By Fred Bauer
Monday, July 25, 2022
Long-simmering rumors of a Donald
Trump 2024 campaign have recently begun to boil. Many in Trump’s orbit seem
eager for a run, as do many Democratic strategists. Ever unpredictable, Trump
himself has sent signals that he could very well declare a bid for the
presidency even before the 2022 midterms. However, changes in the political
environment since 2016 may help cement Trump’s legacy as a disrupter while also
posing some obstacles to Trump as a 2024 candidate.
On a policy level, Trump shattered an
already-cracked consensus. Running in 2012 as a hawk on illegal immigration and
trade with the People’s Republic of China, Mitt Romney saw where Republican
politics were trending, and Trump accelerated that tendency. He pivoted away
from austerity talking points on federal entitlements and shredded many of the
key premises of the neoliberal policy paradigm.
However, Trump as president struggled to
formulate a new policy dispensation. On trade (an area where the president’s
individual powers are extensive), Trump delivered on some of his central
campaign promises. However, he floundered on many domestic areas. The wall was
never built, and most of his policy accomplishments on immigration were only
executive decisions, quickly washed away by the Biden administration. Before
the pandemic, his singular legislative accomplishments were a giant tax bill
and the First Step Act, which enacted reforms to the criminal-justice system.
Paul Ryan — the polar opposite of Trump in many ways — would gladly have signed
both bills had he been president, and indeed Ryan was a major champion of them
as speaker of the House.
The kind of policy revolution Trump had
promised would have been a Herculean undertaking, but Trump as an executive
focused more on provocation than on policy. He seems to view politics in terms
of ratings, not policy accomplishments or popularity. His presidency was thus
full of sound and fury. Polls taken throughout his presidency showed that even
many Republicans were frustrated with the constant chaos of the Trump
administration. Perhaps one of the biggest elements of his legacy was the
polarization of his opponents in the American establishment, pushing them far
to the left of where they were in 2015.
Trump’s decision to fixate on the 2020
election may hamper a 2024 presidential run. Claiming that 2020 was stolen
allows Trump to avoid admitting defeat, but it also sends an implicit message
of ineptitude (allowing your own election to be “stolen” from you while
president is not exactly the definition of winning). It also sucks up the
oxygen for him to talk about other issues. It’s easy for establishment pundits
to forget this, but Trump’s primary campaign in 2016 had a policy message front
and center: build the wall, leave global trade deals, repeal the Affordable
Care Act, and so forth. Republicans could have a host of promising economic and
cultural issues to run on in 2024; making the 2024 election about 2020 would
squander those political opportunities.
The Republican Party has also changed in a
way that has made some of Trump’s 2016 positions less distinctive. As the Washington
Post’s Jason Willick has observed, the GOP has incorporated many of Trump’s key themes into the party
mainstream. In the Senate, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Mitt Romney, and Marco
Rubio (among others) have trumpeted a pro-worker “realignment” agenda for the
Republican Party. Among the nation’s governors, Ron DeSantis has become perhaps
the principal lightning rod for populist political controversies. Veterans of
Trump’s own administration — including Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley
— might themselves attempt to lay claim to Trump’s populist mantle.
Some Republican potential presidential
contenders have pledged that they will not run against Trump, but many others
haven’t. So while Trump could dominate the populist, immigration-hawk lane in
2015, that might not necessarily be the case in 2023.
The past few years have made clear how
often Trump rides a wave instead of driving the bus. Despite the elite-media
meme of the GOP as a “Trump cult,” voters in Republican primaries have
cheerfully ignored many of Trump’s endorsements while he was president and
after he left office. In Georgia, for instance, Brian Kemp crushed Trump-backed
David Perdue.
In many national polls of prospective
Republican-primary voters, Trump has a substantial lead, but he often hovers
around 50 percent or less. For a former president who still claims to be the
leader of the party, that number could point to limits in Republican enthusiasm
for a third Trump run. State polling shows an even more muddled picture. Recent
polls of primary voters in New Hampshire and Michigan show Trump virtually tied
with Ron DeSantis. If Trump does announce a run for the presidency before the
midterms, that would be a glaring admission of weakness — a signal that Trump
thinks he needs to act fast in order to keep other 2024 Republicans from
gaining traction.
President Biden’s growing unpopularity
might at first seem to increase Trump’s incentive to run again. However,
Hillary Clinton was also very unpopular in 2016, and Trump decisively lost the
popular vote to her: If a football stadium’s worth of voters had changed their
votes in three states, Trump would also have lost the Electoral College. Trump
remains a polarizing and unpopular figure, so even a run against a weakened
Biden would be no sure thing.
If Biden grows too vulnerable, that might
place one of Trump’s key intra-GOP levers of power at risk. Since Trump
descended the golden escalator in 2015, Republicans have been terrified that he
would go rogue and start a third-party candidacy. However, if Biden remains
mired in the low 30s, Republicans might feel less need to defer to Trump.
Running to lose as a spoiler if he lost the 2024 GOP nomination would cut
against Trump’s political history so far. Though he often toyed with running as
a third-party candidate, he never mounted a serious effort until he glimpsed an
opening in one of the two major political parties. Trump could encourage his
voters to stay home if he’s not the nominee. But a critically unpopular Biden
also undermines that threat.
Nor is it clear that it would be in
Trump’s own interest to act as a spoiler. If the Republican nominee were to win
despite Trump’s opposition, voters might see him as irrelevant. If Democrats
were to end up winning in November 2024 because of Trump’s effort to burn the
GOP down, that could severely damage his political brand among the grassroots
voters who constitute his base.
While Trump is a master of branding, his
political success has been parasitic upon broader institutions. He relied on
cable networks to give him a boost in the 2016 primary, Twitter to get his
message out, and the Republican Party to provide a political apparatus. He has
been unable to re-create those things on his own. Cut off from Twitter, he has
been unable to generate the same amount of buzz. His multiple efforts to
re-create that platform have stumbled. The “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump”
blog lasted less than a month. His “truths” (posts) on Truth Social have not
dominated the conversation as the tweets of yore did. Mounting a third-party
run for the presidency would be a logistical marathon, requiring a combination
of coordination and discipline that has often eluded Trump World. Trump’s
clearest avenue to win the Oval Office again would be through the Republican
Party, but he might face some new obstacles if he tries to seize the Republican
nomination again.
To be sure, Trump would enter the 2024 presidential
field with many advantages and would no doubt start with higher poll numbers
than he did in June 2015. If he does run, many Democrats are likely to try to
boost his candidacy, as might the national press corps (which has a symbiotic
relationship with him characterized by performative loathing). That would be
one continuity from 2016. However, many other things have changed since then.
Republican voters looking for a populist set of policies in 2024 could have
options other than another season of the Trump show.
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