Trump is stronger than ever after Super Tuesday
About 18 months ago, Donald Trump suffered one of his worst political defeats, when many of his loyalists and handpicked candidates were defeated in a midterm landscape that clearly favored Republicans. A lot of people — I was one of them — thought that this might be the beginning of the end for him, a stark indicator of political weakness that would encourage GOP voters to abandon him or set him up for a decisive general election defeat.
Instead, today Trump arguably occupies a more politically commanding position in American politics than at any other point in the past eight years. His romp through Super Tuesday completes the replay of 2016’s GOP primaries, with his opposition again fatally divided and his coalition much stronger from the start.
The polls that matter are the ones that show Trump consistently beating President Joe Biden — a show of strength beyond anything he managed at a similar point in his previous two presidential runs.
How did we go from defeat to recovery? Start with the most important political result of the Republican disappointments in 2022, which was not the temporary blow to Trump but the brief return of Biden’s mojo, preempting any effort within the liberal coalition to make an issue of his age and push him out for 2024.
Sticking with Biden didn’t just mean that Democrats were stuck with apparent presidential decrepitude to go along with an unpopular economic record. It also meant that the argument among Republicans for Trump’s unelectability, briefly potent enough to lift Ron Desantis in the polls, fizzled out quickly: With every new survey showing Biden struggling, it became harder and harder for Desantis and Haley to persuade voters who liked Trump that it was time to turn the page.
In saving Biden, then, the midterms eventually helped revive Trump. So did the return of liberal lawfare, which was in abeyance during Biden’s first two years but came back with a vengeance in the run of indictments, lawsuits and attempts to remove Trump from the presidential ballot.
There is an understandable liberal frustration with all attempts to make Trumpism out to be some kind of unbeatable political force, given how many defeats he and his allies have suffered.
Obviously, Trump is corrupt, and some of the proceedings against him have merit. But far too often these efforts end up tainted by nakedly partisan intent, whether they’re taken over by liberal grifters or just pursued with a mixture of overreach, incompetence and wishcasting.
Prosecutors could have brought one slam-dunk indictment against the former president, in the classified-documents case. Instead they brought four of them — the first one (the New York case) completely partisan and farfetched and the other two requiring creative legal theories to succeed.
So Trump has risen by being fortunate in his rivals and enemies. But he’s also risen by ceding the spotlight and showing a touch — just a touch — of political discipline.
He refused to be goaded onto the primary debate stage. He has somewhat normal political professionals running his campaign. He’s kept his more bizarre rants confined to the weird microworld of Truth Social. This isn’t a “new Trump,” exactly:
His rally speeches are still rambling and rich with grievance, and you just need to take a glance at Truth Social to see the old mania at work. It may just be that he seems more contained because he’s being contained by forces stronger than his ego.
In general, the White House seems to be in denial about its position, trying to wish away the message of the polling averages. But to the extent that Trump thrives when he’s getting less attention, you would expect a general election campaign to provide many more reminders of his chaos and unfitness to the voters who just aren’t paying close attention.
Or at least you’d expect that from a normal campaign. But we don’t know yet if Biden can play that role. If he can’t, the peculiar ease of Trump’s recovery may just extend itself all the way to a November restoration.