Will the GOP Dump Trump?
Republicans have a clear off-ramp, but it’s up to them to take it.

Donald Trump withers in darkness. He needs sunlight—media attention—to thrive. Otherwise, he reverts to his natural state: Florida-based hotelier who will direct you to the omelet station or maybe give a toast at your wedding or bar mitzvah (though the toast is likely to focus more on the 2020 election than your blessed event). As Ukraine, gas prices, and other events of actual note dominate the news cycle, there is less and less room for Trump. Add in the fact that he’s also on the utterly wrong side of one of those events—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and for the first time since 2015, Republicans have a relatively painless way to rid themselves of the Mango Mussolini once and for all. Will they take it?

Probably not. But they should.

Trump is clearly feeling his displacement from the media ecosystem; hence his single-spaced three-page letter to NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt about Holt’s interview with Bill Barr (part of the Bill Barr Historical Revisionism Book Tour, as I call it). Some might see the letter, which boils down to a greatest-hits collection of Trump’s usual complaints, nicknames, and lies, as a Trumpy way to correct “the record,” whatever that means in Trumpworld. But I see it as yet another desperate attempt to inject himself back into the media discourse. The problem is that Trump, like an elderly vaudevillian, has only a few tired topics in his repertoire.