Trump Genuinely Could Win Again, and I Hope You Understand What That Means

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, September 25, 2023

 

I remember how, not long after George W. Bush left office and Obama suffered through a very rough opening two years (the bailout, Obamacare, etc.), a meme image floated around of a billboard of Bush waving, with a goofy smirk on his face and the chyron “MISS ME YET?” In all truth, I didn’t miss him yet — the Iraq War, as I saw it, was an unforgivable error of both intelligence and global strategy — but I marveled then at how fast public memory of past presidents can be rehabilitated. And with Bush (who, recall, left office in 2008 with approval ratings around 30 percent), the process was indeed brisk: A few photos with Michelle Obama and a handful of paintings later, poll respondents had a warm fuzzy glow about the Bush era that you’d have thought inconceivable at the time.

 

Perhaps that’s just the way it is with American presidents — even Nixon had a comeback, after all. Obama has already practically been apotheosized into the godhead of American memory, despite the fact that I’m still not sure any of us ever really knew the first thing about him. But you would have thought that, of all people, Donald Trump would be immune to this retrospective burnishing. And not just because his four years in office were stocked with crazy weirdness, but because of Covid-19 (which for many was a dark period not worth the psychological pain of revisiting) and obviously January 6, 2021.

 

But while this weekend’s shocking Washington Post/ABC poll of the presidential race is almost certainly an outlier, it reflects the hard truth that when economic times and social disorders and border crises become bleak enough, a certain percentage of voters will start to view even someone as controversial as Trump through rose-colored glasses. And why not? Long before the Post/ABC poll showing Biden not merely losing to Trump in a 2024 rematch but by a shocking amount — 51/42, a number both outlets went to great lengths to downplay — Biden’s softness in the polls had been overwhelmingly obvious. He has been neck-and-neck with Trump for so long that the bemused incredulity felt by many at the closeness of a race that in theory shouldn’t be at all close has now become a slowly dawning realization of peril.

 

There is a hideous weakness underlying Biden’s approval ratings. Those numbers bespeak the dangerously marginal attachment of negative partisanship (“at least he’s not the other guy”) and zero personal loyalty. (Remember, the vast majority of Democrats, in poll after poll, desperately wish Biden were not running again.) His precarious political state reminds me of nothing so much as a rotten, abscessed tooth, hollowed out from within and on the verge of cracking open in truly catastrophic and painful fashion. There is nothing holding him up, and should he stumble in some notable way, physically or verbally, or should the economy worsen (or merely fail to improve), the whole thing may shatter, creating an opening for the unimaginable: four more years of Donald Trump.

 

Which is why the numbers in the Post/ABC poll for how Trump’s presidency was remembered are even more remarkable: 48/49 approve/disapprove, up from 38/60 in the same poll on the day he left office. That’s an amazing improvement from his typical numbers — one reason not to press it too hard — but it also reflects memories of how good the economy genuinely was back during the years 2016–19, before Covid hit. Trump’s weirdest and least discussed advantage in a 2024 matchup against Biden (as opposed to all of his flamingly obvious and disqualifying disadvantages) is that he can run in a weird way as the economic embodiment of that old Bush “MISS ME YET?” meme. There are many people out there, who share neither my granular interest in politics nor my sensibilities, who remember the Trump years more than anything else as “a crazy circus but hey, times were good, the border was secure, and then Covid happened.”

 

So remember: This man, running a competitive race for the presidency, has also been charged with 91 felonies, most of them related to his departure from it, and could conceivably be convicted on many of them. It’s the Constitutional Crisis we’ve been promised by media alertists since the Watergate era but never actually got. Let’s assume for argument’s sake he is convicted, the reason being that (1) 91 acquittals would be an amazing run of luck, and (2) acquittal solves the problem one way or another for our purposes here on a “crisis of the republic” level. Maybe his conviction carries a prison sentence. Maybe that verdict arrives before the November 2024 elections. And maybe he wins anyway.

 

What then? It was actually my colleague Noah Rothman who corrected me when we were discussing this matter privately, and I casually said “nobody seems to realize just how possible this is.” He pointed out that, quite to the contrary, all one need do is pay attention to how professional Democrats and their pollsters and elections experts are behaving to see that they are already running scared, as though they know it’s going to be a white-knuckle affair one way or another. Perhaps they have not thought about the potential ramifications in the way that I have, but they are acting as though circumstances have put the fear of God in them, electorally. The mainstream media — which, joking aside, is not quite synonymous with “the Democratic Party,” hence their lateness in catching up to this zeitgeist shift — seems to be sounding the alarm now as well.

 

I know what smart Democrats will tell you the play on their side is. (After all, they are, as noted, running scared.) They assume, correctly I believe, Trump’s inevitability as the GOP nominee, and they are waiting until he formally wins it (which should be obvious enough by South Carolina if not before then) to resurrect the ghost that so bracingly spooked the American electorate back in November 2022: the January 6 riots and the madness of Trump’s assault on our entire electoral system to keep him in office. It was an extremely effective tactic back then, as all remember. It may work again, for the simple reason that, like it or not (and even when, more cynically, Democrats often were responsible for promoting these candidates in Republican primaries), election trutherism is frankly crazy, and it turns off sane people, and it’s those people who, unfortunately for Trump’s electoral strategy, still comprise the supermajority of the American electorate. It is a proven non-seller electorally.

 

But. But. In 2022, the class of “mini-Trumps” — Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, Darren Bailey, Tudor Dixon, Joe Kent, John Gibbs, the list goes on depressingly forever — were just that: mini-Trumps. There is only one real Donald Trump. You can explain it in terms of his charisma, his policies, or however you please; I explain it empirically by pointing out that his voters showed up for him in both 2016 and (remember how much this surprised most observers) 2020 as well, and when they did, for the most part, they also voted Republican down-ballot. Have the events of January 6 altered that dynamic? I would have to think so. But maybe Joe Biden’s countervailing weaknesses, as already discussed, are just so unsurvivable that it doesn’t matter, and he loses anyway. (I once again would like to point out the incredible irony that, had Trump merely walked away after November 2020, crying all he wanted about a “stolen election” but taking no actions in that regard, by now he’d likely already be the heir-designate next president of the United States. Ponder that alternate universe for a moment.)

 

And think about what four more years of Donald Trump would actually entail, once — holy guacamole — America did this again. What if he is convicted of any of his crimes? The republic has, quite literally, never faced a situation remotely like the one we contemplate there. The presidency cannot be conducted behind bars, obviously. What of afterwards? Does he pardon himself in the meantime? (Heck, it’s Trump: I place good odds that he actually runs on pardoning himself. He cannot issue pardons on state convictions, incidentally.) But that’s only for starters: Imagine the sort of person who would work in Donald Trump’s second administration, given how he treated departed or fired staff during his first one, and given the stain of January 6. Also, just for fun, imagine a Trump who, as a lame duck (what, you think he cares about congressional midterms?), has nobody left to owe anything to, and what he might get up to.

 

The honest truth is I’m not really capable of predicting, certainly not in a way that would ever do justice to the weird reality of a second Trump administration. I still think it is much more unlikely than likely to come to pass, but I fear that could be because I suffer from the same “impossibility bias” that I did back in 2016: my innumerate “it can’t happen here” refusal to consider the possibility of something one simply cannot accept on a psychological level. Trump’s Democratic opponents sure seem to think he can win, after all. Trump’s supporters absolutely believe he can. That leaves me as the one out on an island muttering, “It can’t happen here, not again, no way.” That is why it’s important to take a moment to remind myself, as much as the rest of you: This absolutely can happen again, and it may yet.