Trump without Trumpism

O n a recent podcast with Conan O’Brien, the comedian Zach Galifianakis said America’s obsession with celebrity culture was a “mental illness” that explained why we ended up with Donald Trump, a celebrity president.

Given how tired and ineffective Joe Biden looks right now as president, my guess is that Republicans will be awfully tempted if Trump presents himself for election in 2024. He’s still more relatable than all other elected Republicans, funnier, and freer to say what he thinks. The problem for Trump is that he’s now all about Trump. He’s lost the political substance of his first campaign and is now stuck dwelling on the unfairness of the Russiagate investigations, or his zany theories about the 2020 election that he lost.

Trump’s celebrity certainly was a major factor in his rise. But while it may be difficult or painful to remember in the year 2022, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in 2015, he was an issue-driven candidate. He ran against the record of President Barack Obama, but even more so, he ran against the record of former president George W. Bush.

Bush’s second term had turned into a disaster, largely because of his policy choices. The Iraq War began to turn into a quagmire, empowering a government in Baghdad that was too close to Iran and not in control of the Sunni Triangle, where radicals seized the advantage. Instead of Iraqi democracy leading to a domino effect of democratic revolution across the region, the War on Terror was producing more opportunities for terrorists.

But it wasn’t just the Iraq War. Bush had pursued an unpopular reform of Social Security that blew up in his face. He also pursued a form of comprehensive immigration reform that, like Reagan’s attempt in the 1980s, put an amnesty for illegal immigrants up front, and promised enforcement and border security later.

Donald Trump’s promise in 2015 was to reverse the polarity of the party. On the issues where George W. Bush had run to the center, such as immigration, Donald Trump would move decisively to the right-most flank of the party. On issues where George W. Bush had been further to the right, on reforming entitlements, Trump was going to be a moderate. A vote for Trump in the Republican primaries was a vote to change the direction of the party, and it proved irresistible to a larger and larger number of Republicans. What made Trump’s a populist campaign is that Republican elites and institutions were heavily invested in that polarity never reversing.

Precisely because Trump came from outside the culture of electoral politics, it was easy for a very large pool of voters to project their fantasies onto him. The businessman-as-president appeal already had deep roots in the Republican Party and among centrist populists who had voted for Ross Perot decades earlier. Maybe Trump placed in such a high office really could build the best roads and airports in the world. Maybe he could reform American medicine and “take care of everybody.”

It would be much harder for so many diverse groups of voters to fall under the same spell again in 2024. They’ve now seen what a Donald Trump presidency looks like. The wall was not built. Mexico did not pay for it. It took Joe Biden to come into office before the troops came home from Afghanistan.

Trump has a more hostile relationship with most elected Republicans now than he did seven years ago, namely because they do not take his claims of election fraud seriously and are unwilling to make them the central issue defining the party’s politics.

This week Trump sat for an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, and he obsessively pressed his claims that there had been incredible, can’t-believe-it revelations in Arizona, Georgia, and other states that he lost in 2020. All he could talk about was the supposed conspiracy against him. “How come Biden couldn’t attract 20 people for a crowd?” Trump asked. “How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a sudden he got 80 million votes? Nobody believes that, Steve. Nobody believes that.”

While it is true that many Republicans have a bone-deep belief that the electoral system is somehow unfairly stacked against them, the obsession with these claims reverses the polarity of Trumpism itself. When he first ran for president, Trump genuinely promised to do things that voters wanted, to make the country great, proud, and prosperous again. Now, he is essentially asking Republicans to do something for him, to restore his tarnished honor and make credible his belief in his own victory. All that is left of Trumpism are Trump’s grievances and aspirations.

This is not an agenda that will win him high office, help his party, or accomplish anything for his countrymen.