Republican Joe Walsh is challenging Trump – but that is nothing to celebrate

Donald Trump has been very good for a lot of very bad people’s careers. Take Sean Spicer, for example. Spicer lied through his teeth during his stint as White House press secretary and has been rewarded with a gig at Harvard and a spot on Dancing With the Stars – where, presumably, he will continue to prance around the truth. His successor, Sarah Sanders, is joining Fox News. Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted only 10 days as Trump’s communications director, has reinvented himself as a high-profile critic of his former boss.

The latest odious person to scramble aboard the Trump gravy train is Joe Walsh, a rightwing talk-radio host and former congressman. On Sunday, Walsh announced he would challenge Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination because “we all know [he] is unfit” to lead – which is a dramatic change of tack from 2016, when Walsh tweeted: “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”

Walsh is Trump’s second primary challenger; Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, threw his hat in the ring earlier this year. You would be forgiven for not knowing this, as Weld’s candidacy generated little interest and he is way behind Trump in the polls. Weld poses no threat to Trump. Walsh, on the other hand, may just.

Let’s be clear: Walsh is not someone to root for. He is basically a carbon copy of the president, just less orange. Like Trump, Walsh has a long history of racism, tweeting things such as: “We LOWERED the bar for Obama. He was held to a lower standard cuz he was black.” Like Trump, he is a self-aggrandising narcissist. And, like Trump, Walsh has a hard time practising the “family values” the Republican party likes to preach: in 2011, for example, Walsh’s ex-wife sued him for more than $117,000 (£71,500) in child support. (The pair later issued a statement saying they “now agree that Joe is not and was not a ‘deadbeat dad’”.)

Now that he is running for the Republican nomination, Walsh has apologised for his past bigotry and his role in helping to “create Trump”. I suppose there is a tiny chance that Walsh is genuinely a changed man. What is more likely is that he reckons there is a payday in all this. Motives aside, though, he may be the biggest threat yet to Trump’s chances in 2020. After all, in the past 50 years, every sitting president who has faced a serious challenge from his own party went on to lose in the general election.

While Trump’s team purport not to see Walsh as a serious challenger (their reaction to his announcement was “whatever”), Walsh is seriously good at squirming his way into the limelight. He may not turn Trump’s cult-like base away from him, but he may get more conservatives to speak out against the president – he is already urging Republicans to “say publicly what you believe privately”. At the very least, there is a good chance that Walsh’s attention-seeking antics will distract and frazzle Trump.

Of course, even if Walsh ends up hurting Trump’s re-election prospects, his candidacy is not something to celebrate. Whatever happens, we should mourn the fact that Trump has set the presidential bar so low that a radio host who has been openly racist and can’t pay child support on time thinks he is qualified for the most powerful job in the world.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Topics

US elections 2020

Opinion

Donald Trump

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