Tide is turning against Trump as GOP heavyweights increasingly call him outAccording to CNN's political analyst Frida Ghitis, recent comments by a pair of conservative heavyweights about moving beyond Donald Trump may be just the beginning of a movement to leave the former president in the past because he has too much baggage to be re-electable in 2024.
Of particular note are comments made this week by Rupert Murdoch -- whose Fox News gave Trump a major boost that led to victory in 2016 -- only to have a falling out in 2020 when Trump lost his re-election bid.
Writing "It is noteworthy that in the past few days we have heard from two major figures in the conservative camp telling Trump that he should stop whining about the election he lost and let the Republican Party focus on real issues, instead of his self-serving fantasies," Ghitis quotes Murdoch complaining about who should lead the party saying, "It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past."
Add that to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hitting every cable show to promote his book "Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden" that seems as much a jab at Trump as it does President Joe Biden, and the analyst suggests Trump's career as a viable candidate may be waning even as he leads in the polls among Republicans.
"Murdoch and Christie are not the first Republicans who have stood up to the former president -- but their rebukes of Trump are markedly different, "she wrote before suggesting, but in the long run, they might set off a wave.
Writing, "it is remarkable that they have done the calculus and decided they can benefit from speaking out against the former president, even after other Republicans have been badly hurt by doing the same thing," she then added, "I think their calculation makes sense."
Explaining that Republicans may be "doomed" if they stick with Trump, she stated that --when the 2024 election comes around -- voters will once again be put in a position of deciding if they want to vote for the man who created so much chaos for four years.
"Biden may look uninspiring now, but the former president, who had the most consistently poor approval ratings of any president in the modern era, remains highly unpopular and controversial," she wrote before adding another concern for Republicans willing to bet the house on the former president.
"Do Republicans want a candidate embroiled in endless -- and serious -- legal troubles?" she wrote before detailing Trump's legal problems in Washington D.C., New York and Georgia that could make a 2024 presidential campaign, at best problematic.
"One-third of Republicans and 92% of Democrats don't want him to be a major national political figure going forward. That's not the arithmetic of victory," she wrote before predicting, "There's the potential for a post-Trump Republican Party to gain ground. It still seems like a long shot at this point, but if his critics are successful in persuading the GOP to move in a different direction, there's a chance American democracy can return some semblance of normality, where political leaders debate what policies are best for the country, without fear of upsetting the tender, explosive feelings of a very bad loser.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-gop-2024/