By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Give it up, guys. Only Donald Trump can prevail
against Joe Biden.
Why? In 2016, when Trump won the White House, he obtained
just 46.1 percent of the vote. Had his opponent not been so historically
unpopular — and had the Green Party not siphoned off votes from the Democrats
in a handful of key states — Trump would have lost. In 2020, when he lost
reelection, Trump received 46.8 percent of the vote — lower than Mitt Romney’s
number in 2012. Trump received 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden, who barely
campaigned. In the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022, Trump proved politically
toxic with the independent voters who decide American elections. Since then, he
has grown even more unpalatable. All told, it would make more sense to say that
Trump is the only candidate who cannot prevail against Joe
Biden than that he is the only candidate who can. Trump’s approval rating is in
the low 30s, and 60 percent of Americans wish he weren’t running for president
again. It would be a peculiar form of “populism” that considered these facts to
be recommendations.
Screw you. You can’t win without MAGA, and MAGA will
only vote for Donald Trump. You have to pick him.
Actually, the opposite seems to be true. This argument
was made in Georgia, where the incumbent Republican governor, Brian Kemp, was
primaried by David Perdue at the behest of Donald Trump and his acolytes.
Perdue lost the primary by 50 points; Kemp went on to win the general by eight.
Especially in general elections, the Only MAGA voters just don’t seem to matter
that much. Sure, some of the movement’s more monomaniacal members will stay
home if Donald Trump is not on the ballot. But the loss of those voters will be
more than offset by the considerable number of non-MAGA voters who are happy to
return to the fold. As we have observed in the political fallout from Trump’s
two indictments, what is good for Trump among the most committed Republican
voters is, in fact, toxic for him among the electorate at large. To put it
bluntly, alienating MAGA voters may be mandatory if a Republican candidate is
to win the White House in 2024.
Why are you thumbing your nose at the base?
I don’t really know what that means. I’m not a
politician, I’m a voter. And, as a voter, I have just as much right to argue
for or against a candidate as anyone else. I am not obliged to acquiesce to bad
arguments simply because they are made by people who are sensitive or unusually
loud. And whom are you referring to as the “base”? A party’s base consists of
voters who show up every cycle no matter who the nominee is. You’re threatening
to stay home if it’s not your guy? Then you’re not the base.
But we can’t go back to the loser-filled Republican
Party of old!
Which Republican Party was that, exactly? The one that
won five out of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1992? The one that
won the White House in 2000 and 2004? The one that controlled the House for
most of the period between 1994 and 2018? The one that did so well in the
elections of 2014 that it was tantalizingly close to being able to amend the
Constitution on its own?
There have, indeed, been some problems with the way that
the modern Republican Party has chosen to use the power it has garnered —
although these criticisms are usually overstated — but it is not at all clear
why Donald Trump is regarded as the answer. For a start, one has to win
elections to wield power, and Trump is proving a serious obstacle to that aim.
And, besides, the victories that Trump did win and that his
champions are touting relied heavily on the very institutions and figures (the
Federalist Society, Paul Ryan, the American Enterprise Institute) that are
supposed to have fallen out of favor. Moreover, with the exception of the
imposition of tariffs, Trump did not actually do most of the unorthodox things
that he promised he would. He did not reform the bureaucracy. He did not
champion an industrial policy. He did not try to procure funds for his border
wall until the GOP had lost control of the House of Representatives. And, when
the choice was between listening to the entrenched public-health establishment
and listening to the people he claimed to represent, he chose the establishment
every time. What, exactly, did he do to earn his place in the vanguard?
If we don’t choose Trump, we are allowing the Deep
State to choose our candidate.
On its own terms, this doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Practically speaking, there is no difference between the insistence that,
because Donald Trump was indicted, he ipso facto must not be
the Republican nominee and the insistence that, because Donald Trump was
indicted, he ipso facto must be the nominee. Both arguments
take an external event and use it as a dispositive case for nomination. You
just like one of those cases but not the other.
All right, but the indictment makes a strong case for
Trump, doesn’t it?
Do you hear yourself? The fact that Donald Trump was
indicted makes a strong case for his being the Republican nominee for president
in 2024? Why?
Because they’re scared of him.
Who are “they”? The people who took control of the House
of Representatives in 2018 because Donald Trump was so unpopular? The people
who won the presidency in 2020 because Donald Trump was so unpopular? The
people who won the Senate in 2022 because Donald Trump and his preferred
candidates were so unpopular? The people who spend their days dreaming of another
Donald Trump nomination in 2024? Those people? The Democrats have been
extremely open about the fact that they want Trump as the nominee. They spent
tens of millions of dollars promoting Trump-backed candidates in the 2022
primaries, betting those candidates would lose. It worked out for them.
But the Deep State! They’re trying to get rid of him
because he’s such a threat to them.
A threat? Trump is nothing of the sort. On the contrary:
He’s the sort of ill-disciplined fool on whom the permanent bureaucracy likes
to feast. Leave aside that Trump can’t be a threat to anyone if he can’t win a
general election. Nothing in the man’s first-term record suggests that he will
be able to reform the federal bureaucracy from within. Trump was federally
indicted because, at every stage in the proceedings, he made profoundly stupid
decisions. He took information to which he was not entitled. He refused to give
that information back, even though by doing so he would have avoided a
prosecution. He ignored the advice of lawyers who knew how to work the system.
And by admitting — on audiotape, no less — that he knew a document
was secret and knew that an ex-president lacked authority to declassify it, he
undermined the only defense that was available to him. In doing each of these
things, he accomplished precisely nothing and made his situation worse.
Did Trump “drain the swamp” last time? Why not? Because
he doesn’t know how anything works, and he doesn’t care. Of all the people in
the United States — politicians and nonpoliticians alike — Donald Trump is
perhaps the least qualified to reform Washington, D.C. He
doesn’t grasp detail. He sees neither the threats nor the opportunities. He is
fatally susceptible to flattery. He has a short attention span.
He can’t do it. We know this, because we’ve watched him
work since 2015.
Why are you abandoning him in his hour of need?
Come now, this isn’t medieval England. It’s America.
Trump is a servant, a vessel, a hireling. When some of us balked at voting for
him in the past, we were told to ignore the man’s faults because he was just
the tool of a larger cause we should join. When did that change?
The correct role of his employers — the voters — is not
to help or to hinder him as a person, but to use him or discard him in order to
advance a set of political aims. Even if one were willing to overlook that he
violated his oath of office last time he was entrusted with power — and I’m not
— he is simply not able to fulfill the role for which he is running. I want a
president who can maintain an originalist majority on the Supreme Court, rein
in the bureaucracy, balance the budget, deal smartly with China, advance school
choice, protect unborn life, ensure that the Bill of Rights remains intact, and
promulgate a hopeful conception of America that is capable of vanquishing the
ignorant nihilism of the 1619 Project and its followers. Trump is not that guy,
and he never will be.
So you prefer Joe Biden?
That’s not the choice, is it? Trump isn’t the Republican
nominee, and he doesn’t have to be the Republican nominee. Hell, he’s not even
the incumbent. The question at present is not whether we prefer the
Republican nominee or the Democratic nominee, but which candidate for the
Republican nomination we wish to elevate. I can see a certain campaign-strategy
logic to the Trump camp’s decision to pretend that he is inevitable, but as a
free citizen, I am in no way obliged to submit to it.
So you think that the Democrats and the media will be
nicer to another candidate than they were to Trump?
No, I don’t. But I do think it matters how that other
candidate responds to that inevitable onslaught. Yes, Mitt Romney was too nice,
but that doesn’t mean anything goes. That Republicans have learned to fight
back with more edge is, I agree, a good thing. I do not agree that this makes
the case for flat-out, all-caps insanity. The press can’t accuse any of the
other candidates of being under indictment — because they’re not. They can’t
accuse any of the other candidates of having paid off a porn star — because
they didn’t. They can’t accuse any of the other candidates of having tried to
stage a coup — because they didn’t do that either. It is the worst of non
sequiturs to propose that because Romney lost to the most talented politician
in a generation, the Republican Party must continue to indulge the preposterous
antics of a septuagenarian lunatic. There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. Some of them are running for
president this year.
Given the headwinds, it’s important to make smart
decisions. A lot of Democrats still believe that Al Gore and Hillary Clinton
got cheated out of the presidency and that only unfair racist appeals stopped
Michael Dukakis from taking his rightful place as the president. You know what
Democrats didn’t do? Nominate those people again. They went out and found
people they thought would do a better job of handling what Republicans threw at
them. That’s how they got the White House back three times.
So you hate me then?
No, and it’s extremely weird that this would be your
conclusion from what is nothing more than a political disagreement. You like
Donald Trump. I don’t. If you can’t tolerate that, I’d propose you leave your
computer and go outside.
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