Make the GOP
great again

Whether you believe Donald Trump is a victim of flagrant and malicious persecution or finally is being prosecuted for malice he flagrantly has displayed, one thing is clear.

Although many voters believe he should be elected to a second term, there aren’t enough of them for him to win. He most assuredly will drag the Republican Party down — perhaps permanently — if he continues to be its candidate.

The closer the presidential election becomes, the more those who believe that a convicted felon should not serve will flock to the polls. They decisively will vote against him and, by extension, every other candidate running under the same banner.

Not giving up, even in the face of impossible odds, might be a valued character trait, provided it is not carried to an extreme. The former president, unfortunately, has a track record of crossing the line in refusing to accept defeat.

What Election 2024 will mean if Trump leads the Republican ticket will be not just re-election of a Democratic president but also election of sizeable Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate.

At that point, policies that he and many Republicans rightfully opposed will end up becoming law. The ideological tilt of the Supreme Court will shift. And all the gains that conservative Republicans think they have achieved in recent years will be swept aside.

Now is not the time for all good party members to come to the aid of this not-so-good man. Instead, now is the time for the Republican Party to return to its roots as a party devoted to caring for individual rights, compromising as needed to progress, and never allowing government to get so big that it dwarfs the people it is supposed to serve.

This is the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. Most of its core beliefs are the same as the core beliefs of the nation’s founding fathers.

However, insisting on going forward with an unelectable standard bearer may cement its place in history as another incarnation of the Federalists or Whigs, whose final nominees for president were the eminently forgettable Rufus King and Winfield Scott.

As things stand today, Donald Trump is likely to go down as the final presidential candidate of the Grand Old Party unless members of that party do not insist that their top candidate should have an actual chance of winning against what should be a vulnerable Democratic incumbent.

— ERIC MEYER