Regarding Trump’s eligibility to be POTUS per the 14th Amendment — Kate Riga at TPM has a rundown on what people are doing to get Trump declared ineligible. See also Protecting the Constitution from Trump by Gerard N. Magliocca at Washington Monthly. Although it’s a long shot to work, at the moment enough important people are taking it seriously that the ineligibility theory needs to be factored into the Republican nomination contest. Next year’s presidential elections are likely to be an even bigger chaotic nightmare than these things usually are.

Also at TPM, see The Plutocrats’ Low Energy Bark by Josh Marshall. Josh Marshall wonders why no alternative to Trump has broken out of the pack. “The only surprise to me is that there hasn’t been any coalescence behind a new guy, even as DeSantis’s campaign has become little more than a running joke,” he writes.

Along these lines, Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire and son of odious piece of slime John Sununu, whom I’m sure many of you remember, has an op ed in the New York Times. In this Sununu the Younger practically begs the GOP presidential candidates to stop tip-toeing around Trump and go after him. He is certain that Trump would not only lose the 2024 election but would be a disaster for other GOP candidates. “Every candidate with an (R) next to their name, from school board to the statehouse, will be left to answer for the electoral albatross at the top of the ticket,” he writes. And he thinks Trump is beatable, not just in the general but in the primaries as well.

The headlines tell us that Trump’s lead over the other candidates is growing. But to continue Sununu’s argument, this is partly because the “other” votes are being broken up among so many other candidates. “After the results from Iowa come in, it is paramount that the field must shrink, before the New Hampshire primary, to the top three or four,” Sununu writes. Candidates who stay in the race who have no viable way to win need to be called out.

The Republican base makes no sense to me. I’m not going to predict that some not-Trump candidate can somehow catch fire and challenge His Orangeness, or which one that might be.

And if Trump realizes he has a genuine rival for the nomination, there could be a literal bloodbath. Trump is fighting for his life. He’ll stop at nothing to get his way.