DONALD TRUMP HAS NOTHING LEFT BUT SPITE
It seems likely that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and if you want to know what his campaign will be about, look no further than his journey to Wyoming this past weekend to try to destroy Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans in Congress who turned against him.
Trump’s political project can now be described in a single word: spite.
His personal animosities and resentments always played a key role in his political decisions, but what’s different today is how little anything else seems to animate him. It’s why he went to Wyoming to campaign for Harriet Hageman — and why Hageman herself was an afterthought. All that matters is that she’s primarying Cheney.
I suppose you could argue there’s a rational strategy behind Trump’s actions: Like the mob boss he has so often resembled, he must make an example out of a disloyal underling, so nobody else gets any ideas. The trouble is that one candidate after another has endured Trump’s fury and won anyway. The far-right clowns he endorsed in governor’s races in Idaho and Nebraska both lost. In Georgia, he targeted the incumbent Republican governor and secretary of state because they declined to steal the 2020 election for him; both won their primaries easily.
That doesn’t mean any Republican could successfully challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination; his grip on the party remains too strong. But what kind of case can a politician so consumed with spite make to the general electorate?
When we look back on the bizarre spectacle of the 2016 election, we sometimes forget that amidst all the vitriol, Trump had an argument that was compelling to many Americans embittered about what had happened to them and their communities. The story of the past few decades, Trump said, is that the game was rigged. Manufacturing declined, jobs went away, and now you struggle to make ends meet with little hope for the future.
There was a lot Trump left out of that story. He didn’t mention how much worse his own party made those same people’s lives by keeping wages low, and hampering access to health care and good schools. The message also was wrapped up in xenophobia and misogyny. But at least part of Trump’s diagnosis — that both parties had failed to bring millions of Americans along through tough economic transitions — was basically true, and resonated powerfully.
And in true Trumpian style, he promised the people left behind that he would wipe their problems away and deliver them to a nirvana of wealth and spiritual triumph.
Four years later, the promise had worn thin.
But there’s still power in one of the central rationales Trump offered to his supporters: There are people you hate — immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds — and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them. His core supporters still thrill to that message.
Others notice, though, that despite Trump’s four years in power, the United States is still full of immigrants and growing more diverse every day. Social change on issues of sexuality and child-rearing has not been reversed. And it turned out you can put an internet troll in the White House to spend every day owning the libs, but it won’t turn your struggling town into a paradise.
Trump no longer has a story to tell about America that ends with a better future. That’s not to say it’s impossible he wins in 2024.
But if and when Trump runs again, his bid will have all the anger and hate of his past two campaigns, but none of the optimism he had in 2016. He has been distilled to his bitter, resentful core. The result could be a race even uglier than what he subjected us to before.