Let’s consider the elephant in the room.
Let’s consider the elephant in the room.
O kay, I’ll bite. Will The Donald run again?
The going theory among liberals and conservative NeverTrumpers is that until there is some kind of decisive repudiation of Donald Trump among Republicans at large, the GOP will remain his party. And there is some evidence for that. Trump has dominated every poll of potential Republican nominees for 2024. He’s supposedly told people behind the scenes that if he’s healthy enough, he’ll run. Some Republican leaders have told reporters that this possibility worries them.
And Trump is sort of hanging around. There are rallies planned to keep his core supporters engaged in politics in the run-up to next year’s midterm elections. Trump allowed an attack on critical race theory to be printed under his name in RealClearPolitics. The essay explained that leftists are pushing revisionist history in classrooms because “our attachment to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and most of all, Americans’ very identity as a free, proud, and self-governing people” stand in the way of their policy goals. It was not as concise, punchy, and memorable as the Trump’s comments on passing trends are at their best. But his Father’s Day press release was perfectly in character: “Happy Father’s Day to all, including the Radical Left, RINOs, and other Losers of the world. Hopefully, eventually, everyone will come together!”
It’s actually that weird, singular kind of humor that makes it easy to imagine Trump defeating any potential Republican challenger. Trump has comic timing, and one virtue that has been bred out of almost all other politicians: He’s self-possessed. Most politicians live in a kind of fear of offending voters and donors — of getting off-message, or slightly changing their position and being called on it. Trump’s superpower was that he didn’t fear any of this. He connected with his core supporters and voters by sharing in their passions, hatreds, and fears. He didn’t let pollsters determine his language; he tried out his insults and slogans live on stage and saw how his audience responded. Nobody other Republican politician currently on the national scene will be able to duplicate his rallies.
Trump could possibly be helped by the media itself, too. In any primary contest, his opponents would be constantly pushed and cajoled to say either that they could support Trump as the nominee, and therefore are against democracy’s very survival, or that they could not do so, and therefore are part of the NeverTrump #resistance.
And yet, one can feel Trump’s power possibly slipping away. He lost, barely, this past weekend’s straw poll at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, where conservative activists put Ron DeSantis just ahead of him. One is tempted to suggest that he is liable to lose more such contests because his hardest-core supporters tend not to be politically active in the same way as institutional conservative activists.
The ultimate problem facing Trump, if he attempted to duplicate Grover Cleveland’s feat of winning two non-consecutive terms, would be that he’d be implicitly running to restore himself to the presidency, not to Make America Great Again. The ability of his supporters to fantasize about what he could do with power is somewhat diminished, since they’ve now experienced the Trump administration and the reality of its unkept promises. There is no wall, and no forthcoming check from Mexico. No giant tide of manufacturing jobs washed back onto our shores. Across the world, American power is still strong, but it is ebbing — with European and Asian allies hedging their bets, and occasionally defying Washington’s wishes in the process.
And that’s just the problem for voters; the problem might be even more acute for the man himself. He already was president, and he experienced the limitations of the job. In office, he constantly butted up against the obstacles presented by Congress, the formal limits on the executive, and the informal ones imposed by bureaucratic mulishness. Out of office, he is the king of Mar-a-Lago, playing golf during the mornings, lunching with power brokers, and spending the evenings with his supermodel wife, even as he haunts the nightmares of “the Radical Left, the RINOs, and other losers.” Why would he give up that perfect retirement to seek his old job, which he never much seemed to like in the first place?