Alan Zendell, June 8, 2023

Political pundits, who rarely get it right more often than you or I, have told us for months that the 2024 Republican primaries would be a repeat of 2016. Remember when there were sixteen Republicans vying for the presidential nomination? Remember how Trump’s shameless, belligerent, offensive style intimidated his opponents, forcing them to drop out one by one? That happened because the others were all professional politicians, who, for all their hypocrisy and misleading promises, were following a well-established set of rules for political campaigns.

Trump, who doesn’t believe rules apply to him, was so outrageous, so profane, so effective at blending lies and truth until most people couldn’t tell them apart, that his opponents reacted like deer caught in headlights. It made me wonder at the time how these people reacted to schoolyard bullies, they seemed so helpless and unable to defend themselves. Like those kids in a schoolyard, it never occurred to them that they could have brought Trump down simply by uniting. They (and we) were all victims of their personal blind ambition. They threw around words like “sacrifice,” but not one of them was willing to cede his place in line until it was too late.

I have good news for everyone who believes Trump is a threat to our country, to basic decency, and to that mythical world order which is based on the rule of law. The pundits are wrong. Last evening, before CNN broadcast a Town Hall with newly announced candidate Mike Pence, they had a fascinating panel discussion. The person who most impressed me was Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor from 2019 to 2023. More than anyone I can think of, he and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, illustrate the fractured condition of the Republican Party that Trump left in his wake.

Duncan and Raffensberger were in the midst of the firestorm created by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. To the surprise and relief of everyone who believes in our Constitution, they were the only two senior elected Republicans in the entire country who stood up to Trump’s lies and intimidation, despite enormous risks to their careers. Lifelong Conservatives, they both declared on national television that Georgia’s election results would not be tampered with. Last night, before a large TV audience, Duncan declared, “Trump is definitely going down!”

He was referring both to Trump’s attempt to gain the 2024 Republican nomination, and state and federal justice systems that have spent more than two years investigating whether Trump is guilty of serious crimes. New York courts have already found Trump’s company criminally guilty of fraudulent business practices and Trump himself guilty of sexual misconduct and bribery in a civil trial. The Department of Justice appears to be on the verge of indicting him for serious felonies concerning his illegal retention of Top Secret national security documents and his instigation of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

For his part, Pence, Trump’s former vice president, declared that Trump’s actions around January 6th and his continuing refusal to accept his 2020 defeat make him unfit to serve as president again. If, as I do, you believe the same thing, that should be cheering news, because Pence is positioning himself to take a large chunk of evangelical votes away from his former boss. The far-right Christian movement was willing to look the other way when Trump acted like an immoral pig, because he promised them an all-out war against abortion and women’s rights to control their own health. He delivered on that promise, but evangelists know that everything Trump did was transactional. Pence, on the other hand, is (or pretends to be) a true Christian evangelist who said, last night, that he favors a national ban on abortion.

While I find Pence creepy at best, and I cringe at the notion of him in the White House, he gave some very good answers in his Town Hall. About trans-gender individuals, he said he had no problem with adults making whatever gender choices they were comfortable with, but that chemical or surgical procedures that make irreversible changes to their bodies should be outlawed for people under eighteen, a slap at Trump but more so at Ron DeSantis. With respect to Ukraine, Pence distanced himself from Trump and DeSantis, stating that defending Ukraine against Russian aggression is our highest priority. Otherwise, he warned, Putin will keep going until NATO is directly involved militarily, and any weakness we show standing up to Russia will enable China’s expansionist goals.

The news that Trump will almost surely fail in his attempt to regain the presidency is very good. It’s possible that whoever replaces him might be worse, but the thought of saying good-bye to Trump once and for all makes the risk worth taking.