A GOP challenge to Trump?

A lot of Republicans still believe in the power of competition. A poll in November indicated that 40 percent of them, and 72 percent of all Americans, would like to see President Donald Trump face a primary challenge. But Republican politicians, even those who have strong objections to Trump, have been inhibited by the conventional wisdom that running against Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries would be a suicide mission.

Trump is in a very strong position for renomination, as I have written before. An antitrump conservative named Andy Smarick has recently argued, however, that the risks of challenging Trump are greatly overestimated. He contends that an ambitious Republican could do himself a world of good by running against President Trump for the nomination in 2020. That candidate, Smarick allows, would probably lose.

But he would establish himself (or, in the less likely case, she would establish herself ) as a top contender for the leadership of a post-trump party, either in 2020 if Trump lost the general election or 2024 if he won. The challenger would also give a boost to the influence of his ideas within the party.

By sharply criticizing the president in an op-ed article published Tuesday, Mitt Romney has reopened the question of whether Trump will have a rival for the nomination. So it’s worth considering Smarick’s case.

He writes, “Recall: Ted Kennedy challenged Carter, lost, then continued to be a Dem leader for years. Reagan challenged Ford, lost, and was president next time around.” Kennedy may not be a good example for the point Smarick is making: As the word “continued” suggests, Kennedy was already a leading Democrat, thanks largely to his last name, before that 1980 challenge. I would defer to others who were paying closer attention to politics than I was at the time, but my sense is that the 1980 run detracted from rather than enhanced his reputation: A disastrous interview with Roger Mudd stuck to him, and some Democrats blamed him for softening up Jimmy Carter before the general election.

Leaving that aside, there’s a reason Smarick has to ask us to recall such primary challengers: Serious primary campaigns against the renomination of a sitting president have gotten rarer. The last one was Patrick Buchanan’s challenge to George Bush in 1992, and even that campaign