Trump Needs You to Believe His Nomination Is Inevitable

I n spite of the ancient injunction, I am prone to falling inexorably into despair. I despair about the national debt. I despair about the state of our political conversations. (Once, I was even berated on Twitter by someone who explained to me that my stated affection for my kids was a “ploy” to distract my readers from the perfidy of my political positions.) I despair about the relentless usurpations that are staged by the executive branch. And, yes, I despair about Donald Trump, who has been a part of our politics for nearly eight years now, and who, despite having racked up a losing record over that time, is doing his level best to ensure that he sticks around for at least four more. Sometimes, to quote Frédéric Chopin, it seems that my only choice is to “groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano” — or, even better, into a tall glass.

But old Thomas Aquinas was correct, you know: To despair really can be a sin. And it can especially be a sin when driving you to despair happens to be your opponent’s deepest wish. It has occurred to me lately that the existential dread that I feel each and every time I read Donald Trump’s primary polling is, in an important sense, contrived. By word and by deed, Trump and his team have made it clear that they intend to cast Trump’s return as an inevitability and thereby to clear the field of his strongest challengers before some of them even declare. Which is all well and good, but that . . . well, that takes two to be effective, doesn’t it? Anyone can pronounce himself inevitable. The important question is whether the audience believes him when he says it.

Do I believe that Donald Trump is inevitable? Actually, I do not. But suppose that I did. What, exactly, would giving in to that conclusion achieve, beyond helping to guarantee that it came true? To despair is to give up. It is to abdicate. It is to remove oneself willingly from the field. Despair yields nihilism. It inspires nonchalance. It breeds torpor. And into the vacuum step the giddy survivors. At present, Trump and his acolytes are keen to insist that the primaries are already over. But they don’t feel over, do they? And those who contend otherwise do not sound convinced by their own rhetoric. “Being powerful,” Mrs. Thatcher once observed, “is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” The same might be said of contested elections. If you have to cajole people into considering you unstoppable, you probably aren’t.

Which is all to say that to treat Donald Trump’s nomination as a foregone conclusion is to ignore the substantial evidence to the contrary, to reject the very notion of political persuasion, and to conceive of the game as Trump does: as nothing more than a contest of belligerence. Dismiss all the fluff, and the same old obstacles come into view. Trump’s national approval rating is terrible. Seventy percent of Americans — including 44 percent of Republicans — are opposed to his running for the presidency at all. And, in 2020, the last time he was the nominee, he lost to a walking cadaver. Certainly, early primary polling has Trump doing extremely well. But it’s May of 2023 — before the primaries, before the caucuses, before the debates, before the voting, before his most effective challenger has even jumped into the race. “Give up!” he insists. I think not.

As was his fancy, Edmund Burke appended a twist to the classical admonition. “Never despair,” he wrote, “but if you do, work on in despair.” This is salubrious advice. Never despair. But if you can’t manage that — as, often, I cannot — then power through regardless. To do otherwise is to hand the advantage to those who are already strong, loud, and overconfident, and to ensure that the status quo will continue to obtain. It is not written in the stars that Donald Trump must dominate the Republican Party. It was not foretold. There are no entrails of augury. As a matter of fact, it is not possible for him to do so without the acquiescence of Republican voters. Fearing a fight, Trump and his acolytes have attempted mightily to short-circuit the process by driving their critics into despondency. They have failed. Now follows the brawl.