YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT, EVEN IF YOU'RE A RIGHT-WING BILLIONAIRE

Mainstream Republicans and their billionaire backers are making it so easy for Donald Trump. Six months before the first contest, they're talking about bailing on Ron DeSantis. Some are considering a switch to Tim Scott. Rupert Murdoch is telling friends he wishes Glenn Youngkin would enter the race. They're splitting anti-Trump support and energy at a time when they should coalescing behind one candidate.

My unpopular opinion is that it was always unreasonable to expect DeSantis to do any better than he's doing. As soon as Donald Trump was indicted, he became unbeatable -- GOP voters rallied around him the way Democratic and independent voters rallied around Bill Clinton when he was impeached. Sure, DeSantis is a thoroughly unpleasant person and a lousy retail politician, but GOP voters still like him a lot -- just not as much as Trump. He's still solidly in second place in every national and state poll. In the most recent Morning Consult survey, he has a 66% approval rating among potential Republican primary voters, just 8 points behind Trump, and ahead of every other candidate in the field by double digits. He's the first choice of 17% of respondents in that poll and the second choice of 39% of people who prefer Trump, which suggests that he'd be at 56% if Trump were out of the race.

I know that billionaires don't like being told that they can't do something they want to do, but they simply can't beat Trump among GOP voters. He can't lose the nomination unless he decides he's so overwhelmed by legal problems that he shouldn't stay in the race -- which is unlikely -- or unless he dies or has a serious health crisis that forces him from the race. Which could happen!

But the billionaires want what they want, and they don't want to be told they can't have it. So some of them will switch to Scott, even though he's Black and soft-spoken and never actually owns the libs, all of which makes it highly unlikely that he can win over more than a handful of additional GOP voters. Even if Scott reaches the low double digits, he won't hurt Trump, because nobody can. He'll only hurt DeSantis, making him look like a real loser, and possibly ruining his political future (which is a good thing, because DeSantis is a fascist and would probably do more damage to America as president than Trump). But the plutocrats don't get this. They'll find out when the Dump DeSantis strategy fails as badly as the DeSantis Can Beat Trump strategy has. .