Trumpism without Trump

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman in Arkansas in 2016 has kept a low public profile since Trump’s infantilism blew the election to a weak opponent in 2020.

I’ve interacted with lawyer-lobbyist Bud Cummins of Little Rock only twice in the last couple of years. I must say that I found him insightful both times.

At a Political Animals Club meeting I told him he ought to have liked my column a bit more lately because I’d been inclined rightward toward the center. He said he found me instead mostly moody, willing when in a good mood to give conservatives an occasional point but devoted as ever to insults and left-side partisanship when in a foul mood.

That’s exactly right and a compliment. It says I am fair to right-wingers if they deserve it but vigorous in condemnation when they act ridiculously and offensively, as in the millimeter-deep talking-point essence of

Sarah Sanders’ pretense of a governorship, this ongoing nonsense of a state legislative session and

Kevin McCarthy’s selling of whatever he has in place of a soul to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of the kook-right nook of his caucus.

It appears I was in a bad mood during that preceding paragraph. So let me get in a better one.

I posted on Twitter the other day to report that Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — like Asa Hutchinson a mildly conservative and pragmatic small-state Republican governor — had declared himself a Trump rejecting contemplator of seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. I said that Sununu — who last year hosted Hutchinson at a business breakfast in New Hampshire — offered a “younger, wittier Asa.”

I was meaning to say that Asa’s unlikely lane to the nomination was potentially rendered even less likely by a younger, wittier clone who happened to govern the first primary state.

To my surprise, Cummins showed up soon with a posted response, saying: “Running [against] Trump is a losing strategy. Running as an equally tough fighter who will never tolerate politicization of government agencies, open borders, unlimited spending, and who will expose left-wing media, but with even better leadership skills than Trump, [equals] winning strategy.”

That was exactly right as political analysis except for the phrase “even better leadership skills than Trump.” Any leadership skill exceeds Trump’s. The word “even” was deadpan comedy.

In a subsequent phone conversation, Cummins told me he has not abandoned admiration for Trump or willingness to vote for him again. He said his point was that Trump, by his personality at times, played into the hands of Democrats wanting to make the race about him personally instead of policy issues on which they’d lose.

He was saying that simply offering oneself as a Republican who is nicer-seeming than Trump “sounds a little like virtue-signaling” and misses the point that Republicans want Trumpism, with or without Trump.

If Republicans had any tactically organized common sense, they’d accept that Trump would have been reelected — carrying Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — if he had demonstrated the same bluster and unrelenting anti-establishment fire, but without the megalomaniacal and narcissistic disorder. He exhausted Americans emotionally.

A decisive number of swing voters preferred Joe Biden in hopes he’d sleep for four years.

ATrump presidency without Trump, defined by conservative issues rather than personal drama, talking tough against media bias and government insider-ism, which Cummins calls media corruption and Justice Department corruption … that would be electoral gold for Republicans.

It wouldn’t be gold in the nationwide popular vote, but it could well tilt the Electoral College in greater Phoenix, greater Atlanta and beyond.

The trick is to embrace Trumpism that owns the liberals but doesn’t irk enough moderate swing voters — think conservative moms — to let liberals win in the only way they might, as the lesser evil.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to the extent the nation thinks it knows him, seems the best prospect for being as galvanizing as Trump without being as evidently nuts.

Mike Pence is too much the Milquetoast. Nikki Haley is possibly a prospect, depending on what she can show.

But Hutchinson, Sununu and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, as Republicans I’d think about voting for, face low ceilings among contemporary Republican primary voters. A three-way split of the John Kasich vote of 2016 is not a substantial or competitive base.

What Republicans need is an arch-conservative candidate not named Trump who scares a moody columnist half to death, but not with a behavioral disorder and insurrection. He, or she, would do it with sanity and effectiveness — a less-weird hairdo, to put it metaphorically.