The Republican National Committee on Friday released their requirements for candidates who want to participate in the 2024 primary debates, most of it reasonable enough like minimum polling at or above 1 percent nationally and/or in the early states and more than of 40,000 individual donors.

It’s down at the bottom with the long-rumored “Have signed pledge agreeing to support the eventual party nominee,” that’s going to cause a problem with their leading and all but prohibitive favorite candidate that makes us wonder why the hell they even bothered putting it in there. Just merely expecting him to sign it is going to be perceived as a grave insult to his orange magnificence when he’s already threatening to skip one or both of the first two debates, thereby depriving the other candidates of oxygen and exposure they need. Maybe he will just sign it without a fuss though, who knows. Expecting him to honor it in the unlikely event he doesn’t win is something else.

There’s a narrow, but not impossible scenario in which Trump’s legal problems become so overwhelmingly bad that a significant-enough chunk of soft-MAGA Republicans say “Oh fuck he’s so screwed, we need a different candidate now,” triggering a major, rapid consolidation around Ron DeSantis or maybe Tim Scott, kind of like when most of the 2020 Dem field dropped out and fell in with Biden overnight after he won South Carolina. They’d still be stuck with 35 percent of the base as die-hard Trump fanboys who will not under any circumstances abide another candidate, to say nothing of Trump himself who we have a very hard time seeing endorsing the nominee, let alone resisting the need to keep “fighting” in a third-party campaign. Even having this “loyalty pledge” is the very thing that’s going to put such ideas in the head of a 76 year-old sociopath who will never run again after 2024 and thus has nothing to lose by burning bridges with the RNC.