Trump assures that there will be no post-Trump era
America now is deep into its Dylan Thomas moment. In his Elba-like exile in his Palm Beach retreat, former President Donald J. Trump — once a disruptive force, always a disruptive force — is heeding the Welsh poet’s admonition that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump — planning, threatening, or simply playing with the idea of a presidential campaign for 2024 — is not going gentle into the good night of American politics. Rather than follow the pattern of one-term presidents Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into a retirement of good works and a good post-White House reputation, he instead, as the poet suggested, is girding to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The result is that Mr. Trump, though besieged by lawsuits, has postponed, or even canceled, the post-Trump era in American politics, extending his influence over the GOP and just as quickly recasting the Biden era, which has only begun.
Just as there are few precedents for the disruption Mr. Trump sent coursing through the social culture of the United States, there are few precedents for the potential effect of the 45th president’s coda.
From the post-presidential sidelines, only Herbert Hoover after being defeated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt remained a persistent vocal critic of the new administration with the ferocity that Mr. Trump already has taken to Mr. Biden’s presidency. As a potential White House challenger, only Mr. Trump’s presidential hero Andrew Jackson — the Indian fighter soiled with astonishing swiftness during the racial reckoning that occurred during the Trump presidency — nursed a political grudge with the aggressiveness, even ruthlessness, that is at the center of Mr. Trump’s character.
Indeed, the Andrew Jackson campaignencore could become the libretto for Mr. Trump’s possible returnto the presidential arena.
The Tennessean had one asset Mr. Trump lacks — a 10-percentage point bulge in the popular vote along with his deficit in the Electoral College — but he conjured a rallying cry that Mr. Trump very likely will adapt and adopt. He said he was denied the presidency in a “corrupt bargain” that thrust the very model of the political establishment, the presidential son John Quincy Adams, into the presidency in 1824. Four years later the verdict was reversed by the substantial margin of more than 2-to-1 inelectoral votes.
In his withdrawal and likely reprise, Mr. Trump almost certainly will hew to a “corrupt bargain” theme.
Whether that propels him back to the White House like Grover Cleveland, who in defeating President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 became the only president to win the presidency after losing it, is less sure. But what is likely is that even as Mr. Biden will seek to take the United States down a different path domestically and internationally, Mr. Trump could freeze American politics in place.
The effect could be immediate: The Trump-Biden rivalry persists, Mr. Trump’s sway will remain over Republican lawmakers who might otherwise be drawn into bipartisan efforts with the Biden Democrats — and a new generation of Republican presidential candidates may have to put off their White House dreams for anotherfour years, rendering some of them too shopworn or too irrelevantin 2028, a political eon away.
Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, both 2016 nomination rivals of Mr. Trump who were mercilessly insulted by Mr. Trump, embraced him as a way of retaining their political viability and extending their appeal to the disgruntled and dispossessed who were at the center of the Trump coalition. Their presidential campaign plans instantly are on hold; a second nomination fight against Mr. Trump would become awkward and likely unavailing, and Mr. Cruz wasn’t helped by his hasty return from Mexico while Texas was buried under floodwaters.
At the same time, fresh GOP faces with a Trump strain to their politicssuch as Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Tim Scott of South Carolina, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, herself a former governor of South Carolina, would have to wait another four years before mounting their own candidacies. Then there is Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, already a hero in Trump circles for inviting thousands of bikers to Sturgis in the summer and who blithely brushes off figures indicating the state has the nation’s eighth-highest coronavirus mortality rate, according to the Becker’s Hospital Review newsletter.
In the short term, Mr. Trump is planning trench warfare against the Republicans he cited at the CPAC Convention late last month as apostates for voting to impeach or convict him — party members he vowed to help defeat in primaries. Target No. 1: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whom he called “a warmonger,” saying her “poll numbers have dropped faster than any human being I’ve ever seen.” Think of next year’s Wyoming GOP primary as the Shootout at Creek Ranch, the largest contiguousranch in the Rocky Mountains.
The effect of the Trump profile has other important implications.
If, for example, Mr. Biden sees himself as a one-term caretaker president — though Mr. Biden has not suggested anything of the sort — the country in 2024 could be in more of a post-Biden era than a post-Trump era.
Or Mr. Trump’s return on the white steed of resentment politics could set up the first presidential rematchsince 1956, when defeated 1952 Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson once again took on Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Eisenhower prevailed a second time. There also was a rematch in 1900, when Democrat William Jennings Bryan tried again against William McKinley. He, too, was defeated by the incumbent president.
Though return matches are not a sure thing for the challenger, second tries against different candidates twice have produced victories, first for John Quincy Adams, the losing candidate against James Monroe in 1820, and then for Richard Nixon, who lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 but defeated Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. Charles Pinckney (1804 and 1808) and Thomas E. Dewey (1944 and 1948) lost both tries, and William Jennings Bryan was a three-time loser, his final defeat coming in 1908.
In this, Mr. Trump sets down what the American poet Robert Frost called the “road not taken.” In doing so, he defies both custom and the quiet Dylan Thomas conviction that “wise men at their end know dark is right.”