The GOP dumpster fire is getting worse – and even 2024 wins might not help

Trump leads in all the polls, the government is barreling toward a shutdown and the world is on fire. Do Republicans care? No

Nobody in the Republican Party seems to be having a good time, except for maybe its leader Donald Trump.

That’s because everyone else in the GOP seems to be unwilling to accept reality and instead are engaged in their own personal imaginary thinking that they can somehow ignore the current crises facing them and instead focus on what matters solely to them in the name of maintaining power.

On Wednesday evening, his would-be opponents for the Republican nomination for president – former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Florida Gov Ron DeSantis – exchanged barbs against each other as they pretended that Mr Trump does not hold a double-digit lead before the Iowa caucuses on Monday and some polling shows he leads in New Hampshire by almost 20 points.

Their announcement came just hours after former New Jersey governor Chris Christie left, excoriating his fellow Republicans for failing to confront Mr Trump. Before his announcement, a hot mic caught the brash New Jerseyan saying that Ms Haley was “gonna get smoked” and that Mr DeSantis called him and was “petrified.”

During the debate, the two candidates made only a cursory mention of him for most of the debate and dodged questions from CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash when asked about the former president.

Their failure to directly confront Mr Trump shows they would rather not have to think of him. But it also is a tacit admission that nothing they say or do will win over the slice of the Republican electorate that considers themselves as much supporters of Mr Trump as they do Republicans.

Indeed, when Mr DeSantis talked about Mr Trump’s legal battles, the Harvard-educated lawyer somehow made himself sound like the former president’s defence attorney, saying the former president was facing a “stacked left wing DC jury of all Democrats.”

Ms Haley made some more pointed jabs, saying she wished Mr Trump was there and that they disagreed about January 6. She also admitted that Mr Trump lost the election to Mr Biden as a means to bolster the case for her candidacy before she resorted back to attacking Mr DeSantis and referring to her website listing all of his various lies.

And Republicans on the Hill are not faring any better. After a year that led to arch-conservatives torpedoing a speaker and nominating neophyte Mike Johnson, Republicans are now turning their ire towards the man his party nominated unanimously.

At the core of the anger is the fact that over the weekend, Mr Johnson came to an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer about the topline numbers for spending bills that are roughly the same as those Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the White House last year.

That caused the conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus to get hopping mad at the speaker and in revolt, they voted down a rule to begin debate on Wednesday. Conservatives have apparently deluded themselves into believing that somehow they could get everything they wanted when they only control one half of one branch of government.

Republican lobbyist Liam Donovan articulated it best when he told me on X (formerly Twitter), “They prefer to lose.” Losing gives them the ability to call “the swamp” corrupt and themselves pure.

Instead of focusing on the hard work of governing, the House has focused instead on holding Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress in hopes that will weaken his father President Joe Biden, and holding impeachment hearings on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. For what? It’s not entirely clear except it’s a way for them to highlight “the border,” Republican code for restricting legal immigration.

Occasionally, some of the more “grown-up” (but no-less conservative) Republicans let morsels of truth escape their lips. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted that much when he told reporters that “obviously” Congress would need to pass a continuing resolution. Mr McConnell knows a shutdown would hurt Republicans more than Democrats in an election year and risk national security priorities (though he has also fooled himself into thinking he cannot talk about Mr Trump even though his vote to acquit Mr Trump means he can reassume the presidency and they will have to work together again).

Similarly, Rep Garret Graves, who negotiated the debt limit deal with the White House last year, told reporters on Wednesday that he’s been saying “for nine months or so that effectively there's not a majority. There's a coalition.” That coalition looks a lot like the one that raised the debt limit and prevented government shutdowns: half of the GOP conference votes to prevent catastophe, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries bails them out and a crisis is averted.

But nobody can admit that lest conservatives begin to bray and whine.

This is not to say that Republicans could lose in the 2024 election. Quite the contrary: polling consistently shows Mr Trump beating Mr Biden and Republicans could easily win the Senate if they flip just two seats, while Democrats are defending eight seats in swing states. On Thursday, the Consumer Price Index report showed that inflation is still going up.

But that makes the GOP’s structural weakness even more damning. The Republicans are on the precipice of winning back the country in an incredibly consequential election. And that structural weakness allowed Mr Trump to curb-stomp the party’s campaigning and governing apparatus and allowed a handful of radicals to hijack the party, making it impossible for them to govern.

Eventually, Republicans – be it donors, also-rans, members of the House or Republican Senate leadership – will be forced to wake up from GOP dreamland, either because Democrats are kicking their keisters or because they will somehow wind up with the majority in both chambers and the White Houses and they no longer can blame anyone else.