Instead of sulking, Republicans should ditch their own crappy candidate

Accusing former President Donald Trump of being petulant is like accusing a cow of being cattle or a butterfly of being fugitive. His petty self-absorption, for reasons that continue to elude me, doesn’t bother his hard-working base. But even his supporters generally admit that a certain swagger is part of his trademark.

Even so, the way he blithely reacted to replacing President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris is spectacularly self-defeating.

In his rambling interview with Elon Musk, Trump offhandedly referred to Biden’s ouster as “a coup,” echoing his vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who has repeatedly used the same phrase .

But wait. A “coup” is the subversion of a constitutional order, usually violent, resulting in the removal of a legitimate government. You know, like storming the Capitol to overturn the outcome of an election.

In this case, there was no attempt to overthrow the regime. Biden is still in the White House, whether the old man is aware of it or not. All that happened is that one of the two main parties chose, within the rules, to nominate someone in particular.

And you know what? It is open to the other party to do the same, to replace their own pair of weaklings with more viable candidates.

Of all the lies Republicans tell to justify their debasement of Trump, the most implausible is that he is an election winner. In fact, in both 2016 and 2020, he was outspent by most Republican senatorial and gubernatorial candidates. True, in 2016 he still won the states he needed, but that was against a spectacularly hopeless Democrat — and even then, he lost the popular vote.

Sure, Trump might turn out some people who wouldn’t vote for other Republicans. But we’re looking at the net impact here, the ratio of soccer moms lost to bearded mountain men won. When you compare Trump’s numbers to the Republicans’ down-ballot numbers, there’s no doubt that he’s a drag.

The reason the betting markets are now predicting a Harris win is that they can see what Trump supporters cannot, which is that while his support has a high floor, it also has a low ceiling.

Against an obviously unelectable candidate like Hillary Clinton or a visibly senile candidate like Biden, Trump wins. Against a normal Democrat, he loses.

Now, you could argue that Harris is far from a normal Democrat, that her fringe views and inability to string a sentence together put her in the unelectable category. I wrote here last month about her far-left economic views.

Her radical stances on identity politics would occupy a whole other column. This is the politician who supported gender surgery on minors, who refers to Hispanics by the hideous term “Latinx” and who urged his supporters to post bail for Black Lives Matter rioters.

But that’s exactly the point. Against any other Republican candidate, Harris would be toast. At some level, almost all Republican strategists know this. But they pander to their primary voters, refuse to stand up for their principles, and ultimately turn against those who, like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, espouse the beliefs that all Republicans used to profess. They are past the point where they can realistically complain, let alone resist, the MAGA takeover of their party.

However, the strange thing is that, politically, Trump is much closer to most people than Harris. If she were a little wiser, she would allow this fact to come out, effectively subjecting her to the party primacy she never had. Instead, he and Vance are campaigning the only way they know how, through childish insults. She is still employed! It’s not properly black! She’s a crazy cat! She laughs too much! Unsurprisingly, these offensive lines motivate his base much more than theirs.

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Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), is also politically vulnerable. Like most public school teachers, he combines lazy revivalism with quasi-socialist economics. But incredibly, Trump and Vance prefer to go after him because of his military record. Yes, that’s Trump, who, after dodging the draft in Vietnam, saw fit to mock John McCain’s service record.

In a normal world, Harris-Walz would be the extreme choice. Except for one thing. If they lost, they accepted the result and gave up. The same is not true for Trump and Vance. That fact alone should disqualify them from serious consideration. That they are unchallenged and unchallenged does not say anything good about their party.