Peggy Noonan on the recent election's implication for the GOP

...On the outcome as we know it: The MAGA movement and Donald Trump took it right in the face. Normal conservatives and Republicans fared well. Trump-endorsed candidates went down. Everyone knows the famous examples—Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Tudor Dixon, who lost by 10 points in Michigan. All embraced Mr. Trump, some sincerely, many opportunistically, all consistently. A Hollywood director once said of pragmatic choices, and we paraphrase, that it’s one thing to temporarily reside up someone’s organ of elimination but it’s wrong to build a condo up there, people will notice and get a poor impression. That’s sort of what happened.

Less noticed so far: In Michigan, Democrats flipped both chambers of the Legislature. Republicans lost the state Senate for the first time in almost 40 years. Trump-backed candidates lost big races. The nonpartisan Bridge Michigan said the election should be “a wake-up call for the GOP to move on from Donald Trump’s obsessive quest to re-litigate his 2020 loss.” Jason Roe, a former head of the state party, said the GOP can continue to tilt at windmills or win elections, and if it does the former, “it’s gonna be a rough decade ahead of us.”

Ronna McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, lives in Michigan. Think she noticed?

On the other hand Team Normie pretty much flourished east to west. Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire won by 15 points, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia by more than 7, and of course Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by nearly 20.

The weirdness of the Trump candidates—their inexperience and fixations, their air of constant yet meaningless conflict, their sheer abnormality—asked too much of voters, who said no.

On Mr. Trump himself, everything has been said, including in this space for a long time. An esteemed Tory political figure summed it up succinctly in London in August: “Donald Trump ruined the Republican Party’s brand.”

It will now stick with him or not. It will live free or die.

If, in 2024, Republicans aren’t serious about policy—about what they claim to stand for—they will pick him as their nominee. And warm themselves in the glow of the fire as he goes down in flames. If they’re serious about the things they claim to care about—crime, wokeness, etc.—they’ll choose someone else and likely win.

Read the rest here.

A few issues I see going forward. Trump is going to run. Period. His ego won't allow him not to. And with Trump, it's always about him. If he is denied the nomination, he will almost certainly reject the results and divide the party. He would rather burn the GOP to the ground than concede defeat. And yes, he can do that. He still retains a very sizeable number of supporters whose loyalty can only be described as quasi-religious. 

If he wins the nomination, he is all but certain to go down in flames. Again.

Beyond all of this, the Democrats now have a boogey man that may help them win elections for who knows how long. Trump has become their new Herbert Hoover. After his defeat in 1932, the Democrats ran against Hoover for the next 30 years, with a great deal of success. Every GOP candidate going forward is likely to be tarred as a Trumpist, irrespective of how true it is. And if they try to deny it, then they will risk the wrath of the MAGA wing of the party. 

Lastly, there is the "what if" question surrounding Trump's legal problems. By my count there are at least four criminal investigations and countless civil suits where he is either a target or a person of interest. Of the four criminal cases, one, the Manhattan DA's fraud case appears to have stalled with the DA signaling that he is not ready to pull the trigger on an indictment. The DOJ's January 6 investigation is cloaked in secrecy, and nobody seems to really know where that is going. The Fulton County DA in Georgia has indicated that she is hoping to wrap up the special grand jury by the year's end. So, if indictments are coming, that could be fairly soon. 

But Trump's greatest peril appears to lie in what is being dubbed document-gate. Even some of the most solidly trumpian commentators and legal experts are acknowledging that if the DOJ really wants to nail him, the evidence that Trump effectively stole large numbers of US government documents, including state secrets of the highest level, and repeatedly lied about it to the Feds, is overwhelming. 

And his response has not helped. The usual barrage of lies, accusations of witch-hunts (his favorite term), and official misconduct without evidence are not having much effect beyond seeming to put a chip on his shoulder and daring the DOJ to indict him. 

I think the next six months are going to be very interesting times, in the sense of the Chinese proverb.