Miles Taylor Will Stop Donald Trump From Winning Again In 2024 Or His Name’s Not ‘Anonymous’

Oh, to dream the impossible Evan McMullin dream!

Donald Trump headlined a big hate rally in Ohio Saturday with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as his opening act. The entire event was gross and terrible, and we're not going to talk about it. We have better things to do. We'll simply point out that the GOP's apparent strategy of ignoring Trump like cowards and hoping he'll just go away on his own is working out as well as it did in 2015. Republicans had the chance to go full Liz Cheney on Trump's sorry ass and banish him permanently to the political Phantom Zone. Instead, they gave him made-up awards of merit for Best President Who Ever Incited A Violent Mob To Attack Congress. 

The 2024 election is shaping up like the sequel to a horror movie we didn't enjoy the first time. Instead of rallying behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, which was the only realistic way to save democracy, much of what would later become the Never Trump movement either supported go-nowhere independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin, wrote in Dead Ronald Reagan, or closed their eyes and imagined a rightwing Supreme Court as they voted for Trump (Cheney did this twice ).

Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, who feels real bad about all those kids Trump separated from their families, announced on Friday his own doomed McMullin-esque campaign.

Twitter 

 He tweeted:  

If Trump somehow wins the GOP nomination in 2024, I will run against him as an independent. And recruit more conservatives to do the same. We will split the vote and sink him.

When McMullin ran as an independent in 2016, pundits suggested he might at least carry his home state of Utah where Mormons were ambivalent about Trump. That didn't happen. He won just 21 percent of the vote, and Trump easily carried the state with an 18-point margin over Clinton.

McMullin offered voters the standard terrible conservative platform but without the overt bigotry and cruelty. It's like the gourmet burger place that charges $15 for a burger without cheese or french fries. Meanwhile, more people prefer the chain restaurant that charges $5 for a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. When will self-described “rational" Republicans realize that the GOP electorate doesn't want their grass-fed conservatism or even rationality? They want the full combo meal with all the racist trimmings.

Taylor, who wrote the self-serving "Anonymous" op-ed for the New York Times, looks like a Republican from the "West Wing," so hopeful liberals want to believe he represents a significant constituency within the party. But he doesn't. Cheney's defrocking and Greene's popularity should've proven without a doubt that the GOP is a lost cause. Pay attention: supposedly “good" Republicans likeElise Stefanik,   Nancy Mace, and Nikki Haley are adopting Tucker Carlson's rhetoric. 

The new “red dog" Democrats are former Republicans, most of whom are college-educated white voters and working-class white suburbanites. We need them to continue voting Democratic, up and down the ballot, until every craven, MAGA-enabling Republican is gone. Then we can possibly discuss the dominant Democratic Party splitting into a “centrist" and a “progressive" party where the primary disagreements are over policy and not which Americans are worthy of respect.

McMullin's stated objective in 2016 wasn't to win outright but to somehow block both Trump and Clinton from reaching 270 electoral votes. This would send the election to the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, which would have to choose among the three top electoral vote winners. Installing McMullin instead of Trump or Clinton would've been profoundly anti-democratic, but the Republican establishment was desperate to prevent what ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd described as Trump's “hostile takeover" of the party. However, Republican voters and later spineless Republican politicians willingly delivered the GOP to President Klan Robe. It was quite the amicable takeover.

No, Taylor needs to stop building a field of dreams that he hopes will summon the spirits of Jack Kemp and John McCain. Trumpism is the modern GOP's beating heart. There's no removing it and hoping the party's rotting cadaver remains upright long enough to confirm more rightwing hack judges and block any decent climate change bill.

If you want to defend American democracy, vote for Democrats. Anything else is vanity.

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