ANDREW NEIL: It’s looking like Trump’s days are numbered 

It’s over for Donald Trump. He still doesn’t quite realize it, but even he is beginning to make out the writing on the wall. His hopes of returning to the White House triumphantly by winning the 2024 presidential election, vindicating all his nonsense about a ‘stolen’ 2020 election, look increasingly bleak.

Meanwhile, the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol is considering criminal prosecutions against him and several of his closest allies.

And on Tuesday, a jury in New York convicted the Trump Organization of criminal tax fraud.

Far from being the vote-winning machine of his own mythology, it is finally dawning on even the dumbest of Republicans (of whom there are far too many these days) that Trump is a serial vote loser.

And the ultimate evidence of that came this week when, in a crucial runoff in Georgia for a key Senate seat, another Trump-backed candidate was defeated in what should have been a winnable election for Republicans.

Trump effectively imposed Herschel Walker on the Georgia Republicans in the Senate race. His endorsement of his old friend, a famous former football star, scared the best and most credible Republican contenders.

Trump claimed that Walker would be “unstoppable.” Obviously, that turned out not to be true. What was true, thanks to Trump, was that Georgia Republicans went into battle with a rookie candidate who had not been tested or vetted. It wasn’t long before his campaign fizzled out.

His explanation for climate change was that the United States was sending “good” air to China, but China was sending “bad” air in return. The scientific literature is strangely silent on this interpretation. Standing on a hardline pro-life and anti-abortion platform, it soon emerged that he had encouraged his pregnant girlfriends to have abortions, and in at least one case even paid for it.

None of this mattered to Trump. Walker checked the only box the former president cares about: He agreed with Trump that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. But it all mattered to the good people of Georgia.

Walker lost by three percentage points. Not much, I hear you say. Which is true. But consider this: In every race across the state of Georgia in last month’s midterm elections, anti-Trump Republicans won.

Brian Kemp, whom Trump loathes because he rejected Trump’s claims of a “stolen election” in 2020, was reelected governor with an eight-point lead. His secretary of state won by nine points, his attorney general by five points.

All Republicans. All clearly distanced from Trump. In fact, Walker was the only Republican to lose in a Georgia state election. It’s a voting pattern that’s not unique to the Peach State.

Much has been made of how the Republicans underperformed in last month’s midterm elections. They failed to take the Senate and only narrowly recaptured the House. They certainly did a lot worse than I expected. But contrary to popular perception, there was a ‘red wave’: it was simply limited to those races in which Republicans fielded anti-Trump candidates.

Kemp’s convincing victory as governor of Georgia was not an isolated result. Anti-Trump Republicans running for re-election as governor in Texas, Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire won convincing victories. Most impressive of all was the re-election of Ron DeSantis as governor of booming Florida.

It won a landslide of 20 points in what amounts to Trump’s home state, given that the former president spends most of his time these days at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. You can understand why DeSantis is now Donald’s public enemy number one.

Republicans sought winnable gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona. They entered the fray with Trump-backed hopefuls. they all lost.

Republicans also had a good chance of winning Senate seats in New Hampshire, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. They only needed one to take control of the Senate. In all four states, they fielded Trump-backed candidates, all of whom publicly adopted Trump’s “stolen election” mantra. In all four they lost, often poorly in what should have been close races.

The one exception to this litany of Trump failures was Ohio, where JD Vance (of Hillbilly Elegy fame) scored a six-point victory in the Senate race.

But only after the Republican party flooded the state with $32 million in campaign funds to save the day, even though Ohio is an increasingly red state. The Republican gubernatorial candidate clearly not Trump won by 26 points.

“We’re going to win so much,” Trump once boasted, “that you’re going to get sick and tired of winning.” But the Republicans are now sick and tired of losing. It makes you wonder what the Democrats would do without him.

Since Trump’s upset victory in 2016 against the generally disliked Hillary Clinton (even then she got three million more votes than he did), he has posted a consistent record of electoral defeat.

The 2018 midterm elections came as a surprise to Republicans, not helped by Trump’s declining personal approval ratings since 2016. He lost the White House in 2020 and then sabotaged both Georgia Senate elections in early 2021, which ensured that the Republicans lost that camera as well.

He is the main reason Republicans fared much worse than expected in this year’s midterm elections, with the Senate held by Democrats.

None of this, of course, has stopped Trump from deciding to run for president again although, oddly enough, he has done very little in terms of fundraising or campaigning since announcing his candidacy in mid-November. Perhaps he is realizing that it will not be the perfect coronation that he expected.

But he has worked to make himself even more persona non grata in the eyes of the American mainstream. He recently hosted a dinner party at his Mar-a-Lago retreat with a despicable white supremacist and anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes, and Ye (the rapper formerly known as Kanye West), also a notorious anti-Semite.

Far from coming to terms with his 2020 loss, he recently stepped up the rhetoric, even claiming that the ‘stolen election’ was so egregious that it should result in the ‘termination of all rules, regulations and articles, including those found in the Constitution ‘.

Calling for the suspension of the Constitution, a sacred document in the United States, is extreme even by Trump’s standards. But it adds to the growing sense among Republicans that he is now a serious electoral liability.

He has been dismayed by the diminishing attention he receives in the media these days. As a result, there’s almost nothing he doesn’t do or say in a desperate attempt to stay relevant and in the public eye.

It is always a mistake to dismiss Trump entirely. He still has the support of the central Republican vote, a crucial asset in the primaries. Polls show him holding a comfortable lead over DeSantis, his strongest rival to date.

If there is anything like the 16 Republican candidates in the 2016 primary, Trump could pass with 40 percent of the vote, while the other 60 percent goes to everyone else.

But the primary campaign is still a long way off, there is plenty of time for the anti-Trumpers to consolidate around the best opposition to him, and his grip on the Republican base is already waning. Nothing you’re doing is likely to reverse that.

He is also aided by a weak Republican leadership, who are still too cowardly to attack him unless he unleashes the party’s base on them. A host of Republican bigwigs were quick to condemn any idea of ​​suspending the constitution, but none of the current party bosses dared to condemn Trump explicitly. It was a heartbreaking display of cowardice.

Still, it seems that Trump’s days are numbered. Republicans outside of his cult core are getting tired of his trick. His underdog status is etching itself more and more into Republican minds. Some brave voices in the party are now openly attacking him. More will follow as he veers into even wilder territory to keep his face on the news channels. There is a growing desire to just keep going.

The broader benefits would be historic. If Trump is not the Republican nominee, the pressure on President Biden not to run again would be irresistible. Trump’s exit from the scene, then, would herald a much-needed and overdue generational shift in American politics, on the left and the right, both wings dominated for too long by the Trump-Biden generation.

Far from being the Comeback Kid, Trump would be relegated to Yesterday’s Man. He won’t like that. But he would give him more time to deal with all the lawsuits and investigations currently pressing on him.