Fake Independents & Silly Libertarians
They’d rather help elect Biden than unite around Trump.
Now that Iowa and New Hampshire have made clear what we already know—Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee, a few people are starting to wonder what took his competition so long to figure it out.
Nikki Haley still hasn’t.
Her reliance on ‘independents’ and Democrat crossovers in New Hampshire represents, as Ron DeSantis so succinctly put it, “the old Republican guard of yesteryear — a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism…”1
In any other cycle, Trump’s resounding back-to-back victories would have easily settled things. But his neo-conservative adversaries are not going quietly into that good night. Despite being the first non-incumbent Republican to win Iowa and New Hampshire, Fox News Channel spent Tuesday wringing their hands over all those ‘independents’ the former President didn’t get.
But of course, as Ford, Bush, McCain and Romney so aptly demonstrated, GOP candidates who fail to solidify their base don’t win general elections. You’d think that a couple of record-setting 50%-plus wins for Trump might do it.
Herding cats, however, is easier than getting unhinged never-Trumpers back in the fold. There are several middle-of-the-road ‘no label’ careerists who still think the path to power is to avoid standing firmly on clearly defined principles.2 The biggest change in the Trump-era is that they have joined forces with a few libertarians who used to.
When the Koch brothers’ network decided to get behind big government, pro-war ‘conservative’ Haley, it was just the latest example of libertarian spite.3 For heaven’s sake, these “pro-open borders, pro-jail break” billionaires apparently thought DeSantis too reactionary.4
Yet as fruitless as their national ambitions have been, libertarians from Arizona to Minnesota have proved adept at electing Democrats.