Trump’s Path Back to the Presidency

It runs right through a legal and political gauntlet

People gather outside of a Manhattan courthouse as the nation waits for the possibility of an indictment against former president Donald Trump by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office on March 21, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Over the past two months, I’ve gained nearly 2,000 new subscribers. I’m delighted to have all of you here, in addition to those who subscribed closer to my launch in June 2022. I hope you’re finding my writing worth your time. But is it worth your money? Fewer than 10 percent of subscribers pay for the newsletter. And the rate of conversions from non-paying to paying has been dropping during the recent surge in sign-ups. That’s because I’ve been restrained in my use of the paywall through this period, making most posts fully available to read and blocking only the audio version and links to the comment thread on each post. But that has to change.

Writing three substantive (and often quite lengthy) posts per week takes a lot of time and mental energy—at least as much time and energy as I used to spend writing three columns per week for The Week, in a job that paid a high enough salary for me to be relieved of the need to earn money elsewhere. I face the same set of tradeoffs here: Either my Substack newsletters bring in enough income that I don’t need to seek out other work—or I won’t be able to continue writing three substantive (and often quite lengthy) posts per week. To be clear: I want this to be my main job. But I need your help to make it possible.

A few of you might be motivated by this plea to convert to paying, but I’m sure to need more than that. So today I’m going to revert to a more aggressive use of the paywall, to incentivize you to take the plunge. I don’t anticipate making any posts entirely private. But I will be placing the paywall partway through most posts, usually halfway through, but sometimes just a few paragraphs from the end. My goal is to balance the need for a nudge with my desire not to provoke non-paying subscribers to unsubscribe altogether out of frustration and anger. I won’t succeed in every case, but I hope I will in most.

Thanks for being here and for supporting my writing. Now on to today’s post….

---

A remarkably broad consensus has formed among Democratic and Republican strategists and pundits that Donald Trump can’t win the presidency again.

He’s a loser, they say. After pulling an implausible inside straight in 2016, just barely beating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million, he’s led his party to three stinging defeats in a row—in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Now he looks likely to face at least one, and maybe many more, indictments. Put it all together and Democrats conclude facing Trump is the best-case scenario for 2024. Plenty of Republicans agree, arguing the party’s voters would be smart to shift their support en masse to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who as president would accomplish much more than Trump managed to do in his four years in office while also running a much more formidable campaign against incumbent president Joe Biden (or whichever Democrat runs instead).

To put it bluntly, the claim that Trump “can’t” win (or even that he’d be easy to beat) is a delusional fantasy. Yes, he lost his bid for re-election by 7 million votes, but as we all know very well, what counts is the Electoral College—and there Trump came incredibly close to winning. A shift of fewer than a hundred thousand votes in a handful of very close states and Trump would have won despite his relatively weak showing in the nationwide popular vote. Recall also that he was running for re-election after four long years of relentless bad press while the country was still deep in the throes of the deadliest pandemic in a century—and yet he still managed to best his 2016 popular vote total by 11 million.

The Populist Dynamic

Populists always have a harder time politically when attempting to hold on to power. Their strength is portraying themselves as outsiders at war with a corrupt system. Trump has now returned to that role, running against a long list of opponents: the Democratic president and his party; his enablers in the mainstream media and state-level law enforcement (including District Attorneys in New York City and Fulton County, Georgia); a substantial portion of his own party and its semi-independent support apparatus, including its favored choice for 2024 (Ron DeSantis); the FBI and the rest of federal law enforcement, including the Attorney General of the United States and Special Counsel Jack Smith; the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, as well as Washington’s foreign policy establishment, which (unlike Trump) strongly supports Ukraine in its defensive war with Russia.

That’s a lot of enemies—which is what any populist craves.

The length of that list helps to explain what would otherwise be the inexplicable fact that Trump’s standing in the polls has markedly improved relative to DeSantis over the past month, as news has been dominated by stories about the governor’s nascent presidential campaign and Trump’s mounting legal woes on multiple fronts. As Chris Cillizza shows in an excellent Substack post, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is solid and substantial. (Trump is lapping him in more than one recent poll.) Hard as it may be to believe, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s lead in the GOP primaries will only grow as he finds himself facing multiple indictments in multiple jurisdictions and treats that fact as indisputable evidence “the system” will stop at nothing to take him down.

As any number of commentators have noted over the past seven years, the Republican base is less interested in policy (including the policies favored by the conservative movement since the Reagan administration) than they are in expressing anger at elite actors and institutions that make up the country’s political, cultural, and economic establishment. And no one is better at channeling and expressing that rage vicariously than Trump. As long as this remains the case, the former president is likely to remain the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, no matter his legal struggles.

The Polarized Path to Victory

But is this a self-subversive tendency? Could it be that the base’s stubborn attachment to its orange tribune is setting the party on a path to certain defeat in the 2024 general election, as both Democratic strategists and conservative opinion leaders insist?

Maybe, but I’m skeptical.

Now, don’t get me wrong: He definitely could lose. The country is narrowly divided, and many Americans can’t stand Trump. You’d think the willingness of independent/swing voters to hold their noses and cast ballots for him would decrease relative to the 2020 baseline in reaction to seeing him accused (and possibly found guilty) of multiple crimes. Given that he narrowly lost then, even a marginal drop in support among those who aren’t die-hard Trump backers would appear to set him up for an even weaker showing, and hence a bigger defeat, in 2024.

But this is far from assured—and not only because, as Cillizza also notes, Biden’s approval remains distressingly tepid. The bigger (or more structural) factor is the dynamic of political races under conditions of sharp partisan polarization.

According to theories developed by political scientists during the heyday of mid-20^th-century consensus politics, presidential campaigns typically unfold in two distinct stages. During party nomination contests, candidates run to the center of public opinion within each party, which is somewhat further left for Democrats and somewhat further right for Republicans than the nationwide electorate they both face in the general election. But then the two successful party nominees shift their strategy when they face each other in the final months before Election Day, with each of them running toward the center, where the greatest numbers of votes can be found (in the substantial overlap of the parties, which form the bell curve of a normal distribution).

When analysts pronounce that Trump can’t possibly win in 2024 given how far outside of the mainstream he is, not just on policy but even more so in populist animus and legal jeopardy, they usually do so while assuming these old rules still apply.

But they don’t.