He never really went away, did he? And now he’s back.
Donald Trump
’s announcement that he is running for the 2024 Republican nomination is no surprise. All popular reality TV shows return for a second or third run. But the ratings are sliding with each new series. Trump’s routines were once the greatest show on Earth. Now the viewers are turned off.
Trump performed a public service in the 2016 campaign. He exposed first the Republican and then the Democratic leadership as corrupt amateurs. He named and shamed the bipartisan failures of outsourcing and foreign wars. He goaded the media into dropping its mask of objectivity and revealing a snarl of pure partisanship. He goaded the FBI and the Justice Department into confirming that the administrative state really does believe that it, and not the public, should decide who rules. The system needed a shock, and Trump deserved to win.
CONSPICUOUS SILENCE OVER FALLEN CRYPTO KING’S DEMOCRATIC TIES
Trump does not deserve to be on the ticket in 2024. His refusal to accept defeat in 2020, his incitement of a mob to block Congress’s ratification of the vote, and his relentless inculcation of “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories about that election all disqualify him from public office. The same goes for the Democrats who refused to accept defeat in 2016, relentlessly promoted the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and cheered on the Black Lives Matter rioters in the summer of 2020. But this is politics, not ethics, so let’s look at the numbers.
Trump cost the Republicans the House in 2018. He lost the general election in 2020, and his interference in the Georgia runoff cost the Republicans the Senate too. This year’s midterm results confirm that he retains his unique ability to alienate independents and centrists. Over the next two years, his snail trail of legal woes and low-grade hangers-on will only render him less appealing to the sane. Repeating the experiment for a fourth time in the hope of getting the right result is the wrong strategy. In 2024, a vote for Trump will be tantamount to a vote for President Joe Biden.
The midterm elections also confirm that the Republicans must separate the MAGA from the message. Trump delivered the MAGA message so successfully that Biden and the Democrats adopted a watery version of it and won in 2020. “Build Back Better” is nothing more than a technocratic gloss on “Make America Great Again.” The Biden administration’s sudden conversion to Sino-skepticism and reviving America’s industrial base are further Trumpian impostures.
Trump’s message retains broad, centrist appeal. His presidential record confirms that, time and again, his policy instincts were right. Like it or not, Trump the reality TV star had a better grasp of foreign policy basics than the supposed professionals. Like it or not, Trump the debt-loaded property developer had a better grasp of the domestic economy than the supposed experts. The problem, electorally speaking, is his immoderate personality and his increasingly unhinged and cultish followers.
Trump also delivered the Republicans a new base, the unruly red-hat hordes of MAGA, much to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s chagrin. The midterm elections show that the voters want MAGA policies without MAGA candidates and conspiracy-mongering — and without Mr. MAGA himself. Contrast the results in Florida, where Gov. Ron. DeSantis grew the Republican vote by welding Trumpish cultural politics to a proven record of competence, with the failure of Trump-endorsed Republicans in Arizona, which was a red state until 2018, when it was empurpled by Trump’s unique powers of polarization.
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Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, is a true Trumper, an ex-cable anchor who says the 2020 election was stolen. The Democratic incumbent, Katie Hobbs, was deeply unimpressive. Lake should have beaten her, but Hobbs won, not least because in 2021, Lake told “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out.” Blake Masters, the Trump-endorsed state Senate candidate, also lost his race. So did Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona’s secretary of state. Meanwhile, the state treasurer, Kimberly Yee, won by double digits. She was not endorsed by Trump.
If a MAGA slate cannot win in the midterm elections in Arizona when the economy is in shambles, the Democrats control both parts of Congress, and a Democratic president is semi-senile, then it cannot win a national election. It looks like this message is reaching the Republican base — or at least those parts of it not bewitched by QAnon and steal-stopping fantasies. If not, Trump (who will be 78 in 2024) and Biden (who will be 82) will go at each other in the debates like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men. That fleeting pleasure will be followed by four long years of further decay and decline under the Democrats.
