SO I GUESS MARCO RUBIO WON'T LOSE A PRIMARY TO IVANKA AFTER ALL

The Daily Mail says Ivanka Trump is doing damage control -- but if the story is accurate, she's doing it wrong.

Ivanka Trump is planning to attend Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20 - much to her father's chagrin - and is scrambling to save her aspiring political career....

'Ivanka is worried that her promising political career is in jeopardy and she's doing whatever she can to save her reputation,' a White House insider tells DailyMail.com.

But President Trump is up in arms about Ivanka's decision.

'He said it's an insult that she would even want to engage with the crooks that are trying to bring him down,' says the insider, adding that Trump said the family must stand together and put on a united front.

'The president told his daughter that her presence at the inauguration will cost her thousands of supporters and would be the worst decision she could ever make,' they say.

But Ivanka is convinced that by attending Biden's inauguration she will come across as 'being a good sport and will gain future supporters,' the source says.

'She said she has to protect her own political aspirations and isn't about to muck it all up by attending her dad's 2024 campaign kick-off which is set for the same day. She's leaving that for her dad and Don Jr.'

Daddy is absolutely right. This might be the right approach if there were jungle primaries In Florida, where I assume Ivanka intends to run for Senate against Marco Rubio, but she has to win a Republican primary first. She's a sure loser if she's conciliatory toward Biden, who won't be accepted as a legitimate president by GOP voters two years from now any more than he is today (and that will be especially true of Republican primary voters, who tend to be particularly zealous ideologues).

So does this mean Rubio is a lock to be renominated? I doubt it. I can easily imagine that Ivanka will still run, and that she and Rubio will raise a lot of big-donor cash to beat each other ... and that they'll split the not-completely-crazy vote and lose the primary to an utter nutjob who raises a lot of cash from people who consume right-wing media fourteen hours a day -- someone like, say, Matt Gaetz, or even Laura Loomer or Roger Stone.

It would be nice to believe that we're seeing peak Republican insanity in January 2021, but trust me: Until the Republican Party start routinely losing elections it should win, or regularly losing by blowout margins in contests that should be tossups, it's going to keep getting crazier. The vast majority of Republicans, even the supposedly sane ones, would vote for Gaetz, Loomer, or Stone in a general election. Until there's a limit to what those voters will accept in a GOP candidate, there'll be no limit to how far off the edge the GOP will go.