Trump’s Disconnection from Reality

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, June 22, 2022

 

It’s fascinating to watch then-president Trump, on the evening of January 7, 2021, start to give a pretty darn good speech about the attack on the Capitol. The White House speechwriters knew what the president had to say that morning. It sounds like Ivanka Trump, unseen but heard offscreen, knew what he had to say. But during the delivery, Trump seemed to decide that he just couldn’t do it, refusing to say the sorts of things a president should say in that moment:

 

TRUMP: I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday. And to those who broke the law, you will pay. You do not represent our movement. You do not represent our country. And if you broke the law–

 

Trump stops:

 

TRUMP: I can’t say that. I’m not going — I already said you will pay.

 

The January 6 Committee’s tape skips ahead some undetermined amount of time to this:

 

TRUMP: The demonstrators who infiltrated the capt— . . . have defied the seat of des— it’s defiled, right? I can’t see it very well. Okay, I’ll do this. I’m gonna do this. Let’s go.

 

The Committee’s tape skips ahead again:

 

TRUMP: But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results.

 

Trump stops again:

 

TRUMP: I don’t want to say the election’s over. I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election’s over, okay?

 

Trump’s refusing to say, “The election is over” on the evening of January 7 — months after all the ballots had been cast, counted, recounted in some cases, the vote results were certified by the state governments and certified by Congress — represents his disconnection from reality. Ivanka Trump tries to guide her father back to reality:

 

IVANKA TRUMP, offscreen: But Congress has certified the results. Now Congress is–

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah. Right. I didn’t say over. So let me see. Don’t – go to the paragraph before. . . . Okay?

 

Trump begins again:

 

TRUMP: I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday.

 

Trump stops:

 

TRUMP: ‘Yesterday’ is a hard word for me.

 

IVANKA TRUMP, offscreen: Just take it out.

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Ah, good. Take the word ‘yesterday’ out because it doesn’t work with . . . heinous attack . . . on our country. Say, ‘on our country.’ Want to say that?

 

IVANKA: No, keep it–

 

The Committee’s tape skips ahead again:

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote.

 

Trump grows frustrated, grimaces, and makes some gesture pointing down. The Committee’s tape skips ahead again:

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote.

 

Trump is suddenly really frustrated and slams his hand on the lectern.

 

Eventually, Trump did deliver a version of that statement, and declared that, “I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.” He also said, “To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

 

Interestingly, the final version did not include the sentences, “You do not represent our movement” or “This election is over.” The closest he came was, “A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20” and a pledge to ensure a smooth transition. At no point would Trump acknowledge that he had lost the election, that Biden had been legitimately elected, or that his supporters should accept the outcome.

 

Nor is there any sign that a year and a half passing altered the way Trump sees anything. Earlier this month, Trump called Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos in another attempt to convince Wisconsin Republicans to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential results. Trump believed that a Wisconsin state supreme-court decision gave the state assembly the authority to decertify the election results and declare Trump the real winner of the state. Vos argued that the decision didn’t give the state legislature that authority at all.

 

The certified results indicate that Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes, or six-tenths of 1 percent.

 

The Choice before Republicans

 

Different surveys will give you different results, but right now, when a pollster asks Republicans whom they want to see their party nominate for president in 2024, at least half answer, “Donald Trump.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis is gaining some impressive momentum, no doubt. A recent poll showed that DeSantis is the preferred choice of Florida Republicans by a considerable margin, and another one showed the two men nearly tied in Michigan. But in the national surveys, the percentage who name DeSantis as their top choice ranges from the low 20s to low 30s. DeSantis just isn’t as well-known, and Trump is the default setting for a lot of Republicans right now. If the Florida governor wants to be the architect of the Republican Party’s post-Trump vision and agenda, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

 

Right now, there’s about a 90-some percent chance that on the afternoon of January 20, 2025, the president of the United States will be one of four people: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis. Stranger things have happened — maybe Biden chooses not to run for another term, or Harris loses a primary fight to a Gavin Newsom-type figure. Maybe some other Republican figure catches fire. But right now, it looks like the choice before Republicans is Trump or DeSantis.

 

In the next 18 months or so, Republicans will have to ask themselves hard questions concerning what they want the 2024 presidential election to be about.

 

If Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis, no doubt the Democratic nominee will try to make the election about DeSantis’s allegedly reckless policies during the pandemic — you know, those policies that Floridians largely supported. They’ll try to make the 2024 election about “Don’t say gay” legislation, or how the big mean governor is picking on that poor, defenseless Disney corporation. I’m sure that some tired Democratic spin doctors will try to argue that DeSantis is a “Florida Man” — reckless, crazy, and endangering everyone around him. Every Republican gets labeled one of three things: old, dumb, or evil, or some combination of those traits.

 

DeSantis will presumably want the election to be about contrasting his conservative vision for government against the wreck— er, record of the Biden administration.

 

DeSantis will want 2024 to be about how runaway federal spending exacerbated severe inflation that ate away at Americans’ standard of living. He will want Americans to be talking about self-defeating energy policies; self-destructive crime policies; a de facto open border and waves of illegal immigrants; an educational establishment that dragged its feet on reopening schools, and that was more interested in ideological indoctrination when it did finally reopen the school doors. He’ll want Americans to focus on a sclerotic, sluggish public-health bureaucracy in places such as the FDA. He’ll remind Americans about our catastrophic, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the continued rise of China, and how foreign brutes such as Vladimir Putin and MBS are treating the current president like a pushover.

 

If Republicans nominate Donald Trump, the election will revolve around what people think of Donald Trump. The 2024 general election will be dominated by arguments about January 6, and Trump’s insistence that he was the true legitimate winner of 2020, and the cockamamie theories of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and Venezuelan hackers and Chinese bamboo in the paper ballots of Arizona. It will likely feature Trump tirades about what is being said about him on cable news. Trump will likely talk at length about which Republicans have been disloyal, and which other Republican officials are “LOSERS!” and which ones are “SAD!” Every Trump decision from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, will be relitigated and re-argued.

 

In short, Trump will be extraordinarily eager to make the preeminent issue in the 2024 election about who really won the 2020 election. That topic interests him far, far more than, say, the national rate of inflation.

 

A GOP choice to nominate Trump again would also represent a dramatic change from recent history, in which parties left their losing candidates to enjoy retirement and moved on to a fresh face.

 

If the GOP nominates Trump in 2024, he would be the first presidential candidate to be nominated three times by a party since Richard Nixon (1960, 1968, 1972) and the first major party nominee who had previously lost a general presidential election since Nixon’s last nomination. (In 1996, Republicans nominated Bob Dole, who had lost as Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976 and 1984, Democrats nominated Walter Mondale, who had lost as Jimmy Carter’s running mate in 1980.)

 

Back in 2015, historian Josh Zeitz observed that the presidential-primary process in place for all or most of our lifetimes “is not a format that is hospitable to ‘losers.’ The modern nominating process has an unwritten rule: You lose, you leave.”

 

There are bright conservatives I know who think Trump is toast. I have a hard time seeing it. But to me, the argument for moving on to a fresh face and refocusing on real issues that affect people’s daily lives couldn’t be any clearer or stronger.