Now for my
own embarrassing confession: I thought I had learned, over four decades of
political reporting, the dangers of making glib predictions and getting ahead
of the actual political storyline. But that did not prevent me from writing in May about Tim
Scott: “In a long campaign season, some candidates have a moment when they
look as if they are real contenders for the nomination.… And the bet here is
that Scott, especially after he visually stands out on a monochromatic
Republican debate stage, will have one of those moments in 2023.” After
three weak debate performances, Scott’s chance for such a moment ended when he dropped out in November. Now he’s newly
engaged as a Trump surrogate angling to be the veep pick.
At least I was never gulled by the bumptious Vivek Ramaswamy. Following the first
Republican debate in August, NBC News gushed, “A charismatic public
speaker, Ramaswamy, 38, has risen from relative obscurity to the top tier of
the Republican presidential primary by embracing Trump wholeheartedly.”
The Associated Press also succumbed to Ramaswamy’s
brass-knuckles debate style: “At the center of the stage, and the center
of the debate’s hottest exchanges, was … a novice candidate and technology
entrepreneur named Vivek Ramaswamy.” A weak fourth-place finish in Iowa sent
Ramaswamy packing. (He endorsed Trump, just as DeSantis did on Sunday.)
The moral
inherent in all this is a sad one: In his cultish capture of the Republican
Party, Donald Trump has single-handedly destroyed traditional campaign
journalism, at least on the GOP side. If the rituals of the early states don’t
matter, if campaign announcements and stump speeches don’t matter, if
endorsements (Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds for DeSantis and New Hampshire
Governor Chris Sununu for Haley) don’t matter, then what is the point of
chronicling the GOP nomination fight?