Are We Really Stuck with Trump?
It depends on whether his voters have finally had enough of the nonsense
Podcast Announcements: If you just can’t get enough your humble scribe, you may enjoy my recent 90-minute conversation with Andrew Sullivan on the Dishcast. We discuss our traumatic childhoods, what we each took from our encounters with Leo Strauss, the midterms, and the impending Trump v. DeSantis smackdown on the right. I also talked through the meaning of the midterms and the future trajectory of Trumpian populism in an hour-long conversation with Martin Di Caro on the History As It Happens podcast at the Washington Times.
Last week, former President Donald Trump said he would make a “big announcement” on Tuesday, November 15 from Mar-a-Lago, presumably the launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. I’m writing this post on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, with some minor edits on Tuesday evening, but even those will come before the scheduled event at 9 PM. My goal is to write the post in such a way that it will be worth reading regardless of whether Trump’s stated intention from a week ago gets fulfilled. What matters is that Trump is intending to run, not precisely when he announces.
Republican Voters Love Trump
In the rather harsh Twitter-based arguments about whether Trump will be successful in his attempt to win the Republican nomination in 2024, I’ve come down rather firmly on the affirmative side. Not that I think he should win. I wish I could snap my fingers to make Trump vanish instantly from American politics. But in a world lacking such magic, I can only call things as I see them—and I don’t see how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (or, for that matter, anyone else on the right) manages to take Trump down.
Let me be clear: This isn’t a prediction. It’s more an extrapolation from the present, based on seven years of observation. Back in the fall of 2015, when Trump first jumped into the polling lead ahead of the GOP primaries the following winter and spring, I took to saying on Twitter and in my columns for The Week that Trump could well end up being the nominee. This inspired derision among lots of other pundits. Trump isn’t going to be the nominee! No major party has ever nominated someone like that—with no experience and no political skills beyond attacking everyone around him, including Republican leadership! There’s no way a demagogue-charlatan ends up as the GOP standard-bearer!
When I’d ask those making these arguments precisely how Trump could be stopped, things got vague—the party would do it, the donors would step in, the combined anti-Trump vote (which was quite a bit larger than Trump’s support at that point) would coalesce around one of the other candidates to beat him—and that’s when I staked out the bizarrely simple position I’ve held ever since: Trump would be the GOP nominee as long as he continued to lead comfortably in the polls. That’s something he did throughout the 2016 primaries, so he became the nominee.
The question for me, two years out from the 2024 election, is whether that dynamic will continue to hold. Will Trump stay in the polling lead despite everything, including possible federal indictment, a terrible midterm endorsement record, tons of ebullient coverage of DeSantis’ 19-point re-election victory, and lots of vituperative anti-Trump op-eds from conservative intellectuals?
I honestly don’t know. On Monday of this week, some partisan and state-level GOP polls were released showing DeSantis in the lead, beating Trump by several points. On Tuesday, a Politico/Morning Consult national poll had Trump at 47 percent, which is close to the 50 percent that’s been showing up in national polls for the past year, and DeSantis 14 points behind behind at 33 percent. That sounds more plausible to me than a poll conducted by the “Club for Growth” showing DeSantis already in the high 40s back in August and in the lead today across several states.
Trump’s Continued Strength
Those numbers could go up or down after Trump announces his campaign and begins holding more public events. We will see soon enough if he surges and DeSantis sinks or if the opposite happens. I don’t know which will take place, though I do dissent pretty strongly from those who think it’s obvious that a Trump campaign is doomed from the get-go.
For one thing, it is not inevitable that Trump will collapse automatically in the polls after the GOP’s midterm disappointments and DeSantis’ big re-election triumph. This has been a longstanding fantasy among GOP consultants, party apparatchiks, and officeholders speaking anonymously to reporters—that Trump would implode all on his own without someone else having to set and detonate the TNT. It hasn’t happened yet, and I see no reason to suppose anything fundamental has changed. And, I should add, neither will Trump collapse because the Wall Street Journal and New York Post ran some mean editorials and a cartoon about him over the past week.
For another, I don’t think Trump getting indicted for either January 6 or Documentgate would necessarily sink his hopes for 2024. On the contrary, it’s possible an indictment would supercharge his populist appeal. Now his attacks wouldn’t be limited to the liberal media, the Democrats, the Bush family, the FBI, the intelligence community, and the “Deep State” more broadly. It would also include the Justice Department and federal law enforcement as a whole, and potentially the rule of law as such. I think this would be extremely bad for the country, which is one reason among many that I made the case over the summer against indicting Trump.
Finally, I think it would be extremely foolish for either anti-Trump Republicans or Democrats giddy about their surprising strength in the midterms to convince themselves that Trump is bound to lose a general-election contest in the fall of 2024. He would certainly have liabilities. But as I’ve pointed out numerous times in recent posts, Trump increased his vote total by 11 million between 2016 and 2020. He also came within just 45,000 votes scattered across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin of tying Joe Biden in the Electoral College last time, an outcome that would have led him, despite losing the national popular vote by 7 million, to be declared president for four more years by Republican state delegations in the House.
That’s not a portrait of a guy who’s a sure loser in 2024. It’s the portrait of a guy who could well pull off another narrow win.
Breaking the Spell
So where does that leave us? Right back where we started in the fall of 2015, I’m afraid.
To rephrase somewhat my bizarrely simple position about Trump’s fate being a function of polling support: Trump will be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024 as long as a plurality of the party’s voters continue to want him as their nominee. That really is what my position has come down to these past seven years. Trump appeals to a plurality (and sometimes a supermajority) of Republican voters. As long as that’s the case, he will remain in control of the party.
So the question we need to be asking ourselves, as always, is: Can anything be done to get these voters to abandon Trump? And the honest truth is: I doubt it. It’s an attachment beyond rational calculation, so trying to explain that DeSantis (or anyone else) is a better bet to win will fall on deaf ears. Trump won once, so his voters believe he can win again—and, as I argued above, they could well be right about that.
In the end, the thing that might eventually lead Trump’s most fervent supporters to move on and leave him behind is simple exhaustion or boredom with the bluster. People sometimes get tired of acting out. They get shit out of their system and return home. Trump’s voters need to become sick of making a mess of liberal-democratic self-governance. They need to lay aside enough of their hatred for the other side that they’ll once again accept the rules of the political game—playing to win but accepting a loss if it comes down to that, convinced that they can come back to try again the next time. Their reaction, so far, to their disappointments in the 2022 midterms is encouraging in this regard.
That’s really what people are talking about when they ponder whether Trump can be toppled: Have his voters finally had enough of the nonsense? Getting to that point is the key—but it’s not something you or I or anyone else can make happen. The addict on a bender needs to choose rehab, reform, and sobriety for himself.
Yesterday I took a deep breath and posted a piece with the same basic calculation. Mine was much more an exercise in wiseass bloviating, but with the same serious point.
It’s encouraging to see that I’m on the same wavelength as you on this topic.
When I watch people blithely assume that Trump’s base will ditch him over this, I think I’m watching people who don’t clearly understand the psychology of the Trump voter.
Re your piece on don't indict Trump - I would read it but it's paywalled. Agree it would be very bad for the country. But if he's not indicted - IF the the Fulton County DA or the DOJ think they have the goods to get a conviction - that will be very bad for the country too. I think the former does more damage than the latter, so I say indict. Prepare for the violence - IF the majority of law enforcement are not MAGA.