Trump to the rescue
Arkansans have long said “Thank God for Mississippi” whenever we finish 49th in some nationwide ranking.
Democrats have now become similarly accustomed to saying “Thank God for Donald Trump.”
They said it in 2018, after picking up 40 seats and taking the House; they said it in 2020 after taking the presidency from him and again, a few weeks later, when he destroyed Republican chances in runoff races for the Senate in Georgia, thereby handing Democrats control of it.
Democrats more recently thanked Trump when his endorsement in the Republican primaries elevated an unsavory array of wingnuts that allowed them to turn the anticipated red tsunami into something more akin to a blue puddle (the Republicans had an unpopular Democratic president, key issues and history on their side, the Democrats had Trump, and it proved to be more than enough).
But even more champagne corks had to be popping in Democratic homes across the nation last week when Trump announced he was running for president again, thereby continuing his personal project of destroying the GOP from within and dramatically bolstering Democratic chances of inflicting yet another electoral debacle upon it in 2024.
The 2022 midterm wasn’t the usual “referendum” election because it was more of a referendum on a former president rather than the incumbent president. No matter how badly they do, how awful the policy disasters or how many Americans think the country is on the wrong track, all Democrats have to do is say the magic word “Trump,” and all is well.
A certain pattern has thus become detectable in which Trump loses because of the way he behaves, and causes other Republicans to lose because of the way he behaves, and then doubles down on that behavior causing him to lose still more and taking more Republicans down with him, in the process validating the decision of both those who refused to ever vote for him and those who did but never will again (the latter an obviously expanding group).
After being, appropriately, blamed for otherwise inexplicable GOP defeats in the midterms, Trump responded by throwing a series of characteristic tantrums, much of which were directed against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for having the temerity to do what Trump no longer can, which is win an election.
One would argue that this is how a 7-year-old behaves, but it’s really not, because most 7-year-olds are capable of learning.
The question of capacity for learning also comes into play when considering the likely reaction to Trump’s candidacy on the part of Republican voters frustrated with losing and, hopefully, beginning to figure out what/who is causing it.
Along these lines, it has always been possible to break down Trump voters into three groups, with the first two featuring considerable overlap and the third standing distinct from them.
In Category One are those who have maintained, not entirely unreasonably and probably sincerely, that they were fully aware of Trump’s defects all along but considered him the lesser evil; they held their noses and voted for him rather than Hillary Clinton and then did it again when it came to Joe Biden. These Trump supporters didn’t so much support Trump as oppose Democrats and the left more generally.
Those in Category Two also had few illusions about Trump but decided to look the other way and tolerate his tawdry behavior in return for tax cuts, deregulation and conservative judges. A “transactional” approach was adopted based on the assumption that Trump could be used as an unsavory means toward certain public policy ends.
Because Republicans/conservatives in these two categories viewed Trump purely in instrumental terms (as a way of avoiding a Democrat in the White House and the policies that would flow from that), they will now have no difficulty in withdrawing their support; because their approach was always conditional, most probably already have, with a sigh of relief and a certain embarrassment. They will enthusiastically support DeSantis in 2024, because achievement of their goals requires winning, and they know Trump can’t.
Alas, this takes us to Category Three, otherwise known as Trump’s “fans”; a common enough formulation when it comes to ballplayers and rock stars, but disturbing when applied to public servants because it implies unjustified, even debasing, emotional and psychological investment.
The hunch is that many of those in this category had little interest or involvement in politics before being mobilized by Trump and likely have never voted for president for anyone other than him. For them, Trump isn’t just a politician but a heroic leader of a populist movement with which they both identify and via which they have acquired, for perhaps the first time in their lives, a political identity. In their eyes, Trump can do no wrong but is continually wronged, and cannot have lost because he always wins; hence their reflexive acceptance of his claims of the stolen election as a means of resolving the cognitive dissonance.
The number of Republicans in Categories One and Two are probably, at this late point, sufficient to deny Trump re-nomination.
It is the number still left in Category Three that will determine whether his third-party bid then denies the GOP nominee the presidency.