Don, you have to go back to the future
Forget 2020 loss and focus on winning 2024
DEAR Donald, How are you feeling after the primaries? And specifically, about what happened in Georgia? Are you happy that some of your candidate endorsements like exNFL star Herschel Walker and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won their races to be the state’s Republican Senate and House nominees?
Or are you still staring furiously at the other results in Georgia and wondering what the hell happened to your Midas touch?
To be fair, you’re entitled to feel both sentiments.
There’s no doubt you continue to have huge power and influence in the Republican Party, and your emphatic support for candidates across the political spectrum has frequently paid off with victory.
But there’s also no doubt now that my suspicion about the folly of your ongoing obsession with the 2020 election being “stolen” and “rigged” is beginning to turn off voters.
David Perdue was your big gubernatorial pick in Georgia.
He’s a full-on Trumper and an unabashed advocate for your unsubstantiated claims that widespread voter fraud robbed you of victory in 2020.
You recruited Perdue to exact supposed glorious revenge on Gov. Brian Kemp, your onetime ally who enraged you by refusing to help you overturn President Biden’s electoral win in Georgia.
And just five weeks ago, you looked me in the eye at your Mara-Lago estate in Palm Beach and declared confidently: “David Perdue is a good man. I think he’s got a good chance because Kemp was so bad. On election integrity. I think that David Perdue has a very good chance of winning.”
But he lost.
And he didn’t lose small, he lost “bigly,” as you might put it.
In fact, he got shellacked, destroyed, eviscerated.
And the ironic truth is that Kemp won because of HIS election integrity, and because he pretty much ignored you and focused instead on the strongly conservative agenda that he promoted during his four years as governor.
Even more humiliating for you, your former Vice President Mike Pence, who also refuses to accept you had the election stolen, backed Kemp.
He didn’t criticize you either — because he didn’t need to.
This wasn’t the end of your Georgia revenge misery.
Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who, like Kemp, refused to follow your shameful pleading to “find” enough votes to help you overturn the 2020 election, beat off a challenge from your heavily endorsed candidate, Jody Hice.
And your pick for attorney general, John Gordon, got hammered, too, by incumbent Chris Carr.
GOPers at wits’ end
None of this is remotely surprising to me.
As I told you in our interview last month, many Republicans are fed up with your stolen-election nonsense, which they believe cost the party control of the Senate.
And they’re also fed up with what former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calls your “universally unsuccessful vendetta tour.”
It’s been especially unsuccessful in Georgia, the state you lost in the 2020 election and where your ridiculous whining about that loss caused the GOP to lose both of the state’s Senate seats two months later.
Now you’ve lost big there again by putting your bruised ego above party interests.
It’s time to wake up and smell the covfefe, Donald!
I still think you have a good chance of winning the Republican nomination for the 2024 election and then winning back the White House.
The Democrats are in total disarray, thanks to Biden’s shambolic, asleep-at-the-wheel leadership and the crippling inflation engulfing the country, and you remain a towering force in the GOP.
But if you keep banging on about the 2020 election, you’ll end up increasingly marginalized and irrelevant and the party will move on without you — especially now they can see that Republican candidates can win big by refusing to buy into your conspiracy-theory crap.
In Alabama, Rep. Mo Brooks, whom you initially endorsed but later denounced when he said he wouldn’t revisit the 2020 election, was also able to overcome your spiteful and petty wrath by making it to a run-off election in the Senate race.
This trend should worry you. Yesterday, you had a fascinating exchange on Fox Business with host Stuart Varney, a longtime supporter of yours.
“What I hear from a lot of Republicans is that they don’t want you to look back to the 2020 election and rehash it,” Varney told you. “That’s not what people are talking about. People don’t want you to do that.”
He added that voters find your contentious 2020 conspiracy theories “toxic.”
Lousy history lesson
But you were having none of it. “No,” you snapped, “you have to look at history, Stuart. If you don’t look at history, you’re going to be lost. It’s gonna happen again. You can’t let it happen again.”
You insisted to Varney, as you did to me, that the “vast majority of Republicans” agree with you.
“They are very upset. They’re very angry with what happened in the election. The problem is the press, including Fox, doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Sorry, Donald, you’re wrong. The real problem is that nobody apart from you and a small number of your most devoted blinkered sycophantic acolytes wants to talk about it anymore.
Republicans rightly smell Democrat blood in November’s midterms, buckets of it, and a triumphant return to the White House in 2024.
They don’t want or need you bleating away about 2020 when there are so many better sticks to beat Biden and his party with right now and so many better ways to sell a positive Republican message than being a sore loser.
The frustration many of your supporters feel is that, as they could see in our lengthy interview, you have so much more to offer than just constantly complaining about what happened two years ago.
I won’t wind you up by accusing you of propagating “The Big Lie” — not least because I think you do genuinely believe you had the election stolen from you.
But your refusal to move on from it has turned you into “The Big Bore,” and if you don’t let it go, you can kiss any chance of winning back the presidency goodbye.
Kind regards,
Piers