Trump Is Getting Squeezed, Left and Right

By Michael Brendan Dougherty 

Wednesday, February 08, 2023 

 

Donald Trump is running for president in 2024. In 2015 and 2016, we knew why. He was the candidate offering a completely different vision. He was attuned to America’s darkened mood: “I will gladly accept the mantle of anger,” he proclaimed in one memorable debate exchange. He offered economic nationalism and competition with China as a corrective to a Clinton–Bush–Obama consensus on free trade with the third world. He offered a different foreign policy, wanting to bring Americans home from wars that had lost their original purpose. He made bold interventions in culture-war issues, becoming the first Republican president to vow that Roe v. Wade would be overturned if he were allowed to make Supreme Court appointments. 

 

In 2015, that was a package of goods nobody else was quite offering. In 2022, however, Joe Biden has stolen most of Trump’s economic and geopolitical themes. And Ron DeSantis is running out ahead of Trump on cultural issues. 

 

“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world in manufacturing again?” Joe Biden asked in last night’s State of the Union. “For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to all we’ve done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.” 

 

If we’re just looking at the issues, Joe Biden can credibly out-hawk Donald Trump on China. Trump concluded his mostly phony trade war with China in January 2020. According to tell-alls from his administration, the whole thing ended with Trump begging Chairman Xi to buy more soybeans from swing states. Trump came home bragging about his great relationship with Xi, and stock markets went crazy for it. But it was temporary. China was soon exporting a product from Wuhan that would send us tumbling again, and Trump — too slow to adjust — kept praising Chairman Xi. Meanwhile, Biden has signed the CHIPS Act and a series of executive orders that aim at crippling the Chinese semiconductor industry and facilitating the onshoring of that industry in the United States. 

 

For a confrontational approach in the culture war, does the GOP want more of Trump’s jokes about Rosie O’Donnell? Or does it want more victories such as the one Ron DeSantis racked up this month when he challenged the College Board on its African-American Studies course and won a major concession? DeSantis is kicking off a conservative counterrevolution on education. 

 

Most Americans could not have told you what “DEI” meant in 2015. But it rapidly expanded its reach in private and state institutions during the Trump presidency. Now, Ron DeSantis is defunding it in Florida’s education system. 

 

Trump was also the candidate in 2016 for people who didn’t quite trust American institutions, or who questioned authoritative opinion on the efficacy of vaccines or the trustworthiness of Big Pharma. Now all those people are flocking to DeSantis. Not as much because he has shared or expressed their direst views, but because he has used the tools of his office and a rhetoric of American freedom to guarantee that they can safely navigate normal life, and that the social contract won’t be completely rewritten in a crisis. 

 

Trump’s hard-line views on immigration are now widely shared in the Republican Party. And on that issue, DeSantis has drawn as much attention to himself, by flying asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, as anyone has. 

 

Populist rebellions in politics tend to succeed when they infect the mainstream parties. It’s a measure of Trump’s success that most of the political class has moved in his direction on China and trade, and that the Republican Party is now nearly as restrictionist as he was. 

 

But it leaves fewer issues for him to run on in 2024. Will he run on making peace in Eastern Europe? Or will he run on claims that the 2020 election was stolen? Trump needed his issue set to win over Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If that’s taken away from him, trying to win again would be like navigating the Atlantic on a small ice floe in the middle of summer. The chances of success are slim.