It's All Much Worse Than You Think

There are no "good" outcomes from where we stand now.

This guy. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

1. The Future

Now that the novelty of living in a world with the mugshot of a former president has worn off, we can think about the future.

To that end, Republican pollster Whit Ayres sat down with Bill Kristol last for another insightful conversation that is worth your time.

Ayres’s main takeaways are:

• Today, Monday August 28, is important because we get a trial date for the Jack Smith election interference case.

• If there is a trial before the Republican convention and Trump is not found guilty, he will be the Republican nominee.

• Absent that, there may be a lane for another Republican to seriously challenge him, but those odds are long and require candidate consolidation.

• If Trump is the nominee, he could absolutely win the general election.

• The Democrats still have time to move off of Biden/Harris and have an attractive bench, including potential candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro.

That all sounds bad. Yet I feel like I’m Tom Cruise in the first Mission: Impossible and Whit is Luther Stickell.

LUTHER: I can’t just hack my way inside. There’s no modem access to the mainframe, it's in a stand-alone. I’d have to be physically at the terminal.

ETHAN: Luther, relax, it’s worse than you think.

Yeah. As bad as Ayres makes things sound, it’s worse than he thinks.

First: Let’s take the trial date, because now we have one: March 4, 2024. Which is bad.

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