Free Republic

Conservative commentator George Will criticized 2024 GOP primary favorites former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a column Friday, saying that both candidates will come out of the GOP primary weaker. “The 2024 Republican nomination question was supposed to be: Could anyone harpoon the Great Orange Whale? Who knew that he would harpoon himself, repeatedly? Or that DeSantis, playing Captain Ahab, would pay Trump the sincerest form of flattery by imitating his persona as an unhappy warrior?” Will wrote in a Washington Post column.

In the Post, George Will predicts that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. Inter alia, Will bases this on what he considers to be voters’ inevitable “rebellion against inevitability”: Voters, however, become contrary when told that the game’s outcome is known in the top of the first inning. Hence what G.K. Chesterton called the game of “Cheat the Prophet”: People listen politely to explanations of what is inevitable, then make something else happen. As a rule, there’s a lot to this. Americans did not like being told in 2007 that the next...