This is an opinion column.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wants us to speak the truth, but he’s not capable of doing it himself. He demands accountability for losing elections, but he willfully ignores the most responsible leader. At the latest Republican presidential debate, Ramaswamy’s performance perfectly demonstrated the metastasizing malady perpetuating the GOP’s electoral failures.

According to Ramaswamy, Republicans “have become a party of losers at the end of the day.” He is unmistakably correct. We’re repeatedly losing winnable elections against inferior candidates. President Joe Biden and Sen. John Fetterman aren’t the best Democrats can muster, but they were victorious nevertheless. In Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia the GOP has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

“Let’s speak the truth,” Ramaswamy crowed at the Miami debate. “We have to have accountability in our party,” he boldly declared. “Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022…no red wave that never came. We got trounced last night in 2023.”

I had to check again to make sure I heard that right.

Since 2017, Republican failure is the fault of McDaniel? That’s equivalent to blaming the sinking of the Titanic on the cruise director. If only there were better entertainment and food for the guests, the ship wouldn’t have hit the iceberg.

Since 2016, who has been the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party? Who promised us so much winning we’d get tired of it? I’ll give you one guess, and it isn’t McDaniel.

As Ramaswamy rails against the cancer in the GOP establishment, it’s clear that he’s suffering from the same. We’re now witnessing the progressive stages of the GOP’s disease. The first symptom was the delusion that Donald Trump actually won in 2020. At first, it was easy to parrot the popular Republican narrative that Biden stole the election. Every Republican was doing it. After all, COVID did create irregularities. These days, continuing the narrative requires Republicans to willfully ignore mounding evidence that Trump and his inner circle knew the truth and lied about it.

The second stage of the GOP’s illness is a fevered, albeit partial, return to reality where Republicans like Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and others admit that the GOP has indeed been losing. Under normal circumstances, acknowledging the truth would be an encouraging sign. Sadly, even the Republicans running for president can’t bring themselves to hammer Trump for all the failures under his leadership.

To be fair, the mental block carries a degree of rationality. Trump has seen a lot of winning in Republican strongholds. With few exceptions, elected Republicans bend the knee to him at every turn. They’re extremely reticent to criticize the former president, and each official predictably pivots to political persecution or something Hunter Biden did. The leader of the GOP being a millstone around the necks of Republicans in tough general elections simply does not compute.

Trump is a largely unstoppable force in GOP primaries and dead weight in countless competitive general elections. That is a difficult pill to swallow for Republicans who desperately wish it wasn’t so.

Ramaswamy knows that, so he aggressively attacks…McDaniel. The current head of the Republican National Committee could resign, lay prostrate in the DC streets, and accept singular responsibility for all the GOP’s electoral failures. It wouldn’t make any difference in the elections ahead. Most voters don’t even know her.

So the sickness grows.

Ramaswamy indeed lived up to his promise to be “unhinged” at the debate, but he can’t bring himself to be honest about the losing he has so clearly observed. As it turns out, Trump proxies have quite rigid operational parameters.

The final stage of the GOP’s disease is a listless inertia from accepting Trump as he truly is without a particularly interesting alternative. The thrill is gone, but half the country who isn’t voting for Biden has to vote for someone, right? In truth, Biden is such a horrible candidate that a beleaguered GOP lead by Trump still has a slim chance at winning. Trump would have to run the table in beating the charges against him, but stranger things have happened.

Alternatively, Republicans could go with Haley who would blow Biden out of the water and begin a new generation of GOP leadership. Gov. Ron DeSantis would fare roughly the same against Biden as Trump, but he’s not looking at 94 felony charges. They’re both better options for the future of the GOP, but they’re similar to downing Robitussin for a cough. It really helps, but nobody is excited about taking it.

As Ramaswamy noted, the delusional symptoms of the GOP’s sickness are widespread. No matter the stage, the fever isn’t broken. Republicans won’t recover until aspiring politicians like Ramaswamy encounter so much losing that actually tell the whole truth.

More Cameron Smith columns:

Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and an extremely patient wife. He’s a partner in a media company, a business strategy wonk, and a regular on talk radio. Please direct outrage or agreement to [email protected] or @DCameronSmith on X or @davidcameronsmith on Threads.