Trump and the curse of the front-runner

DONALD Trump is about to discover the flip side of being the front-runner in a potentially crowded field.

The good news is that front-runners often win, even if they have to claw their way to the finish line. The bad news is that they have to.

He can’t lose. As the fat, old man in the race, he has to win every contest. Truth be told, winning isn’t always enough; you have to win handily, do better than expected and not get shown up by some upstart in New Hampshire who finishes a too-close second.

The whole game is gotcha. When will he stumble? Who will catch him? How hard will he fall? It is the story everyone wants to write.

And he has to do it against the backdrop of a national media corps that has already adopted the line that he is the most unelectable of all Republican candidates, with the only question being whether and when Republican

voters will be smart enough or strategic enough to figure that out. Already, you see the long analyses of whether the polls are showing that Trump’s base may be willing to recognize his flaws.

Not just that, of course. He has to do all of this against a backdrop of continuing investigations, which is not only a distraction of gargantuan proportion but a financial drain of unimaginable dimension. Think dozens of lawyers billing by the hour to fund defense efforts that have no signs of ending. Trump has to fund two campaigns at the same time: one political and one legal, and unlike elected officials who get to do official actions, which earn political attention, Trump has to pay out of pocket for all his events and rallies and campaign travel and staff and the rest.

He is not the brash challenger that he was the first time around. He does not have the power of incumbency that he had the second time around. He has lost any aura of invincibility, if once he had that. And he faces younger, less-encumbered versions of himself, ideologically speaking. What’s Trump to do? Exactly what he is doing, of course.

The good news for Democrats is that there is no other path for Trump than running for president to the bitter end, even if it tears his party apart in the process.

This is not a man who has anywhere else to go — unless it is a courtroom, that is, and even that would not lead him to take his name off the ballot (or, if you believe him, to lose the support of his base).

But the more vulnerable he looks, the more likely it is to be a multicandidate field where a loyal plurality base will hold Trump in good stead. Maybe. For a while.

The winnowing process is harsh in presidential politics. Candidates run out of money when they can’t point to a primary they’ll win. You can run for a year and be out in two weeks.

The field narrows. If Trump dominates the field, and it is hard to imagine that he won’t — at least until it sorts out — then the goal will be to emerge as the one who gains stature by toppling the Big Guy.

That’s the challenge for Ron Desantis. He wants to be Barack Obama in 2008 to Trump’s Hillary Clinton. Run against the front-runner without offending her base in the process. Exploit the baggage without being the one who necessarily points to it. Challengers can finish second; front-runners can’t.

In other words, Donald J. Trump really does face the run of his life this time.