If Trump runs for President, for the second time, do you think it will be detrimental to the Republican party?

Here’s hoping the GOP rejects him and runs third party, splits the right-wing vote, thus benefiting the Democrats.

Of course, it would be great if the Democrats run someone truly interesting and engaging.

I think it only matters if Trump wins the nomination.

Not to split hairs, but it will be his 3rd run. I think he is definitely bringing his party down, and his trying to bully others into not running against him shows what a bully he really is. I’m glad members of his party are trying to dissuade him, but he listens to no one.

I think Trump is, and HAS BEEN, devastating to the GOP. Trump affiliated candidates have underperformed expectations in 2018, 2020, and now 2022. He is an albatross around their neck. His base is too fervent and too dedicated to ignore, and as such is a HUUUGE problem for competent, rational Republicans because they can win primaries for the loons. Yet, if you play to them, the main body of the electorate won’t tolerate it.

If Trump runs, and I think there’s a better than fair chance he will, he will bloody DeSantis and turn the nomination into a circus, which is how he won it in 2016. He treated it like his reality show, which made the media cover it nonstop, effectively giving him free advertising because the GOP resents the leftward slant of the media…so them going negative on him just fuels their anti-establishmentarian impulses.

If he runs, I think there’s a VERY real chance he wins that primary because primaries are terrible ways to filter down candidates. Only party extremists vote in primaries. Most people don’t care. Swing voters, independents, members of the other party…they’re often not even ALLOWED to vote as many states have closed primaries, but even if they were all open, most voters don’t pay attention until the general election. This allows nuts like Bernie and Trump to outpeform how they would truly perform in a general elections.

So I think there’s a very serious chance he could win the GOP nomination, but I think there’s ZERO change he could win another general election after the way he ended 2020. The Dems could run just about anybody and beat him in a landslide. And that’s a problem because the Democrats also have alot of bad candidates that are popular with their extreme wing. But they would all beat Trump at this point.

To date, voters have been pretty smart about splitting tickets to vote against Trump and Trumpy candidates, but FOR other GOP candidates. They did this in 2020 and 2022. But the GOP should not keep expecting that outcome. They’re wrecking their brand.

His ego is bad but depends on who is in the primary. If he is the main candidate my biggest fear is that he will lose his ego and not win. Hopefully DeSantis wins the primary.

By now it is pretty much understood that Trump is a liability to Republican politics—whether he runs or not. The performance of his slate of endorsements in the midterms banished any illusions on Trump as a party asset. The current agenda for the party is the straightforward anointment of Desantis as the great white hope in a post Trump environment. A happy thought perhaps, BUT….If there is a single prediction regarding the pig, it is the certainty that nothing short of death itself will force Trump into the background of ANYTHING. There will be no post Trump environment as long as there is a camera or microphone left in the country. Depend on it!

The ultimate nightmare for Republicans will of course be Trump as an independent, bleeding off the deplorables in the electorate undeniably essential to Republican politics. The very threat of this affords Trump a virtual stranglehold on his party’s future. It is the club with which he can pummel the elephant party to destruction. And all of this while Trump’s yet accumulating legal scandals blare from the headlines. This promises to be an entertaining year for Democrats as Trump ramps up the assured destruction of what we regard as a viable Republican party.

The question is, if he runs, which seems likely, will the Republicans risk the possibility of the Orangutan splitting the vote if they do not make him The Candidate, or will they just make him The Candidate again and fall in line behind him.

Yes it will. He was unwelcome before and he is now to many mainline republicans. We tolerated him under the assumption that he would start to act presidential when he got in office. Well, we all know that did not happen. He has fractured the republican party into two parts: The evangelical, fringy elements and then the run of the mill status quo fiscal conservatives and center liners. Many republicans are ready for a more pragmatic, down to earth leader. Not fucking Trump. He won the first go around because of who he was running against and that person’s hubris. When it came to what many struggling Americans were concerned with Trump made promises and at least listened. He almost won the second go around because he was running against a walking corpse. Now especially after Jan 6 and his behavior surrounding it, we don’t fucking want him back. The other half of the party following his cult of personality do though, and that’s a problem.

I don’t think the Republican party can be hurt any worse than it has been up until now. Trump can/will only hurt himself more.

@ragingloli IMHO, the party is already split, and if not in two ways, three.

I think he would lose and likely the big wigs also will concur and nominate someone else.

I think he will “Game” the GOP for a while and go third party.

As crazy as that party has become since Trump entered the game, I sure hope so!

“There is no denying that Trump is very popular, too.”
– LOL! With idiots, xenophobes, racists, misogynists, rural Christian radio, Republican politicians who don’t want to get abused by Trump and Trumpers, etc., maybe.

But no, Trump has never had a positive approval rating. Gallup’s final presidential approval poll for him was at 34%.

And Trump’s approval ratings have been severely inflated by him being the Republican Presidential candidate – Republicans say they approve of Trump whether or not they actually do, because of the binary political nature of the question. Do Republicans say they approve of the Republican POTUS/candidate? LMAO of course most of them do.

Yes, he’s a bad move for them. Depends on how much weight the Trumper wing of the party still carries.

Trump is already detrimental to the Republicans. About all the candidates that Trump endorsed lost in this midterm election. The Republicans were in good shape to take control of the Senate but Trump is likely the main reason that the Republicans fell short.

Trump is the Republicans worst nightmare and has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats. Trump will single handedly destroy the Republican Presidential nominee in 2024.

The on going criminal investigations against Trump will likely continue through 2024 to make sure that Trump runs as a 3rd party candidate. Can’t have Trump sitting in jail when he can be out loose destroying the Republicans.

I can’t blame Trump for all of the horrible chaos or for fracturing the party, I put some culpability on the Republicans themselves who know better and still go along with catering to his bullshit and catering to the extreme right in the party. Most of them stuck together. The people and the politicians stuck with Trump when the insanity was right in front of them.

Some Republicans at least voiced a psychological dilemma that they didn’t like what Trump was doing but couldn’t vote for a Democrat, but most still blindly agreed with Trump and supported Trump.

The Republican congressman could have led their constituency to sanity, but instead they catered to the “base” as usual and even to the far right. They ousted Liz Cheney for having a dissenting opinion, while talking about protecting freedom of speech.

How many of them stood up on January 6 and still challenged the vote?

I’ve said it all along, Trump seized on the opportunity to play to people who will follow along and fall in line.

The reason I said above that it depends on if Trump gets the nomination is because if he gets it, then I think the party is in serious trouble this next time around. If he doesn’t get nominated he doesn’t matter anymore except to the blind faithful who really think he is part of God’s plan and to the extreme haters. I figure they are less than 20% of the party. Most of them will still vote for whoever the Republicans choose.

It’s up to the voters. If Trump runs and Trump actually does well in the first few states in the primaries, it’s bad news for the party in my opinion.

Again, in my opinion the Congressmen in office have the power to lead the party away from Trump and hate, let’s see if they do it.

If he runs in 2024 he will have to admit he lost the election in 2020.
According to the Constitution 22nd Amendment Section 1: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, ...
Can he admit the election was actually honest and he lost?

@LuckyGuy I don’t think Trump can be honest with himself much less than anyone else.

@LuckyGuy Wait, can’t be elected twice or can’t hold the position of president for more than two terms?

Personally, I believe if he DOESN’T run, it will be detrimental to the Republican Party. The Democrats and the complicit media spent years making up all sorts of b.s. about Trump. They wasted time, effort, and money doing nothing but hating Trump. The people that liked Trump and there were millions of them with even more seeing the light now) recognized the lies for what they were, recognized that Trump did many good things as president despite opposition from Democrats, the Media, and even some Republicans. They recognized the sketchy election results in 2020 and they have seen that the Republicans accepted them without batting an eye or really even doing anything to verify the results or answer the questions and concerns of their constituents. 70+% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track and if the Repubs turn their backs on Trump they are showing they want to go back to the old ways and are willing to give up the country to the Democrats to get there.

If Trump does NOT run in 2024, it will likely be the death knell for the Republican Party. Too many people will recognize their complicity in the lies and deception of the Democrats and the Media.

My guess is that if Trump does NOT run in 2024 there will be a huge low turnout of voters on the right and that by 2028, if the country still exists, a new party will form that will sweep up all those voters.

@chyna: You’re right, good catch. Third run, not second.

@seawulf575 So, you don’t think the Republicans will be willing to move their adoration of Trump over to DeSantis? I’m in Florida so I’m in a bubble probably. I thought Republicans around the country were already gravitating towards him.

@seawulf575 I don’t think anyone will abandon the party either way, not after the last two years.

@JLeslie I quoted the 22 amendment. It said “elected”.

I just saw Trump make his announcement. He looked better than he has in a while and I think he probably sounded very appealing to the people who think he had good policies. They played YMCA at the event. Lol. They’ve played that before at Trump events. Of all songs. I wonder exactly why that gets on the song list.

Trump detrimental? Deplorable MAGA disciples have no idea what that means. The Republican Cult-Party of Trump will happily go down in flames with their orange sociopath douchebag master.

@JLeslie It isn’t really about Trump as much as the behavior of the Republican Party. There are other candidates, but if they toss Trump aside, they are conceding that all the Dems/Media has to do is waste 4 years attacking whichever candidate might get elected. People on the right are tired of how the Republicans have acted over the past 6 years.

You gotta ask yourself, after being dumped in 2020, what has he achieved that makes him more palatable as a candidate? Is it the 6 January insurrection which bolsters his chances? Or perhaps the truckloads of classified documents stolen and thrown in his basement? Where’s the positive news? The Democrats must be licking their chops. Since his dethronement the pig has been legally certified as a swindling grifter and unprecedented fraud of a businessman. Now, the possibly electable Desantis (the Trump who can keep his mouth shut when necessary) must be occupied in a fratricidal pig fight for the nomination. If he manages to win the nomination, we all know damned well there isn’t a chance in hell the other pig will sit still with it. Trump concedes NOTHING EVER. I still insist that Trump all by himself will engineer the destruction of the Republican party. I wish I could afford the luxury of licking my own chops, but for more reasons than there is time to list, the disintegration of the Republican party is not an uplifting prospect. My passport is in order. How about the rest of you?

@HP Didn’t Trump say something like on any other day he would have lost, but it was that day for that election, about 2016. Trump believes in some luck and believes in always seizing power if the opportunity presents itself.

The spectacle of the fat boy campaigning in the midst of his innumerable criminal prosecutions is going to be one for the books. It’s guaranteed to be the sort of clown show that money can’t buy. You’ve gotta pity the poor conservatives who ran around claiming the era of Trump a bygone fluke. Their Frankenstein just won’t die.

(funny aside) Dave Chappelle did the SNL show a few days ago. In his opening monologue, he talked about how he, in the past, has been fired from jobs and he used to steal stuff, staplers, stuff like that. He said “I know one thing I never took home from work – work!” Referring to Trump having thousands of documents in his house.

Video here if you want to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-gO0HSCYk

Lol.

@jca2 That was one funny show, I actually watched the whole thing.

Moderate Repubs, and even some conservative ones, are fast distancing themselves from Trump. A good omen methinks.

Yet so critical to the party base is the Trump contingent that he still wields the wrench to hurl into the gears of the Republican machine. He waves that wrench menacingly to great effect. I’ll say this for the Party and particularly the Republican House regarding the Trump era: not everyone slithered to safety when backbone was required. Those who stood up, few as they are, come out of this genuine heroes and will be remembered as such.