With Trump facing vocal opposition now, how will that affect the 2024 race?
With Trump facing vocal opposition now, how will that affect the 2024 race?
A fter the lone declared candidate in the Republican primary race became one of several, an odd but familiar dynamic soon took hold in which none of the candidates seemed to have a bad word to say about the front-runner.
Perhaps sensitive to incongruous polling indicating that Republican voters were open to an alternative to Donald Trump but, at the same time, hostile to criticisms of the former president, the GOP’s Trump alternatives danced around the elephant in the room. Nikki Haley wouldn’t take the bait. Tim Scott presented himself as a cosmic ray of vigor and jubilance, which precluded displays of antagonism toward anyone, including the front-runner. And while Ron DeSantis waited in the wings, he pulled his punches against Trump, preferring instead to promote positive narratives about his record and biography.
The pattern that was established in this phase of the race looked a lot like the one that came to define the 2016 race, when Trump’s competitors went after each other in hopes of being the last and triumphant alternative to the candidate who’d pulled far ahead of the pack. But the pattern was broken with DeSantis’s formal entry into the race. The Florida governor isn’t just parrying Trump’s attacks but counterpunching as well. From their respective records on Covid to immigration, from federal spending to the culture wars, DeSantis is throwing haymakers at such a pace that it has undeniably set Trump back on his heels.
As the aperture of the 2024 race broadens and more candidates enter, the primary’s dynamic appears set to evolve from the conspicuous avoidance of Trump to an anti-Trump dog-pile.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is prepared to enter the 2024 race next week, and he has telegraphed his intention to devote a good portion of his manic energies to attacking the man who beat him in 2016. But while DeSantis is going after Trump on policy, Christie appears prepared to go after Trump on his undisciplined comportment — behavior that has made the former president the object of disdain in America’s suburbs and the target of multiple prosecutors. Christie has already gone so far as to explain Trump’s aversion to criticizing the Kremlin by insisting that Trump is a “coward” and “puppet of Putin.” That’s a charge that codes left-wing and runs counter to the findings of independent Justice Department inquiries, but it is nonetheless a theory to illuminate the otherwise inexplicable but consistent phenomenon of Trump’s discomfort with criticisms of the Russian president.
In addition to Christie, former vice president Mike Pence is prepared to enter the race for the White House later this month. Pence has been somewhat more reserved in his attacks on Trump, in part because his very existence represents a broadside against Trump’s conduct during the weeks leading up to and on the day of the Capitol riots. When he has addressed the events of January 6, 2021, directly, Pence has called them “a disgrace.” He has brushed aside Trump’s “wrong” legal theories about the election, said that the president’s efforts to whip the crowd up into a frenzy “endangered my family,” and expressed his confidence that posterity’s verdict will vindicate the former president’s critics.
The volume of attacks on Trump from the right could be unlike anything political observers have previously witnessed. The whole spectrum of valid denunciations — from his shortcomings as a politician to his characterological failures to his poor stewardship of government — will be on display. That might delight Trump’s critics, but it also risks running afoul of that significant majority of Republican voters who respond emotionally to criticisms of the former president.
If some sizeable portion of Donald Trump’s support within the Republican base is derived from the assumption that he is beset, as are his voters, by forces outside his control — that he is willingly subjecting himself to persecution — the atmospherics of an anti-Trump pile-on could do him some favors with GOP primary voters.
There isn’t much of an alternative to this approach. If the GOP’s presidential aspirants want to displace Trump from the top of the pyramid, this is their chance. His challengers should hold nothing in reserve lest they regret their reticence in ignominious retirement. And although a large field of anti-Trump candidates splits that segment of the vote and benefits the front-runner, sowing the seeds of doubt in Trump’s ability to overcome his myriad deficiencies could bear fruit down the line.
The anti-Trump scrum could prove fatal to the front-runner, but that would require that the candidacies that are going nowhere recognize their inevitable fates before the first votes are cast in Iowa. The danger is that unrelenting volleys against the former president may lose their bite as criticism and begin to seem more like oppression. That would almost certainly reinforce Trump’s core voters’ support for the avatar of their various discontents.