Is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum going to do it? Will our favorite conservative technocrat deprive his home state of his steady middle of the road leadership to step into the role of political spoiler? Will “the silent majority” of voters roiling in the boil of a cultural climate reminiscent of the Terror of the French Revolution finally have someone else to turn to besides a grifting octogenarian and his hated populist predecessor?

I guess it’s something to talk about, and many people have glibly and sincerely opined on it, but ultimately all this jabber is pointless if the governor never actually enters the arena and continues playing games on the periphery. Burgum’s shooting ads and rolling out glowing puff pieces through his friends and media connections, but unlike the rest of the ever-growing field of GOP hopefuls lining up to take a run at the embattled yet defiant Donald Trump, Burgum hasn’t done the definitive thing and officially announced.

The website Politico, for example, lists Burgum amongst the “long shots” candidates, below even more obscure outsiders such as woke-skeptic investor Vivek Ramaswamy, failed gubernatorial candidates Perry Johnson and Larry Elder, and a Dallas-based non-denominational pastor named Ryan Binkley. This cohort objectively has less to run on than Burgum, but they’ve officially declared, so I’m not sure Doug can cry foul.

Going “slow and steady” only wins races if you are running, and edging everyone with the anticipation over whether Burgum will or won’t is preventing him from being taken seriously by those who set the national Overton Window. Based on everything we have available from the odds makers and prognosticators, Burgum is a “one percenter” in more ways than one.

The slow rollout of Burgum’s candidacy was met mostly with bemusement by corporate pundits, with even the more open-minded missing link media figures like Sagaar Enjeti and Krystal Ball of “Breaking Points” chortling at the notion that our governor of indeterminate wealth would be a factor in the cavalcade of kabuki theater the Grand Old Party is about to take us on.

Burgum is worse than an afterthought for the national media class, many of whom likely couldn’t find North Dakota on a map. Which is probably why we’re seeing his friends profile him in Forbes to inject himself into the conversation while also unsubtly testing the waters in Iowa within earshot of Rob Port’s “little birds.”

Burgum continues to inch closer to formally announcing, leaking to the Wall Street Journal he will be making a big announcement this coming Wednesday in Fargo, while also sitting for NBC News to put himself out there as the anti-culture war candidate. Which, I will admit, is a strange position to take when you look at all of the hot button bills that didn’t bear the rebuke of his veto.

There’s a positive to being on the outside of the frontrunner’s conversation this far out from primary season, and it’s that if you faceplant there won’t be anyone watching to see it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis thought he had a major coup on his hands when his campaign arranged for his kickoff announcement to take place in a Twitter Spaces Q&A with Elon Musk, but the result was almost as bad as the time Jeb Bush meekly begged his paid crowd to “please clap,” or when Howard Dean got a little too excited with a mic in his hand.

Technical glitches and awkward production gaffes produced a great deal of fodder for Desantis’s detractors, in particular Trump, whose team released an AI-generated deepfake spoof of the call that came complete with Algorithm Adolf Hitler loudly proclaiming that he is homosexual. It’s a brilliant bit of memetics, taking a lead from the exceedingly popular series of AI-generated discord gaming chat sessions between our living former presidents. Having the man removed from Twitter has deprived us of the chaotic memetic wizardry Trump is capable of, and I for one welcome the weaponization of AI for the purposes of political mockery.

Trump is hardly the only one noticing how weak DeSantis has become. Yet another Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, initially said he had no plans to run, but there has been reports that he has reversed course after DeSantis’s recent stumbles. However, Youngkin is no better than Burgum in that he’s still a “maybe,” and former VP Mike Pence has beaten them both to the punch with his recent declaration and rollout in Iowa.

Now, I know Burgum and every single other GOP hopeful is posturing themselves as some sort of alternative to the toxic rancor surrounding the supposed front runners in both parties, but it’s quite another thing entirely to grab your sword and confront the dragon in his den.

Suddenly, 2024’s Republican field resembles the cacophonous circus of 2016, which won’t help anyone not named Donald Trump. At the heights of Trump’s barnstorming hellraising tour through the GOP primaries that year, he named and slayed his enemies one by one in state after state. The saying goes, “if you come at the king, you better not miss,” because no one has more “rizz” with a Republican crowd or is as quick with the quip on a debate stage than Old 45. That is, if he still has the killer instinct that served him so well.

Hopefully, Burgum gets far enough along in the process that we’ll get to see the two men share the debate stage, where he will no doubt be christened by Trump like all the other failed and fallen opponents littering the ground around him. It won’t be hard for Trump to make the case that this “outsider candidate” is the ultimate insider who owes a great deal of his success to his fealty to that social engineering weirdo Bill Gates.

But, is it possible that Doug will surprise us all? That he won’t wither and wilt in the face of Trump’s fury?

In Burgum’s defense, all the market research we have points to how exhausted the average American voter has become after two successive cycles of partisan division and social alienation. Burgum doesn’t typically pursue something he feels he’s going to lose and has concluded he is more than able to weather all the barbs and slime that will get hurled his way. Much like Trump in 2016, Burgum must see the narrow way through the chaos to a victory no one else can, though I’m sure Pence stealing the spotlight doesn’t help.

While Burgum’s “radical centrism” is giving fed up anti-Trumpers in North Dakota politics the vapors and causing despairing Dems and progressives to give him the side-eye, he’s going to have to get in line and find some way to distinguish himself enough from his fellow primary fodder for any voter to even remember who he is let alone consider voting for him instead.

I welcome even a half serious presidential contender from my home state, although, I can’t help but feel like Miracle Max from “The Princess Bride” shouting encouragement to Darkhorse Doug to “have fun storming the castle,” as he sets out on what is sure to be a very bizarre adventure.

Is it gonna work? Eh, it’s gonna take a miracle.