He has some serious ones, despite the post-midterm drumbeat that this time he’s really toast.
He has some serious ones, despite the post-midterm drumbeat that this time he’s really toast.
T he argument is being made everywhere that after the 2022 midterms, Donald Trump is finished. In many cases, where Donald Trump intervened in a hotly contested primary, his candidates lost, especially where those candidates spent a great deal of political capital defending the notion that the 2020 elections were stolen from Donald Trump. Among the most notable in this band of losers: Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, and Tudor Dixon in Michigan.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis absolutely triumphed, sweeping to reelection by nearly 20 points and winning outright counties such as Osceola that for decades had been written off as demographically unreachable for Republicans. In the days afterward, on his personal social network, Trump fired off a rambling defensive screed about DeSantis. Political social-media influencers who had once backed Trump are increasingly backing away from him. Among Republicans, it seems that everyone from Ann Coulter to Larry Hogan is against his running in 2024. And your correspondent here has wondered whether most right-of-center voters will look back and conclude that Ron DeSantis was their leader even before Trump exited the White House.
But Trump has serious advantages in a Republican primary. Let’s list some of them.
(1) Republican and Not Republican
The thing that bothers stalwart conservatives and Republicans most about Trump is his greatest advantage; namely, his indifference and occasional frank hostility to the Republican Party. He assumes the loyalty of all Republicans once he is running against Democrats such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and partisan energies kick in. But during the primaries, he vents his disappointments and contempt for the GOP — how it is led by losers, how it starts and can’t finish dumb wars or abandons them in disaster. He feels free to reimagine the GOP as a workers’ party. That is, he’s able to become the vessel for discontents about the Republican Party, a vessel that Democrats won’t be. This is one of the reasons that Trump’s electoral success with rural voters was notably greater than the GOP’s is normally.
(2) Businessman and Populist
Dave Chappelle articulated this in his monologue to open SNL this weekend, in which he called Trump an “honest liar.” In his rallies, Trump would say hard truths that traditional members of the political caste are loath to acknowledge, such as, “We have a lot of sickness in some of our institutions.”
Trump was able to tap into many Republicans’ fantasy of having a “businessman, not a politician” in charge of the federal government. It just so happens this was also the fantasy that powered the candidacy of Ross Perot in the 1990s, at the beginning of post–Cold War globalization. Trump also played into the fantasy, built up by FDR before him, of being a traitor to his class. Donald Trump was the candidate who said, “The system is rigged. . . . Nobody knows the system better than me. Which is why I alone can fix it.”
(3) More than Policy, Passion
Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency reminded a political world drowning in white papers written by dorks and nerds rebranding themselves as “wonks” that politics is not just about policy. It’s about our deepest passions. He made an enduring connection with pro-lifers in one debate by expressing not just moral but physical revulsion at late-term abortions — and using blunt, factual language to describe it that no other high-level politician had seen fit to utter in public. He could often express these passions in contrary ways. In one part of a debate, he could show genuine regret at the waste of blood and treasure on useless wars, and he’d promise to bring the boys home. Later in the same debate, he could express anger at our leadership class, while promising to turn the deserts of the Middle East into glass while taking their oil as a war prize.
(4) Proving the Losers and Haters Wrong
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign succeeded through cussed momentum. He defied the expectations placed on him. He thrived against united and hysterical opposition. No matter the terms you could come up with to describe his downwardly mobile supporters — the left behind, the “somewheres,” the losers of globalization — they all saw their own faith in him rewarded with victories. His candidacy was experienced by them as a kind of biblical prophecy come true about the status of the foolish and the wise being inverted at the moment of revelation. All the smart, with-it, in-crowd knew that Donald Trump was finished, a dead end. And then he beat them.
And that’s where he will start again in 2023, just exactly where he began it in 2015. With everyone thinking he can’t possibly win and that he can only do damage to his party and himself. Sometimes the sheer frenzy of the establishment’s disdain acts like a lofting wind. His die-hard supporters will want to experience this moment as a time of purification and testing for him and for themselves, the necessary nadir before another unstoppable, thrilling rise to the top.