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As alternative right-wing ideas have crept into mainstream American politics, its imperative to understand why. Where exactly did the alt-right come from? If this racist ideology is an alternative, what are its leaders rebelling against? Alt-right is an alternative to what?

Saif Shahin, an American University School of Communication professor, has expertise in global media and politics, critical data studies, and digital discourses. He researched the digital interactions of alt-right leaders to better ascertain how their influence proliferated.

We tracked the diffusion of the alt-right ideology on Twitter between 2009 and 2016 on a year-by-year basis. And we got some very interesting results, says Shahin, an assistant professor of communication studies and a faculty fellow with the Internet Governance Lab.

Shahin co-authored the paper on alt-right Twitter with Margaret Ng, a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Theyll present the paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January, and it will be published in the conference proceedings.

The origin of the alt-right movement can be traced to a live speech in late 2008, just after Barack Obama was elected president. Paul Gottfried, a self-described paleoconservative, gave the address at the H.L. Mencken Club titled The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.

Gottfried asserted that neoconservative figures who had become prominent during the George W. Bush administration had failed. As Shahin interprets the speech, Gottfried was questioning how mainstream conservatives couldnt prevent the election of the nations first black president.

The alt-right movement basically started as a reaction to Obamas election in 2008. Not that these tendencies havent been there for much longer, Shahin says. But the idea they proposed was that the conservative movement needed to return to its roots. Hence, the need for an alternative right.

Shahin and Ng looked at the Twitter activity of 18 accounts previously identified as white nationalist by George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism. Some represent racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, and Neo-Confederates, and others are more cult-like independent figures. The two researchers measured how frequently alt-right leaders original tweets were retweeted, and they did a year-by-year social network analysis of who was retweeting whom. What they found was a movement that spread exponentially from 2009 through 2016.

Obamas early period in office was relatively quiet for the emerging alt-right, even as the so-called Tea Party was making waves in established political circles. In 2009, most of these white nationalist accounts were not even operational. We only saw 59 retweets that year, he says. By 2012, there were up to 6,265 retweets.

That year, Obama was up for re-election, which kickstarted a flurry of alt-right online activity. 2012 was a pivotal moment for white nationalism, Shahin says. The second coming of Obama was its big fear.

Another critical event in 2012 was the death of Trayvon Martin, an African American high school student shot by George Zimmerman. When Zimmerman was controversially acquittedhe claimed self-defenseit helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement online. But according to Shahins research, it also caused a spike in anti-black racist vitriol and retweets by alt-right leaders.

Alt-right retweets grew steadily from 2012 through 2014, and then Shahin and Ng saw a big jump in 2015. What happened during that time? Donald Trump arrived on the scene and announced his run for the presidency.

Then in 2016, it just exploded, he says. Even in 2015, we found around 27,000 retweets. By the next year, we were looking at more than 258,000 retweets.

This research does not exploreand takes no position onwhether Trump is using white nationalist rhetoric. It also doesnt analyze Trumps tweets or whos retweeting him. But Shahin and Ng do argue that alt-right leaders took inspiration from Trumps presidential campaign. Crucially, Shahin explains, Trump became a cause for alt-right Twitter to unite around.

Initially, with Nazis or Neo-Confederates, there was not a lot of retweeting across these groups. So even as they were growing, they were kind of growing on their own, Shahin says. In 2016, we see that these groups shed their differences and closed ranks around Trumps leadership. A fragmented movement thus came together and became a blowhorn for Trump on Twitter.

Another interesting finding is the centrality of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, to white-nationalist online unification and growth. While some media outlets portray the alt-right as a phenomenon of young, angry white menwho happen to be internet-savvyDuke is in his late 60s and has been steeped in white hate activism for decades. (Duke is depicted in Spike Lees film BlacKkKlansman, which is set in the early 1970s.)

While some observers characterize online hate as just hot air or trolling, Shahin notes that upswings of Twitter racismwhich happened in 2012 and 2016coincide with violence against minorities in physical spaces.

Offline, during these periods, you see increasing numbers of attacks on black youth by the police and vigilantes. Following Trayvon Martin, you see a whole series of shootings in different parts of the country, he says. Digital politics is very closely related to real-world politics. If white shooters get acquitted, it encourages more white people to think that, this is legitimate. This is acceptable. That leads them to go online and post more racist tweets or retweet other white nationalists. The online vitriol, in turn, feeds offline angst in day-to-day interactions between whites and non-whites.

As they monitored a steady increase of alt-right retweets from 2009 to 2016, Twitter itself expanded substantially. But Shahin says thats part of the story, too.

Twitter grew because it started being adopted by more and more constituencies, and they used social media to spread their message, he says. One part of that story is the so-called Black Twitter, which other scholars have studied. Another part, which not many have paid attention to, is what we call White Twitter.

As a platform, Twitter can be used for widely supported charitable causes or nefarious purposes. But its role as a meeting place for like-minded individuals is a 21st century reality.

It enabled the formation of these networks where people could practice and reaffirm their own identitiesby connecting with others like them.

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Lana Lokteff, pictured, runs an alt-right media company to promote her white nationalist ideologies. But critics say that kind of outspokenness from a growing number of female allies is at odds with how men in the movement view women's roles. Courtesy of Lana Lokteff hide caption

Lana Lokteff, pictured, runs an alt-right media company to promote her white nationalist ideologies. But critics say that kind of outspokenness from a growing number of female allies is at odds with how men in the movement view women's roles.

Last weekend, when white nationalists descended on Charlottesville to protest, it was clear that almost exclusively white, young males comprised the so-called alt-right movement there were women, but very few.

So where were the white women who weren't out protesting in the streets?

For the most part, journalist Seyward Darby discovered, they're online.

"It wasn't easy" seeking out the women of the alt-right, Darby tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "I spent a lot of time in the underbelly of the Internet Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, places like that digging up contact information."

In the Harper's Magazine September issue, journalist Seyward Darby digs into the aims of the alt-right's women allies. Courtesy of Harpers hide caption

Darby dives into the motivations behind the alt-right female alliance in her cover story for the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, "Rise of the Valkyries." She began her reporting around the time anti-Trump activists were organizing January's Women's March, when she wondered: What do the women who aren't in the resistance think about what's happening?

Many of these women came into the alt-right initially as anti-feminists.

"They were people who felt that the feminist progressive agenda was not serving them in some cases they felt like it was actively disregarding them because they wanted more traditional things: home, family, etc.," she says. "And they came into the movement through that channel and then ultimately adopted more pro-white and white nationalist views."

One of those women was Lana Lokteff, a Russian-American from Oregon who co-runs Red Ice, an alt-right media company, with her Swedish husband, Henrik Palmgren.

The couple decided to make this their cause around 2012, Darby says, when they say they saw a lot of "anti-white sentiment." Around the time of several high-profile police shootings of young, black men, Lokteff "felt that Black Lives Matter and these other reactive forces were being unfair to white people and that then sort of spun into a conspiracy about how the establishment, so to speak, is out to oppress, minimize and silence white people."

Lokteff, who promotes alt-right ideologies on the couple's YouTube channel, has been persistently trolled by the men of the movement. Darby wanted to understand what attracts women to a movement that is often hostile to them.

In her piece, she quotes Andrew Anglin, who runs the (now blacklisted) neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer as saying the white woman's womb "belongs to the males of society." And alt-right pioneer Richard Spencer, who acknowledges that women make up a small percentage of the movement, believes women are not suited for some roles in government, reports Mother Jones: "Women should never be allowed to make foreign policy," he tweeted during the first presidential debate. "It's not that they're 'weak.' To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds."

The thing they are most interested in is promoting the white race and they see [President Trump] as an opportunity someone whose coattails they can ride.

Seyward Darby, on whether alt-right members support Trump

According to Lokteff and other alt-right women allies she spoke to, Darby says, "It's not that men who support the alt-right don't like women, it's that they see women as fundamentally different than men," with equally important roles, which are "to perpetuate white bloodlines, to nurture family units, to inculcate those families with pro-white beliefs."

But the growing contradiction, as Darby points out, "is that people like Lana Lockteff and other women that I spoke to are outspoken."

She adds, "They sort of see themselves as straddling a line between the male and female norms, because they think that at this point in their movement, the more people they can bring in, the more people they can convince that they are on the right side of history, the better, and that includes appealing to more women."

To recruit women to the movement, Darby says, the key is to stoke fear.

Asked how she would pitch the alt-right to conservative white women who voted for Trump, but are also wary of being labeled a white supremacist, Lokteff told her, "we have a joke in the alt-right: How do you red-pill someone? ("Red-pill" is their word for converting someone to the cause.) And the punch line was: Have them live in a diverse neighborhood for a while," Darby says. "She also said that when she is talking to women she reminds them that white women are under threat from black men, brown men, emigrants, and really uses this concept of a rape scourge to bring them in."

And while there are schisms in the aims of alt-right activists, and how best to get there, she adds, "There are some people Lana Lokteff being one of them, Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute who are really trying to find some semblance of civic legitimacy."

On how she understands the term "alt-right"

The answer seems to be different depending on who you ask. ... It's not a formal, structured group. It is more a new term for people who believe in white nationalism, who do not like political correctness, who do not like feminists, who do not like Jewish people, and who generally think that liberalism and diversity have led to the decline of Western civilization. So, I would hesitate to call the alt-right a hate group for instance, but the alt-right does include hate groups.

On being struck by parallels she saw, between the 1920s KKK and Nazi Germany versus today, in how white supremacists saw the role of women

In the 1920s, which is one of the heydays of the KKK, a woman named Elizabeth Tyler became the head of the group's national propagation department, which is essentially sending people out to recruit more members. And she managed to boost the membership by something like 85,000 people. She also founded the first women's wing of the movement. She was considered a seminal figure in the KKK. She was ultimately pushed out, in part, because the men in the movement were threatened by her strength and her power.

On what women bring to these movements

On a very basic level numbers. I think that the people who run these extremist groups, however loose or organized they are, recognized that there is strength in numbers. And to be a truly robust movement women are a large portion of the population. ...

Whether we're talking about white nationalism in the [19]20s, in Nazi Germany, today so much of the ideology is about the importance of family, the importance of protecting the white race, which involves making sure women are there to have children.

On how the language of feminism is being used to recruit women

They do sort of occupy an almost feminist-seeming space in the movement or some of them do, I should say. The ones who are more outspoken, the ones who are trying to bring more people into the movement. But of course, they would never say that. They would never want to be compared to feminists. ... They think that feminists have corrupted what women see as their core desires.

On how women act as a camouflage, to appeal to others they might want to recruit on a more personal level

There's a wonderful scholar named Kathleen Blee at the University of Pittsburgh and she has written a few books about women in right-wing extremism. One of the things she talks about is the role that women play in projecting this image of happy families, communities that are proud of their heritage that it's not so different from your community. And it's a particularly insidious aspect of the propaganda. It's certainly something I encountered and was told repeatedly in my interviews.

On what the alt-right women want

[Lokteff] mentioned to me, people moving to Washington, D.C., getting involved in government. And, speaking to scholars of right-wing extremism, they said to me this is very unusual, usually these groups ... they're very anti-government. And so I think there is definitely a cohort that sees this moment, thanks to Trump's election, as an opportunity to assert themselves on that level.

And I think there are others who want to fight a race war in a much more, I guess, literal way. This is one of the things that's going to be interesting moving forward with the alt-right, is seeing it's a motley crew of people who found each other on the internet and are really starting to, as we saw in Charlottesville, get out into the world and take action. ... And I think that we'll be seeing those fractures widen over the next couple of months and years.

On how these women view the protest in Charlottesville and President Trump's reaction

On the whole I think that they are pleased that they got this attention that they are stoking peoples' frustrations, that they are showing themselves to be a force.

The president's reaction, they're happy with I think. I asked [Lokteff] specifically, I said what do you think about Donald Trump? And she said, "Let's be honest, he's not one of our guys. We've never thought that he's one of our guys." The thing they are most interested in is promoting the white race and they see him as an opportunity someone whose coattails they can ride. The more that he does not disavow the things that they believe in, and either tacitly or directly supports them, the better.

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Donald Trump recently reminded his supporters that he is suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for rewarding The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian election interference, with the validity of the suit questioned by a legal expert.

Trump filed a suit for defamation in December against the board for jointly awarding the two newspapers the prestigious National Reporting Pulitzer Prize award in 2018 for their coverage of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election.

The suit, filed in a court in Okeechobee County, Florida, describes how the "Russian collusion hoax"allegations that Trump's campaign team worked with Moscow to win the 2016 electionhad been "fully and emphatically debunked" numerous times.

"A large swath of Americans had a tremendous misunderstanding of the truth at the time the Times' and the Post's propagation of the Russia Collusion Hoax dominated the media," the complaint states. "Remarkably, they were rewarded for lying to the American public."

Trump is demanding in the suit that the 2018 Pulitzer prizes be rescinded and took issue with a July 2022 statement from the board in which it defended its decision and confirmed The New York Times' and The Washington Post's prizes will still stand.

The former president said the statement was released with "knowledge or reckless disregard for its falsity" and claimed board members "knew that the Russia Collusion Hoax had been thoroughly discredited numerous times by exhaustive, credible, official investigations, contradicting the 'deeply sourced, relentlessly reported' awarded articles."

In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump again mentioned how he is suing the Pulitzer Board for rewarding the newspapers for their Russiagate coverage while citing a recent lengthy and critical report from the Columbia Journalism Review regarding the amount of media coverage the allegations received at the time.

"The Pulitzer Board should have long ago rescinded awards given to the Washington Compost (known to some as the Washington Post) & the Failing NY Times for their fake stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax," Trump wrote.

"However, Pulitzer refuses to do the right thing! The Hoax has now been further exposed by the devastating, irrefutable piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, and Pulitzer has no comment. I am suing the Pulitzer Board to set the record straight and continue fighting for TRUTH in America!"

Speaking to Newsweek, entertainment and corporate law attorney Tre Lovell noted that there are "several problems" with the suit.

Lovell said that even the merits of the suit are "very questionable" and that Trump may just be filing the suit as part of his efforts to denounce the Russian investigation in any way possible.

"The Pulitzer Prize Board didn't publish these articles, but has simply given an award which amounts to commentary, analysis and opinion as to whether or not the board felt there was good reporting," Lovell told Newsweek. "The premise of holding awards organizations responsible to warrant or guarantee the actions of those to which they grant an award is the start of an extremely slippery slope."

Others issues include that in order to bring a claim of defamation, a statement of fact must be made. In this case, the Pulitzer's decision to give out an award is "difficult to be construed" as a statement and instead falls more in the form of opinion.

Lovell said that even if a statement is inaccurate, it may not necessarily be liable if the underlying facts are provided with the statement.

"For example, a person can say 'Jack is a criminal' and that's a statement of fact. But if they say, 'Jack is a criminal because I read he was arrested for stealing something and police found this evidence,' then even if the person who expressed their opinion in that way is wrong, they have provided all the underlying facts so the public can make their own judgment about it," he said.

"Thus, no liability. In Trump's case, the award is based on articles and news reporting that people can read themselves and come to their own conclusions."

Trump would also need to prove that the board acted in "reckless disregard of its truth" by handing out the 2018 awards for reporting on the Russian collusion allegations.

As the board hired independent reviewers to go through articles and find anything that discredited the reporting, the Pulizters formed "legitimate and reasonable beliefs in the veracity of the statements, further removing themselves from the zone of liability," Lovell said.

In January, Florida District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks sanctioned Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba for filing a series of "frivolous" 2016 election lawsuits alleging Hillary Clinton and the FBI conspired to work together to accuse Trump's campaign team of colluding with Russia in order to hinder his chances of victory.

In his ruling, Middlebrooks cited Trump's Pulitzer defamation lawsuit as one of several examples of the former president's "pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes."

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Donald Trump's "very questionable" lawsuit torn apart by attorney

It is also a conversation reminiscent of one many had before. Back in 2016, senior Republicans fretted that putting Trump on top of the ticket would spell certain doom. If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, later Trump acolyte Lindsey Graham notoriously tweeted. And we will deserve it. Those concerns proved to be unfounded, of course, as Trump prevailed over a split Republican field and then went on to defeat Hillary Clinton while Republicans held the House and Senate. But this time around, few Republicans think Trump can pull it off again, not after spending the last three years nursing his grievances over 2020, and especially not after his hand-picked candidates were walloped in the midterms.

Back in 2020, the buzzword among Democrats was electability, as the need to defeat Trump came to outweigh any other concerns or considerations including those of ideology, vision, competence and style. And the winner of the electability primary, at least for donors and liberal pundits, was Joe Biden, which led to most of his competitors dropping out and endorsing him when he was still trailing in the delegate count to Bernie Sanders. Republicans are now hoping that a similar dynamic plays out on their side this year and that even Trump loyalists will understand the stakes. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

I dont think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate, said Eric Levine, a top GOP fundraiser who has been calling on the party to move on from Trump since the 2020 election and the uprising at the Capitol. He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who cant beat Joe Biden.

The big fear among donors like Levine and other party players is that, like in 2016, a number of challengers to Trump will jump into the primary and linger too long, splitting the field and allowing Trump to win. And some of these top Republicans are meeting with potential candidates and telling them that if they want to run, they should by all means do so but that they should also be prepared to drop out well before voting begins in order to make sure that the GOP puts their best candidate forward against Biden.

I am worried about this, but experience is a good teacher, and there is no education in the second kick of a mule, said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and longtime adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell. My hope is that those exploring a race [for president] right now are asking themselves what is best for the party.

Bob Vander Plaats, the president of The Family Leader, a socially conservative advocacy group, is one of the most sought-after endorsers in the Iowa Caucus. He said that he is speaking with every potential candidate about the need to not overstay their welcome in the race.

I tell them that there is an open and fair playing field here in the state of Iowa, and that we will introduce you to our base, and we will give you all kinds of opportunities for you to introduce yourself. And if you have the call in your heart to run for president, I am the last person to tell you to not to.

But, he also tells them. Do not listen to your consultants, who have a vested interest in you staying in. I can help you decide if you should stay in or not.

They all agree right away, he added.

Leading donors who have spoken with the top-non-Trump contenders like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence say that all get it, that none of them are looking to play the spoiler and are aware of the dangers to the party, if not the country, of a Trump Redux. For evidence, these donors point to the potential candidates public statements and recent memoirs, in which all are critical of Trump in one way or another.

Does Mike Pence really want his legacy to be that he got four percent of the vote and helped elected Donald Trump? asked one adviser to a major Republican giver. Same goes for [Mike] Pompeo, same goes for [Nikki] Haley. They want to get traction, of course, but there is a higher motivation to pull out more quickly based on what it would mean for the country and the party.

Yet if the Haleys and Pompeos of the world end up running, they are doing so to win, and despite what they tell donors now, once they start getting a warm reception on the stump it can be hard to stop. Everybody on every campaign says, Why is it our responsibility to keep Donald Trump from winning? said GOP strategist Dave Carney. You have some people that are just running to sell books, but most of the folks that are looking at this are doing so because they think there is a path for them to win.

Trump seems to recognize how the prospect of a crowded field would help him, keeping quiet even as some of his former closest aides consider their own campaigns, and training his fire instead on Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is leading him in some polls. Trump has been reluctant to take the bait as his former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, taunts her former boss by calling for a new generation of leadership. Trump is Trump, so he has hit back occasionally, but has also said publicly that Haley should do it, a sign that, as former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party Katon Dawson put it, Trump has a solid 31 [percent]. And if its a big field a solid 31 can carry you to the nomination. The only way to defeat him is if some of these folks team up.

The question is how, and on this, even some of the Republican rich are at a loss on how to proceed. No more are there party bosses with the power to clear the field. The rise of online fundraising means that even the effect of the donor class can be limited. And while leaders of religious and grassroots groups hold sway, they have their own politics to think about, and cant very well step much beyond where their members want to go.

I dont even know who would be having these kinds of conversations, said Jennings. There is no convening authority. You just hope the candidates figure it out and we dont come in to next January with another John Kasich running around dividing the field.

On the Democratic side, back in 2016, the partys donors and senior leadership united well before the primaries behind Hillary Clinton only to see the folly of that approach when her weaknesses as a candidate revealed themselves as she struggled to fend off a challenge from Bernie Sanders.

For Republicans, the likeliest beneficiary of any similar effort would be DeSantis, who is outpacing Trump in some head-to-head polls. DeSantis has advantages, not least among them the fact that he just raised over $200 million for his reelection bid, and that he has a knack for using his perch in the Florida statehouse to hammer Democrats over culture war issues. But he is untested on the national stage, and there are persistent whispers that he can be clumsy about the normal give-and-take of politics. Many party bigwigs say they would rather watch the process play out for at least a year before picking favorites, with the understanding that if candidates now polling in the single digits dont see their prospects improve, they move to consolidate behind one Not Trump after the first couple of primaries. The great hope for DeSantis is that he breaks through quickly, and that convinces everyone else there is no path, said one former Trump adviser who now thinks the former president cant win.

One oddity of the current moment is that the weaker Trump seems, with federal and local investigations piling up and his campaign launch landing with a thud, the higher the chances that more possible candidates will launch their own bids, seeing a path to victory more likely. And the more candidates enter, the easier it becomes for Trump to win with an increasingly smaller share of the vote.

There may be no convening authority, but there are conversations among donors and party activists who point to how on the other side of the aisle, in 2020, nearly the entire remaining Democratic field dropped out almost at the same time and endorsed Biden. Republicans fret that there is no equivalent of a Nancy Pelosi or a Jim Clyburn in their party who can apply pressure to the dreams of would-be presidents. Still, donors are talking now about pooling money together once the primary gets under way in earnest and a true Trump alternative emerges.

Donors have wised up, said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist. That is the main control mechanism. There is not going to be oxygen for a lot of these guys, and there are not going to be resources.

There is already some movement along these lines.

I dont see a big bunch of donors coming behind Trump at this point, said Andy Sabin, a metal mogul who gave over $100,000 to Trump over the years and who opened his Hamptons estate for a Trump fundraiser in 2019. I wouldnt give Trump a fucking nickel, and that hasnt changed. As we get closer Trump is going to see the handwriting on the wall. Now, he may not care if he fucks everybody up. Trump worries only about Trump, so he may not care if we lose as long as he has his day in the park, but I dont know any donor that wants to give a red nickel to Trump.

Sabin isnt alone. Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone who donated $3.7 million to Trump and Trump affiliated groups over the last several years, said after the midterms that It is time for the Republican Party to turn to a new generation of leaders, and I intend to support one of them in the presidential primaries. Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel who gave $60 million to Republican candidates and campaigns in the 2022 cycle, also said after the midterms that Id like to think that the Republican Party is ready to move on from somebody who has been for this party a three-time loser, and announced his support for DeSantis.

These public clarion calls, donors and party leaders say, are all part of a larger strategy to raise an alarm on Trumps weaknesses; they hope that GOP primary voters start prioritizing electability like their Democratic counterparts did four years ago. Republicans tend to get enthralled with several candidates throughout the course of a presidential primary. The hope this year, senior strategists said, is that voters minds stay focused on who can best beat Biden, so that even if DeSantis or whomever the frontrunner of the moment is stumbles, attention and affection coalesces around the next Non-Trump in the field.

There is a concerted effort afoot to reach out even to some of Trumps most loyal voters. Evangelical leaders have said they are reminding their voters about comments Trump made after the midterms in which he seemed to blame evangelicals for the disappointing results and accused them of disloyalty for not already lining up behind his 24 effort. Plus, they say, even the evangelical movement needs to start thinking long term, and Trump would come into office an immediate lame duck.

Trump can only offer four more years, said Dave Wilson, the president of the Palmetto Family Council, an influential evangelical group in South Carolina. How are we going to build a movement that goes beyond the next four years to the next eight years to the next twenty years, that parallels what we have seen over on the progressive side?

For many party leaders however, such sentiments are just a hope. There is as of now no real effort to consolidate the field, no real plan among the donor class to pull their billions behind a single non-Trump candidate. There is a belief that somehow the Republican collective consciousness has learned from 2016 and that candidates, donors and party leaders will move in concert behind the right person once the process starts to play out.

Republicans are very motivated to defeat Joe Biden, said Tom Rath, a longtime Republican hand in New Hampshire. The Trump people arent at the table for them, but there are already discussions happening about what we do. If we get in a situation where Trump is winning primaries with 40 percent of the vote and losing badly to Biden, I think you are going to see those discussion begin to accelerate, to say the least. We just hope its not too late by then.

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify the recipients of Ken Griffins recent political donations.

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1. Biden's State of the Union may not help potential 2024 election bid against Trump, experts say  CNBC
2. Republicans Are Terrified Donald Trump Will Win the GOP Nomination and Lose to Joe Biden  Vanity Fair
3. Trump on Biden's State of the Union address: "Give him credit."  Slate

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Biden's State of the Union may not help potential 2024 election bid against Trump, experts say - CNBC