accumulate delegates at a fast rate will likely honor trump as the winner before Super Tuesday even rolls up by early March. It then becomes a question if the Republican Convention has to scramble and find a replacement candidate should trump get barred from the ballot due to the 14th Amendment.

The insanity will just keep going through to November. Gods help us.