Trump not going gentle into night
America now is deep into its Dylan Thomas moment.
In his Elba-like exile in Palm Beach, 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, 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 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 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 Hoover, after being defeated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, remained a persistent vocal critic of the new administration with the ferocity that Trump already has taken to Joe Biden’s presidency. As a potential White House challenger, only 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 Trump’s character.
The Tennessean 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 in electoral votes.
In his withdrawal and likely reprise, Trump almost certainly will hew to a “corrupt bargain” theme.
The effect could be immediate: The Trump-Biden rivalry persists, Trump’s sway remains 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 another four years, rendering some of them too shopworn or too irrelevant in 2028, a political eon away.
In the short term, Trump is planning trench warfare against the Republicans he cited at the CPAC meeting late last month as apostates for voting to impeach or convict him — party members he vowed to help defeat in primaries. Target Number One: 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 contiguous ranch in the Rocky Mountains.
The effect of the Trump profile has other important implications.
If, for example, Biden sees himself as a one-term caretaker president — though he 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 Trump’s return on the white steed of resentment politics could set up the first presidential re-match since 1956, when defeated 1952 Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson once again took on Dwight Eisenhower. 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 Bryan was a three-time loser, his final defeat coming in 1908.
In this, Trump sets down what the American poet Robert Frost called the “road not taken.” In doing so, he defies both custom and the quiet Thomas conviction that “wise men at their end know dark is right.”