A Rant: ‘Team Normal’ Republicans, Stop Whining That Democrats Won’t Help You

Your Trump problem is just that: Your problem.

What the “Team Normal” Republicans would like is the arrangement they had before 2015 — they would like Trump to help stir up their own voters and generate “energy,” but they don’t want to have to defend his unpopular actions and characteristics to swing voters who have a negative view of him and they also don’t want to have intraparty fights with the candidates he supports. What they’d like to do is move not against him but past him. They see that Trump is absorbed by his own hobby-horses and searches for vengeance; he does not seem especially animated by the new culture wars of the day; maybe he can just be allowed to fade away, screaming into a void, as the party nominates DeSantis.

When Democrats help prop up candidates who are committed to avenging Trump, they interfere with this project. And if they indict Trump — raising the salience of Trump’s personal grievances and putting Trump’s fixation on his own alleged persecution into more plausible alignment with the locus of Republican primary voter interest in 2024 — they will also interfere with the project.

In the view of the Republicans who cry foul at these actions, it’s the Democrats’ responsibility not to back Trump or oppose him — it’s to ignore him, as they try mightily to do the same, in hopes that it will cause him to disappear in favor of another stronger potential nominee. That is, Democrats are supposed to participate in their strategy to get DeSantis nominated in 2024 — it’s their duty, even if it entails giving Trump a pass on criminal acts, and even though it will make Democrats less likely to win the 2024 election.

joshbarro.com