It’s the best strategy for identifying leaders and a platform that can unite the entire potential Republican electorate.
It’s the best strategy for identifying leaders and a platform that can unite the entire potential Republican electorate.
T he Republican Party has — this is not news — a Donald Trump problem. What it does not have is a consistent Donald Trump strategy. There really is no good answer, but the least-bad one is to give Trump as little attention as possible.
The problem is straightforward. As I wrote immediately after the 2020 election, there are two Republican Party voter bases: the Donald Trump party and what you might call the Paul Ryan party. There is more overlap among the two than you might think from listening to media and political arguments, but there are clearly voters that each party has been able to reach that the other repels. Taken together, the GOP is, or at any rate was at the time, agonizingly close to assembling a coalition that could win the House, the Senate, and the White House — yet, since 2018, it has narrowly lost all three.
Moreover, it has lost them in good part because the party lost voters who specifically could not stand Donald Trump — his personality, his character, his public conduct. If anything, Trump has become significantly more radioactive with these voters since the election, given his lengthy and false assault on the outcome of the election and his role in inspiring the Capitol riot.
On the other hand, Trump remains highly popular with the party’s existing voter base. For a brief moment after the Capitol riot, it appeared as if Trump’s spell had been broken. Mitch McConnell and even Mike Pence had publicly stood up to Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump on his second impeachment. For a time, Trump’s name disappeared completely from Republican fundraising emails.
All that turned around quickly. My inbox is once again full to brimming with pro-Trump emails from the party’s direct-mail operation. Party leaders have been making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring. Liz Cheney is about to be booted from House Republican leadership for speaking out against Trump. Multiple Republican presidential contenders in the early 2024 field have indicated that they would defer to Trump if he ran again.
Republicans should be extremely well-positioned right now for 2022 to reap the natural benefits of being the party out of power in a midterm election, accentuated by a favorable new map for the House, and starting from the very high floor of needing to flip a net gain of one Senate seat and perhaps four House seats in order to control both houses of Congress — far, far below the historic averages for a midterm. With an incumbent who will be 82 years old in 2024 and whose Electoral College margin of victory was 42,918 votes, there should likewise be optimism about the party’s presidential prospects. But in each case, the supercharged anti-Trump turnout of 2018 and 2020 is the greatest obstacle. We often hear people who doubt the outcome of the 2020 election scoff at the notion that more than 81 million people voted for Joe Biden. But guess what: They didn’t. Eighty-one million people voted to get rid of Donald Trump.
Four years of distance will inevitably cool some of the anti-Trump ire, and if Biden and/or Harris is unpopular by 2024, it may be easier to sell a restoration. But the very nature of Trump’s personality is such that it would not take him long to remind people who disliked him why they did.
That is even before you get to the fact that Trump himself, if he were to run again in 2024, might be a significantly diminished figure. He will be 78 years old, and while Biden did win the election, we saw how visibly aged he was between 2016 and 2020. Trump has also spent a lot of his time since January 20 ranting about the 2020 election, an issue that may not be the largest kitchen-table conversation for a lot of American families in 2024.
So, what Republicans need to do is to get Trump offstage, move on from his toxic response to his defeat, and work on identifying leaders and a platform that can unite the entire potential Republican electorate. That cannot be done by Trump. It can also not be done by leaders who are vocally anti-Trump. Mitch McConnell seems best to understand this, as he has clammed up on his criticisms of Trump, but is also going out of his way to focus his attentions on the Biden-Harris administration and its agenda.
The problem is how we get from here to there. The historical precedents are not necessarily encouraging. The party moved on with surprising ease from Watergate after taking its lumps in 1974 and narrowly losing the White House, but it did so because it had two things in its favor that it does not have today. One, Richard Nixon went away, and Republican voters were happy to see him do so. He was invisible in the 1976 election, and except for his interviews with David Frost in 1977, Nixon was content to write his memoirs and his thoughtful, analytical foreign-policy books and await a Republican return to the White House before he would gradually rebuild his profile as an elder statesman. He never again set a toe in electoral politics. Two, the party already had an obvious heir apparent, Ronald Reagan, who had built a distinctly not-Nixon ideological profile without being seen as anti-Nixon to the remaining Nixon loyalists.
No party has had a former president who was constitutionally eligible to run again since George H. W. Bush left office in 1992; Bush waited two election cycles, and handed off the family’s political assets to his son. The last sitting president to lose a reasonably close reelection contest was Gerald Ford in 1976. There was lingering talk of Ford running again, and he ended up having a semi-serious powwow with Reagan at the 1980 convention about whether Ford would accept the vice-presidential nomination.
A former president whose loyalty to his own erstwhile party is questionable can be a particularly divisive factor. As William Gladstone wrote of Robert Peel, the Tory leader who was effectively expelled from his own party in 1846: “Prime Ministers unattached are dangerous as great rafts would be dangerous floating unmoored in a harbour.” Three former presidents have run third-party campaigns: Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Millard Fillmore in 1856, and Martin Van Buren in 1848. Roosevelt handed the presidency to the opposing party and Woodrow Wilson for eight years; Van Buren may well have swung the election away from his own former party; and Fillmore drew significant popular support as well along the way to an opposing-party victory with 45 percent of the national popular vote. By the time of Fillmore’s run, his old party (the Whigs) had already ceased to exist. The wounds from Roosevelt’s 1912 run were still festering in 1916, and may have cost the Republicans that election because of a schism in California (the decisive state) between Roosevelt’s 1912 running mate, California governor Hiram Johnson (who was running for the Senate in 1916), and the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes.
Grimmer still is this reality: The Tories never got power back until after Peel’s untimely death at age 62 after he was thrown from his horse. Republicans never got power back until after Teddy Roosevelt’s untimely death at age 60 in 1919, at a time when many in the party were talking about running him again in 1920. Waiting for Trump to die is obviously not a pleasant way to look at the party’s future, to say the least, even aside from the fact that it requires awaiting a deus ex machina event the party cannot control. But there is not any other clear blueprint for how to get him to make way for a successor.
So, the least-bad option for now is just to give Trump as little attention as possible. Trump will not run for office in 2022, although he may well return to giving rallies. Still, the longer he is out of the spotlight, the more Republicans can focus attention and fire on the Democrats. That will require some discipline from Republicans in the House and in the statehouses to follow McConnell’s implicit lead. As much as Republicans dislike the move and the broader trend it represents, they may also inadvertently benefit from Facebook’s continuing ban on Trump. According to Meredith McGraw in Politico — take this with a grain of salt for its exclusive reliance on anonymous sources, but the reasoning of the anonymous quotations is sound — the ban will constrict Trump’s comeback plans:
“This is a huge decision, makes it infinitely harder for him to raise money,” conceded a person close to the Trump operation. “Facebook was the main way he raised money. He’s now going to have to spend far more in the future to find other ways to raise money. . . . It was the main way he found donors.” . . .
Elsewhere, Republicans argued that keeping Trump off Facebook would be good for the party, even if (or perhaps because) it would be “devastating” for Trump . . . other Republicans feared that MAGA fanatics would become less engaged politically as Trump grew more remote in their lives. “Fundraising begets fundraising so him raising money helps,” said a separate top GOP operative who is working on congressional races this cycle. “It makes it more difficult for him and it gives everyone from Tim Scott to Nikki Haley to Mike Pompeo to Ted Cruz the ability to go out and begin to win over the Trump donors and voters that exist in a vacuum that Trump is not filling,” said one top GOP operative.
Of course, the risk with relying on a social-media ban is that the social-media giants could always reverse themselves and restore Trump if they thought that doing so would harm Republicans at some point down the road.
Conservative media can help move on from Trump — this article’s existence notwithstanding — by not talking about him at every turn or covering his press releases as news. Even left-wingers and #Resistance media need an enemy, and in the vacuum of Trump’s comparative quiet since the election, many of them have latched on to Tucker Carlson. That has its own risks for all involved, but at least it is not giving more attention to Trump.
One lesson from 2016 is that you cannot beat Trump with a long menu of options. What Republicans will also need, if they hope to energize various factions of their voters and potentially deter Trump from running again, is also to build up the profile of an alternative leader. The list of people who might run for president in 2024 is nearly endless, with many big names, but for the moment, Ron DeSantis is in the driver’s seat. While DeSantis may yet stumble and is not everyone’s cup of tea, Republicans who want to move beyond Trump without alienating Trump voters could do much worse than to work on building the profile of DeSantis as the 2024 heir apparent now, rather than holding out for someone they might marginally prefer a little.
The fact that Trump himself recently mused about picking DeSantis as his own 2024 running mate shows a combination of Trump entering the bargaining stage of grief, and Trump recognizing who might be the chief obstacle if he were to run again. On the other hand, Trump loves being associated with winners, so the more DeSantis looks like a truly strong 2024 candidate, the more it becomes thinkable for Trump to treat him as his own heir.
Of course, Trump will still have his own weapons. Do not be surprised if he announces as early as this year that he is running again, a step that might freeze some potential primary foes in their tracks as well as allowing Trump to raise money (money he need not give back to donors if he decides not to run after all). He has every interest in demanding professions of personal fealty, and in turning the subject of conversations toward himself and away from the issues or the Democrats. And he still has a list of grudges against Republicans running in 2022, although he has yet to recruit a top-tier challenger, and Doug Collins announcing that he will not run for office in Georgia in 2022 seems a blow to any Trump plan to unseat Brian Kemp.
Among the twelve flavors of Trumpism, more than a few are likely to survive in Republican politics, but a future for Republican politics will require finally getting past Trump himself. Sooner or later, that goes for any party. As Sparky Anderson used to say whenever his team lost one of its star players, “Babe Ruth died, and the game went on.” It goes particularly for a president who saw the party lose its hold on all the elected branches of the federal government within four years of his taking office. Ignoring him might not make Trump go away, but it is the least-bad option on the table.