With each debacle, it dawns on more voters that he will never be president again.
There is no substantive importance to former president Donald Trump’s hosting at Mar-a-Lago of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a pair of disturbed young men who’ve publicly expressed antisemitic and, in Fuentes’s case, racist views. The only significance is in the public’s learning curve, particularly the learning curve of Republican voters.
To repeat what I’ve said for a long time, it is a ripe dead certainty that Trump cannot win a national election. And at the risk of belaboring a more recent observation, the wheels have come off the Trump Train in the two years since the night he lost the 2020 election. The former president has become increasingly erratic. Yes, he was erratic to start with, but he no longer has an array of experienced, capable people staffing him, advising him, pushing against his self-destructive tendencies, and preventing him from doing crazy stuff. We thus now find him frantically trying to put a benign spin on his dinner with Fuentes and Ye . . . just as it seems like only yesterday he was frantically putting a benign spin on his stubborn recklessness in hording scores of classified documents at the same Palm Beach club (the subject of one federal investigation) . . . much like his benign spin on the Capitol riot (the subject of another federal investigation) . . . and on his phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (the subject of a state criminal investigation) . . . which was of a piece with his equally “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (the subject of the first impeachment . . . that preceded the second impeachment). On it goes, and on it will go.
It’s exhausting. That’s why, every day, erstwhile Trump supporters say Basta! But there is more coming. As the subject of numerous investigations, the former president’s indictment is a matter of when, not if — a blunt fact I discussed here before Thanksgiving, and that has become only clearer with last week’s revelation that prosecutors are seeking testimony from former vice president Mike Pence. Ordinarily, the Justice Department would vigorously oppose efforts to pry testimony from the highest executive officials. Its willingness to risk setting a precedent for such testimony underscores, again, DOJ’s seriousness about bringing charges.
The former president’s lack of electoral viability and his knack for courting disaster at every turn are not reasonably disputable, regardless of how much denial his devoted but diminishing following may be in. The only thing worth considering — relating to the only significance in Trump’s hosting of unabashedly disreputable people — is how long it takes the Trump-inclined GOP faction to catch on.
If we were to graph this, on one axis would be the constant — namely, Trump’s lack of viability as a presidential candidate in a national election. On the other axis would be the variable: the gradually narrowing gap between (a) the rose-tinted Republican assessment that Trump could win and should be the nominee, and (b) the realization of the afore-described constant — of the fact that Trump cannot win a national election and the corollary that nominating him would be suicidal.
The question is how long it takes for that gap to close. Toward that end, Trump has helpfully accelerated matters by the early announcement of his candidacy, in a flat, dispiriting performance just days after the GOP midterm flame-out in which he played such a key part.
His missteps, inevitably, are continuing. So are the legal proceedings — e.g., the state tax fraud trial of the Trump organization in Manhattan, which could wrap up this week. To be sure, Trump’s enemies exaggerate his antics. Nonetheless, they are bad enough objectively, and collectively they weigh too heavily on his candidacy. With each debacle, it dawns on more voters that he will never be president again.
I am more inclined than many of my colleagues to believe the decisive collapse of Donald Trump’s support is imminent (indeed, I think it’s happening now — one of those “gradually . . . then all at once” phenomena). Whether I’m right or wrong about that, the real question is: Do Republicans figure it out in time to avoid nominating a candidate who can’t win and will just wreck the party down-ballot?