Flicking into the 2024 Republican primary debates of 2023, Trump sitting off to the side under the protection of Judge Cannon, a simple observation — all of them, while sucking in both the pre and post-Trump real of ways they can, and generally dancing around with the biggie of January 6, are better for small ‘d’ American democracy than Trump, and the nation will be better off if any of them get through — with one exception. So I am sitting there with the “Anyone but Ramaswamy for Anyone But Trump” conclusion.

The debasement of the political scene since then now has brought in new despicable creatures — Bobby Kennedy, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, newly political Elon Musk — and dragged your Marco Rubio into more despicable territory, while Rubio played his part with a quick strike on Venezuela as prelude to Iran. So I suppose we now sit at seeing the Republican field of 2028 and wishing for the halcyon days of the Republican field of 2024.

There was a logic to the path off of Access Hollywood — a view of cynicism that, yeah, Hillary must have been sitting on that and let us not be beaten by the cynical machinations of the Hillary Clinton campaign for “locker room talk” of long time ago and Clinton is not outraged at all but a little too gleeful. But the lesson learned by Trump — and the Republican tacks us to the no-holds barred steel grip — Dewine voices the descipableness of the Ramaswamy ad — Vance steps in and voices the descipableness of any hard-wringing on the ad, Trump steps in and calls Dewine a RINO and ungrateful for his support, and Dewine re-iterates his support for Ramaswamy, and becomes 2026’s 2016 Paul Ryan. The other great purpose looms out of “they’re eating the dogs, cats” — the Vance defends that if he has to make things up to get the media to pay attention, and you get that over on Ramaswamy’s kvetch that she is not debating him and she lies generally.

Seen this way, the looming defeat of Ramaswamy will be more satisfying than the overall defeat of Republicans across the board — the former a stand in for justice against the politics due to the specifics of the case — it only needs to happen once and there it did, the latter elicits a shrug that “yeah, but it needs to happen more than once, it didn’t when it mattered two years ago, and no one can be deserving of it happening multiple times — so there is not much to cheer on here.

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