Donald Trump has had a bad close to 2022, and yet he’s had very bad times before.
I haven’t seen enough.
Donald Trump has had a bad close to 2022. He announced his campaign, and it was met with a shrug. Fox News cut away from it. Other networks refused to cover it live. This is a sea change from 2015 and 2016 where Jeff Zucker at CNN just let Trump run live as much as possible, pressuring other networks to do the same.
Trump has done no major events. His one policy announcement on free speech seemed to have no impact at all. He made headlines afterward for a Thanksgiving week dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, and Milo Yiannopoulos. West offered Trump a VP slot on his own ticket, then promptly went on Alex Jones’s show and praised Hitler. Trump’s major Christmas announcement was Trump Super Hero NFTs.
And yet, he’s had very bad times before. Encouraging violence at his rallies. Attacking Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier. The Access Hollywood tape. And that was just during his first campaign. His presidency featured his praise of the “very fine people” at the Charlottesville rally even as a woman was killed by a right-wing lunatic.
None of these broke the loyalty of his base voters. And none of them tore at his core strengths. (1) His star power. Trump is the funniest man in the field. He’s used to the spotlight. He thrives in live-event forums. (2) Trump is more than a Republican. His campaign against the way Washington does things draws in voters who hate typical Republicans. (3) The populist identification between supporters and their champion. His die-hard supporters experience politics not as a series of discrete democratic tradeoffs but as a transcendent Event, in which justice and comeuppance is meted out to the haters, doubters, and swamp creatures.
And his base voters may be enough for him to win the nomination, especially when I see reports like this:
A veteran GOP strategist, who is close to several 2024 camps, tells me that Trump rivals smell blood. Says allies/donors of Hogan, Sununu, Cheney, Christie all see opening for their picks to make an "enough of this" case… others close to Pence, Youngkin, DeS watching, waiting.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) December 19, 2022
Hogan, Sununu, Cheney?
A Republican Party that is split into a field of 20 contenders who are united against Trump, and who are laundering their attacks on other conservative positions through their attacks on Trump, will strengthen Trump.
That’s a dynamic that’s very favorable to him, and I don’t see how it doesn’t play out this way.