Today is Monday, February 26, 2024. Delving into something the Republican frontrunner recently said to his slavish supporters about the party being so united, The Nation contributor John Nichols shredded that declaration from the Delusional One named Chump in an online article entitled “Trump Says ‘Republicans Have Never Been So United.’ He’s delusional.”

Nichols begins his article, stating, “as the party’s immediate former president, a virtual incumbent, he’s losing over a third of the vote in the primaries and caucuses.”

After losing 40 percent of the vote in South Carolina’s presidential primary on Saturday, Donald Chump claimed, with his usual combination of bravado and delusion, “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.”

Nichols calls this out for the lie that it is and it’s the lie that he likes to tell himself.

This quote is very encouraging for those who believe in democracy and its preservation from Nichols: “The fact that the base of potential Republican voters is deeply divided about Trump, and that’s very good news for Joe Biden and the Democrats.”

Nichols mentions that Drumpf will “run as a wounded candidate who is far more vulnerable to losing a substantial portion of his base than past GOP nominees who were in similar circumstances.”

Even though Nichols concedes that Drumpf will get endorsements from many prominent Republicans (it’s just been reported that Senate Minority Leader “Bitch ” McConnell might actually consider giving his support to Drumpf as the 2024 presidential candidate), “including scads of governors, senators, and House members,” Chump is still not gaining anywhere near the sort of support that incumbent Republicans – or even prominent frontrunners – received in the past.

After five primary and caucus contests, Trump is winning under 59.5 percent of the overall total of votes cast. Most of the remaining votes have gone to Dump’s female rival, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Haley’s candidacy is seen in a better light when reviewing the numbers of her overall votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, the Virgin Islands, and South Carolina which average about 36.8 percent of the overall vote. This total is a measure of the opposition to Drumpf within his own party. Haley’s primary numbers have confirmed that the GOP is divided over Drumpf.

Drumpf is losing a higher percentage of the vote than Republican presidential contenders in similar positions to his own. And exit polls show that repugnican primary voters who are rejecting him are doing so for a reason: They’ve got qualms about his fitness for the office. Those concerns would be confirmed by a criminal conviction.

To buttress those concerns, 36 percent of GOP primary voters in South Carolina said they’d consider Chump unfit for office if he were convicted of a crime – “a very real prospect, as several of the former president’s many trials are likely to be scheduled for before the 2024 election.”

That number is even higher in New Hampshire, an actual battleground state, where the “Trump would be unfit” number among Republican primary voters is 47 percent.

A deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden, Quentin Fulks, described the dire situation for Drumpf this way: “The GOP primary has laid bare the stark and indisputable reality that while Trump has the united support of his MAGA base, he is struggling to make himself palatable to these key constituencies that will ultimately decide the election this November.”

Thus, as Nichols concludes in his article, “Trump can talk all he wants about a ‘unified’ Republican Party. He’s wrong. It’s deeply divided, and Joe Biden’s reelection bid will benefit from that division.”

So here is one different view of Drumpf’s supposedly “crushing” primary wins which have inspired much worry and hand-wringing from Democrats who worry about a Drumpf win in November. This is encouraging news for the incumbent overall.

It’s getting late here since I was on the phone earlier talking to “Harold,” my very good New Jersey friend. After discussing politics initially, we moved to more personal issues for discussion. We talked for quite some time.

Stay safe and be well.