Pence Says Trump Shouldn’t Be Disqualified Even If CONVICTED — Says ‘That Needs To Be Left To The American People’

Their complacency and servitude is bizarre. I struggle to believe they'd just publicly demean themselves over and over again without being blackmailed or threatened but it looks like humiliation rolls off them like water from a ducks back.

It might be funny but it also makes perfect sense.

Trump is the defacto face of the party now, win or lose, so anyone who wants to take his place on the ballot in 24 has to walk the impossible tightrope of being different enough from him to get moderate Republicans to vote for them in the primary, while also being enough like him to somehow get loyal trump voters to vote for them instead of him.

It can't be done.

It'd be very different if Trump were out of the picture (not running, term limited, convicted and in prison for insurrection, or dead) and the primary field didn't include the OG responsible for the way the party looks and acts now.

In that scenario, you have a field not including trump, with everyone trying their own blend of trump republicanism, traditional conservatism, and whatever else made them unique in the field. But instead, as long as he's in the discussion, they have to somehow be more popular than the party figurehead, and find ways to be different from him while not criticizing anything he says or does, or risk immediately setting his entire base against them.