What will Donald Trump do if the GOP rejects his advances?

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This is a picture. It’s 2024, months before the next US election, and Donald Trump has failed to get the nomination to run as the Republican presidential candidate.

After a bruising battle, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the Republican rising star who has opposed everything from coronavirus restrictions to wake up Disney, won the parties’ primaries, rejecting the former president. and other rivals to fight for the White House against the Democrats.

Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump at a rally in 2018. DeSantis is a potential rival to Trump for the White House.Credit:AP

Trump, whose endorsement a few years ago helped propel DeSantis into the spotlight in the first place, is predictably furious. what is he doing

Does he accept the result and get his supporters behind DeSantis? Is he trying to sabotage the GOP by running as a third-party candidate? Did he claim he was robbed and convince his base not to vote in the general election, which would ultimately help the Democrats win?

This is all obviously hypothetical not least because the much-hyped DeSantis has yet to officially enter the race, and no one else has said they’re considering it, including former vice president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former Maryland governor Larry Hogan.

But as the field widens this week with former Trump UN ambassador Nikki Haley expected to announce her candidacy on Wednesday, it’s a question many political observers are pondering.

In fact, research released this month by veteran conservative pollster Whit Ayres found that 28 percent of major party voters are still so loyal to Trump that they would support him even if he ran for the White House as an independent. to the Republican and Democratic nominees.

Former US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.Credit:AP

The Ayres survey of 1,000 likely Republican primary and caucus voters confirmed that most voters want a new candidate, but Trump remains a formidable force, to be sure.

Trump has also done nothing to allay his party’s fears that he will burn the house down if things go wrong. Asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt this month if he would pledge to support a Republican nominee if he didn’t, he replied: It would have to depend on who the nominee is.

There is no doubt that the twice-impeached president is a diminished figure after many of the extremist candidates he endorsed in previous years’ midterm elections failed to win seats. His re-election campaign has also been low-key since it launched in November, with few rallies and lower-than-expected fundraising hauls.

Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, is considering a run for the Republican nomination.Credit:Bloomberg

And in another ominous sign last week, the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group that has spent nearly $150 million over the past two election cycles, invited six potential Republican presidential candidates at its annual donor retreat next month: DeSantis, Haley, Pence, Pompeo, South Carolina senator Tim Scott and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin but not Trump.

The party should be open to another candidate, the group’s president, David McIntosh, told reporters last Monday.

However, even if Trump seems to have weakened, he still has enough support to win a multi-candidate primary race if Republicans are unable to come together on an alternative.

This is what happened in 2016 when a sparse field and the parties’ winner-take-all voting system allowed Trump to choose his opponents such as senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and former governor Jeb Bush and win several contests with about 25 percent of support.

And as Ayres warned, if Trump decides to run independently, it could pave the way for a replay of the 1912 presidential election, in which former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate. against Republican nominee William Taft and Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson splitting the Republican vote and ensuring a Democratic victory.

Then, presidential candidates Senator Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich took the stage before a 2016 Republican presidential primary.Credit:AP

The jockeying for the presidential nomination will ramp up this week when Haley is expected to launch her campaign in South Carolina, the state where she made her name as the first female governor.

On paper, the 51-year-old, born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley, is a solid candidate. He is the son of Indian immigrants, a two-term governor and a China hawk who last week asked America to hold Xi Jinping accountable for the spy balloon that was shot down after floating over the US.

Like many others, he’s also pushing for revival, telling Fox News in a recent interview: When you’re looking at someone running for president, you’re looking at two things. First you look: is the current situation pushing for new leadership? The second question is: am I that person who can be the new leader? Yes, we need to go in a new direction.

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But Haley also said in 2021 that she would not challenge her former boss. And Trump, in turn, has accused her of dishonesty, posting a video of her uttering that sentence, with the quip that she should follow her heart, not her honor.

The reluctance to be an early target of Trump’s notorious ire may be why some Republicans are still entering the race. Others may also be waiting to see if prosecutors help clear the way by charging him with any of the potential crimes for which he is being investigated: meddling in the 2020 election; giving hush money to a porn star; mishandling of classified documents.

But Haleys entrance with President Joe Biden almost certainly announced within weeks that he wanted a second term would pave the way for a new campaign phase.

Then US vice president Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in 2019.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Pence, an Evangelical Christian, last year said in an interview that he was giving prayerful consideration to running in 2024. His intentions are likely to be further scrutinized after he was subpoenaed Thursday night by the special counsel. which looks at Trump’s attempts to overturn Biden’s election victory. On Friday, the FBI also searched Pence’s Indiana home, just as it did Trump and Biden, after one of his aides found classified documents there last month.

Former secretary of state Pompeo said he would announce his intentions in the northern spring, while Scott, one of the most prominent black Republican politicians and a prolific fundraiser, has lined up speaking events in South Carolina and Iowa. in the next two weeks. Both are key states in the presidential primary cycle.

Meanwhile, other state governors across the country North Hampshires Chris Sununo and South Dakotas Kristi Noem, as well as Youngkin and Hogan are also reportedly mulling their options.

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One contender Trump has focused on, however, is DeSantis, or as former president Ron DeSanctimonious calls him. Trump stepped up his attacks last week by re-sharing a post on social media suggesting the Florida governor behaved inappropriately with students when he worked as a private school teacher.

The post includes a photo taken from a Democratic blog in 2021 that purports to show DeSantis at a party with a group of teenagers in 2002.

Isn’t that Ron? Trump wrote next to the photo. He would never do such a thing!

But while DeSantis shrugged off the joke that I was spending my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting Joe Biden, he told reporters that not everyone is convinced he has what it takes to defeat the former president in a meaningless primary fight.

Ron Filipkowski, a high-profile Republican-turned-Democrat who resigned from Florida’s Judicial Nominating Commission over DeSantis’ handling of COVID, is among the skeptics.

He cited the governor’s glass jaw, his lack of charisma and the fact that he has few loyalists in his inner circle as factors that differentiate him from Trump, whom he voted against in 2020.

Can he beat Donald Trump is the first question, said Filipkowski, a lawyer who has spent the past few years tracking right-wing extremism. But if he does, can any sane person imagine Donald Trump losing a bloody primary against Ron DeSantis and then telling his voters to follow him?

I don’t think there’s any scenario that can happen. So if Trump takes his bat and ball and goes home, what happens?

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