If Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan decided to be a presidential candidate next year, she would be barred from the debates.

The GOP debate rules include a pledge to support the Republican 2024 presidential nominee, and Ms. Noonan makes it clear, from the opening paragraph of her latest weekend column, that she would not back a Trump candidacy.

Noonan declares in her lede paragraph that if "Trump Republicans" nominate the former president next year, "they will have ended the Republican Party."  So there be no mistaking her comment as mere figurative remark, she declares in the following paragraph: "I mean it literally.  The GOP will disappear as a party.  Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear."

Peggy Noonan in 2016 (photo credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 license).

As the title of this screed indicates — "Chris Christie and the Republican Party's Peril'' — Noonan spends half the column discussing the "expected" entry of the former bullying governor of New Jersey in the GOP 2024 presidential field.  (Is such an entry now viable in view of the requirement that all presidential debaters pledge their support for the nominee?  Christie backing Mr. Trump?  Not likely.)

This is to suggest that Peggy Noonan should receive the Liz Cheney Award for Political Prognostication Premised on Poor Perceptions of Donald J. Trump.  More briefly, Peggy Noonan abhors the idea that conservatism should be tempered by populism rather than elitism.

The neo-totalitarians in our politics are desperately straining to convince the American people that they are incipient terrorists if they support conservative populism, better known today as the MAGA movement.  Peggy Noonan has signaled with her June 3–4 column that she will not shrink from joining the anti-freedom movement that will tear the country apart if she has her way.

This observer has in mind the image of shopkeepers putting up plywood to protect storefronts on lower Broadway, near Manhattan's Union Square, the day before the 2020 presidential election.  The plywood was placed on glass windows in anticipation of a violent leftist response in case Trump won re-election.

It seems to this observer that before Republican National Chairwoman Ronna (niece to Mitt Romney) McDaniel posts terms for GOP candidates, she should demand that the Democrat party pledge to denounce in the strongest terms any leftist violence should a Republican win the 2024 presidential election.

The riots throughout the summer of 2020 were dismissed by Democrats as "peaceful protests."  Democrats who reflexively shout "insurrection" when conservatives petition government for a redress of grievances can be expected, in the absence of a pledge to denounce post-Election Day 2024 rioting, not only to cheer on the rioters, but to blame the Republicans for the violence.