Trump dragging GOP down with his ’24 run
Donald Trump is a political phenomenon.
Donald Trump is also a political failure.
No Republican to emerge in the past 100 years — not even Ronald Reagan — has galvanized the party’s base and stirred the kind of devotion Trump has inspired.
Of course, that devotion is a kind of curse for his party.
It weeds out Trump’s GOP critics during the primary process, as we saw this year with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney in Wyoming. It also tends to elevate brain-dead, buttkissing, conspiracy-mongering Trump zombies to general elections, where they often don’t fare so well.
This year’s midterm elections had all the makings of a red tsunami: unpopular Democratic president (Joe Biden), high inflation and public anxiety about the surge of migrants on our southern border. But Republicans managed to yank defeat from the clutches of victory with a string of highprofile loser candidates (Doug Mastriano, Kari Lake, Don Bolduc, Blake Masters, etc.) who parroted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.
As a result, the GOP failed to gain control of the Senate, made small gains in the House and lost key gubernatorial races in swing states.
Reagan’s great political achievement was expanding the Republican base by openly welcoming independents and disaffected Democrats to his cause.
Trump doesn’t invite the opposition to his side. He calls them monstrous, America-hating enemies of the state. Little wonder that he hasn’t been too successful at the art of persuasion.
The tepid response over the past week to Trump’s 2024 campaign kickoff suggests that even some of the loyalists might be wavering.
You get the sense that his narcissistic, whiny politics of grievance has gradually lost its flavor.
Let’s revisit Trump’s electoral history:
In 2016, he ran against Hillary Clinton, the most unpopular Democratic nominee in the history of presidential polling. While Trump won the election by threading the needle in three Midwestern swing states, he lost the popular vote to Clinton by 3 million votes.
Even in his greatest moment of triumph, however, he received a smaller percentage of eligible voters than John Mccain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012, both of whom were landslide losers.
The 2018 midterms were a referendum on Trump’s presidency, and the GOP experienced its worst midterm election since Watergate and lost control of the U.S. House.
In 2020, Trump became only the third elected president of the past 85 years to be voted out of office.
In doing so, he lost the popular vote to Joe Biden by 7 million votes.
Trump’s relentless complaints of election fraud inadvertently discouraged Georgia Republicans from turning out for two U.S. Senate runoffs that the GOP ended up losing. As a result, Democrats managed to flip the Senate.
Trump is like a highscoring basketball player who shoots constantly, plays no defense and regularly turns the ball over. You’re not sure how well you’ll do without him, but you know that you’re losing with him.
The narrative coming out of the Trump camp before last week’s announcement speech was that he is returning to the spirit of the 2016 campaign, as an outsider taking on the system.
That’s not the way his speech came across. Love him or hate him, the Trump of 2015-2016 was feisty and animated. Even if you despised his message, you couldn’t deny that his campaign had a central idea at its core: nationalism.
That meant a rejection of free trade, a negative stance on NATO and a call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants.
There is no central idea behind Trump’s new candidacy, apart from his own perception that he left the country in wonderful shape (conveniently overlooking the fact that COVID-19 deaths were at an all-time high as he left office and the economy was in a shambles) and everything has since turned to rot.
The only new policy position I could glean from the grim, rambling speech was his proposal that drug dealers receive the death penalty.
Last Friday, former House Speaker (and 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee) Paul Ryan sat down with ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl and echoed the growing sentiment among Republicans that three straight election cycles of losing is enough.
“I think what we now know, it’s pretty clear, is with Trump we lose,” Ryan said.
It’s pretty clear to most people. But not to Trump.