The Trump Excuses That Don’t Work

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, November 13, 2022

 

If Trump was Humpty Dumpy on Election Night, as the New York Post had it, his devotees are scrambling to try to pick up the pieces.

 

First of all, it must be said that, obviously, more was at work in the Republican disappointment than just Trump. No one person is responsible for what happened in the midterms. Trump, though, is clearly more responsible than anyone else.

 

The effort to exculpate and vindicate him relies on misdirection and blame-shifting and is thoroughly unconvincing.

 

Stop the Steal? What Stop the Steal?

 

Defenses of Trump skip over the woeful electoral effects of the obsession with 2020. Here is a vigorous defense of his performance that doesn’t even mention Trump’s overwhelming focus on 2020, making for pro-Trump advocacy that Trump himself would consider cowardly and inadequate.

 

“Stop the steal” is a stone-cold political loser. It repelled independents. All the “stop the steal” secretary-of-state candidates in swing states lost. The issue was a handy way to paint any candidate associated with it as out of the mainstream. Yet it was alpha and omega, the be-all and end-all, the prime directive for Trump.

 

He said, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that Don Bolduc lost because he backed off his election denialism.

 

When Blake Masters wasn’t as zealous on 2020 as Trump expected during a general-election debate, he let him know it and said it was the key to energizing his base: “Look at Kari. Kari is winning with very little money and if they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’”

 

No one else would have given any candidate this advice; no one else would have thought it was good advice; no one else would have thought it was even remotely rational.

 

This party-wide focus was a Trump creation, and his alone.

 

Speaking of Kari Lake, She’s Going to Win!

 

Kari Lake is still in the hunt in Arizona, barely trailing Katie Hobbs in the state’s interminable vote count. This is supposedly vindication for Trump’s approach.

 

The problem is that Lake could still well lose, and even if she wins, she does not offer a replicable model. Sure, if MAGA can find extremely polished and politically gifted former TV anchors to run against uninspired Democrats like Katie Hobbs up and down the ballot, it will sweep to victory — narrow victory — everywhere.

 

But that’s not going to happen. The “stop the steal” candidates usually look and perform more like Doug Mastriano or Don Bolduc than the unicorn Kari Lake.

 

Trump Just Followed the Crowd

 

It’s true, as some Trump defenders point out, that Trump was a late adopter of candidates like Doug Mastriano, who had already built a solid lead before Trump gave him his nod.

 

There are two points here, though. That doesn’t mean that Trump couldn’t have pushed such races in a different direction with an endorsement. Trump might have been able to put former representative Lou Barletta over the top against Mastriano. Barletta wouldn’t have won the governorship, but he would have been less devastating to the rest of the ticket; Mastriano didn’t just bring down Mehmet Oz, he helped cost Republicans key congressional seats.

 

(Pennsylvania is a classic Trump production — his loyalist at the top of the ticket helped bring down his loyalist in the Senate race, who clearly wouldn’t have won his .1 percent primary victory without Trump’s endorsement.)

 

More fundamentally, Republican primary electorates wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic about the “stop the steal” stalwarts who thrived in primaries prior to Trump’s endorsement if Trump hadn’t maintained a feverish focus on 2020 to begin with.

 

Leadership matters. Again, Trump worked to make the single worst Republican selling point — we’ll remain obsessed with 2020, no matter what — as prominent and unavoidable as possible.

 

McConnell’s Spending Choices Are to Blame

 

This is hard to fathom. The Senate Leadership Fund and associated groups raised and spent an ungodly amount of money. SLF alone raised and spent more than $250 million. It spent roughly $39 million on Georgia, $38 million on North Carolina, $16 million on New Hampshire, $26 million on Nevada, $32 million on Ohio, and $26 million on Wisconsin.

 

If you include the expenditures of a couple of aligned super PACs, it dropped roughly $57 million on Pennsylvania.

 

On top of all this, an aligned (c)(4), One Nation, spent roughly $13 million on Arizona, $37 million on Georgia, $14 million on New Hampshire, $16 million on Nevada, $3 million on Ohio, and $14 million on Wisconsin.

 

It all ads up to an astonishing $360 million. In light of the numbers, the more natural criticism of McConnell might be that all of his spending didn’t make a difference, not that he didn’t do enough of it.

 

The complaints about McConnell center on the SLF’s decision to pull out of Arizona and New Hampshire. But these weren’t close races, and it was certainly a defensible decision to focus on the other, more winnable races.

 

Don Bolduc lost by nine points. SLF engaged in a bit of a dance in New Hampshire. It boosted Bolduc’s primary opponent (while Democrats were spending for Bolduc), then swung around to support Bolduc in the general before concluding that the race was too much of a reach. Its polling never had it as close as some of the public polling, with terrible internals for Bolduc. At the same time, he wasn’t raising money or running a highly robust campaign.

 

As for Masters, he is down by six points right now, which is not particularly close. He was a notably weak candidate from the start.

 

His candidacy, of course, was created by a billionaire, Peter Thiel, and fervently backed by a former president with his own prodigious fundraising capacity. If lack of funds was the issue, Masters shouldn’t have had a problem, if others had done their part. My understanding is that SLF wanted to go in half-and-half with Thiel, with each chipping in $7.5 million for Masters in the general, but the proposed arrangement fell through. As for Trump, he used the illusion that he was raising funds for Masters as a grifty means for lining his own coffers.

 

Trump’s overall spending on Senate candidates was about $15 million. This means that SLF spent more on New Hampshire, the state it eventually pulled out of, than Trump did on the entire campaign. The (c)(4) spent nearly as much on Arizona as Trump spent during the entire campaign.

 

Think about this: Democrats spent more promoting (defeatable) MAGA candidates than Trump did during the entire campaign.

 

Trump Worked Really Hard

 

It’s true that Trump did rallies. But they were, as always, as much about him as about the candidates he was supposed to be promoting. To the extent the rallies brought him back into the limelight, they hurt the overall Republican effort. He used rallies near the end to tease his potential presidential campaign, which served no interest other than his own. His Pennsylvania rally in the final days probably didn’t help, and he famously said at an Ohio rally that J. D. Vance was “kissing his ass,” creating a new avenue of attack on Vance that his opponent Tim Ryan used extensively.

 

It would have been better if Trump hadn’t worked quite as hard.

 

It may not be that Trump is really Humpty Dumpty. But there’s no doubt that he did more than his share to drive the Republican Party into a ditch in the midterms, and, try as they might, his advocates can’t obscure whose hands were at the wheel.