You can’t beat sore losers. Why? Because, in defeat, they always have irrefutable reasons why they should have won.  Sound familiar? Of course, because we have heard the same sore loser music since 2016.

It started when Donald Trump won the election of 2016, but invested the first two years of his Presidency in an investigation of how he could have lost the popular vote.  We should have anticipated this kind of counter-factual study when he promised to investigate the Electoral count if he lost the official election, but then he won, surprising everyone, including himself.  So all that cynical energy had to be channeled into investigating the popular vote, because he couldn’t have lost that!

We heard the same sore loser music after the mid-term elections, not because Trump had lost, but because his endorsed candidates had lost, especially the one in Georgia, suspected as a bastion of fraud when it elected two Democratic senators.

In 2021 Georgia continued displeasing the sore loser, because Brad Raffensberger, its Secretary of State refused to “find” enough votes to turn his state Trump Red. “During the January 2, 2021 call, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he had won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.” https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/politics/who-is-brad-raffensperger-georgia-secretary-of-state/index.html

And we know that to this day Mr. Trump does not acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden as President, despite a popular vote of 81,283,501 to 74,223,975 and an Electoral  College difference of 74 votes. The legitimacy of this vote has been proven more than forty times in court. Still the sore loser refrain carries on.

Given this broad history, it is unthinkable that Donald Trump would not challenge the legitimacy of the 2024 Republican Primary, if he was not the winner.  Any public display of promising to accept the nominee of the Party has no credibility. The sore loser will accept only one outcome: the nomination of Donald J. Trump.

Should the other Primary candidates be compelled to pledge to support the nominee, given that the front-runner will never live up to such a pledge? That would be like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. While you must stand by your commitment to the Party, Trump is pledging with fingers crossed behind his back. So you’ve made a commitment he will never make, regardless of his promises.

How can Mike Pence say he will support the Party’s nominee, when he has just said that Trump is unfit to be President? That is a contradiction in logic worthy of the master himself. Since the days he was elected to the White House, Pence has tried to have it both ways: showing a superficial support of his boss, while rejecting his most urgent command to de-certify the Presidential ballots in 2021. He should not try to keep up his disguise as he begins his run for the Presidency.

In fact, every Republican candidate for President needs to balk at endorsing Donald Trump for the Party’s nominee. They are all in it to defeat Trump. None of them would sign up for the hell of being Trump’s next Vice-President. So they should take a stand:
“I cannot pledge to do something Donald Trump will never do: support a rival for the nomination.”

What would the Party do against such defiance? The same they do for Donald Trump every time: fold and acquiesce. They would make a work-around, so that at least three or four candidates qualify to debate in the Primaries; probably all would qualify.  This would avoid the sad spectacle of Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson saying, “I misspoke. I cannot support Donald J. Trump for President.” Then you would hear some apoplectic music.

It takes a certain moral fiber to stand against your party, but there is no cure for the Republican malaise without someone straightening their spine. I think Christie and Hutchinson have the nerve, and probably the others will follow, as they do so beautifully.  That would be a sound to overwhelm sore loser music.

I am not sure of the winner, but I believe there will be a showdown about the pledge to endorse the nominee. Then the Republican Party will have to prove its mettle. That is a sound I’d like to hear: the ring of mettle.