Immediately after the election, I found myself feeling unexpectedly content with the result.
Like many conservatives, I’d hoped President Trump would be reelected primarily because I didn’t want the Left rewarded for its violence and rampant intolerance or put in a position to turn its anti-American prejudices into policy. But I expect I’d have agreed before Nov. 3 to a guaranteed outcome in which Trump failed to secure reelection while Republicans kept the Senate and made Nancy Pelosi’s leverage in the House as flimsy as her excuses for breaking lockdown to get a hairdo.
But how could one bank on such a result? It seemed that the only sure way to avoid the Left’s triumphal procession through our constitutional institutions was to accept another four years of Trump tweeting. The odds of voters delivering the amazing, nuanced result that they have, with Trump out and the Left hobbled, seemed too long to bet on.
So on Nov. 4 and 5, the landscape looked unexpectedly acceptable to many conservatives and Republicans. The Left’s worst excesses would be held in check for the next two years (on the reasonable assumption that the GOP would win at least one of the Senate seats in Georgia, where they haven’t lost a Senate election for two decades), and the party would then follow the historical norm of winning seats in the congressional midterm elections, retake the House, and command Capitol Hill. Then, assuming Joe Biden, pushing 82, would not run for a second term, Democrats would nominate Kamala Harris, both extreme and electorally incompetent, who’d face a tough, appealing, and somewhat Trumpy Republican nominee in the form, for example, Sen. Tom Cotton or Rep. Dan Crenshaw.
Seeing that prospect open up for the next four years and beyond bordered on exciting to anyone relieved that there had been no blue wave.
But it naively assumed something which cannot be assumed — that in defeat, Trump would disappear. Come Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, he’d be gone. That seems far from certain. Trump is flirting with the idea of running in 2024, which he’d be entitled to do as he will have served only one term. It’s true that when voters cast their ballots in 2024, he’ll be several months older than even Joe Biden is now, but he is nevertheless suggesting it.
He may be doing so only for face-saving reasons, but what if he follows through? He has played up allegations of election fraud, for which there is scant evidence, to claim that he really won and was cheated. As my colleague Philip Klein perceptively noted, he’d be a more attractive candidate to a Republican base in the next cycle if they think he actually won in 2020 and was wronged than if he were an acknowledged loser.
Having lost in 2020, he’d be more likely to lose in 2024, for he’d lack the advantage of incumbency and would seem more like yesterday’s man. But that might apply only in the general election.
What about the primary? There are many possible candidates in the Republican 2024 field, such as Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and others, in addition to Cotton and Crenshaw, already mentioned. But could any of them beat Trump in the presidential primary? Who’d bet against the most famous person in the world running as a comeback candidate, the cheated once-and-future champion? It may be doubted that any of the impressive figures in the GOP has the wattage to do that.
Surely it will have dwindled in four years. Yes, probably, but how much? The possibility is distinctly there for a Republican nightmare, of Trump crashing back on to the political scene, incapable of winning in the general election but unbeatable in the primary.
No wonder elected Republicans are signaling that it is time for Trump to bow out. No wonder that, while desperately trying to avoid enraging him and prompting damaging retaliation against the party, they are praying for his departure. It isn’t true, as many Democrats and erstwhile Republicans claim, that the whole GOP has spent the past few weeks trying to steal the election from Biden. Most of them have spent it wondering if they can get beyond Trump without irreparable damage.
If you’re wondering what’s meant by irreparable damage and you want to give yourself the heebie-jeebies, just try out the following phrases and see how they sound: “President Kamala Harris,” “President Adam Schiff,” “President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
