By Noah Rothman
Wednesday,
February 14, 2024
“Well,
I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Donald Trump told a reporter on the eve of the 2022 midterm
elections. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” The former
president’s smirk betrayed his attempt at self-deprecating humor. But like all
good jokes, Trump’s remark contained an element of truth. The likely GOP
presidential nominee has become proficient at deflecting blame for his party’s
electoral losses away from himself and his movement. In Trump’s preferred
formulation, neither can fail on their merits. They can only be betrayed.
That was the essence of Trump’s post-mortem analysis of
Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip’s special-election loss on Tuesday night in the
race to replace the ousted former New York representative George Santos.
Here,
Pilip’s inevitable — indeed, maybe even deserved — loss is reframed as an
outgrowth of her refusal to zealously evince all the affected traits associated
with MAGA candidates, the foremost of which was her failure to show the proper
amount of loyalty to the former president. This is a familiar construction. “Ed
Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for,” the president said following Gillespie’s loss in
Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Trump reprised that excuse during a 2018 press conference in the wake of elections that
cost his party control of the House of Representatives. “They did very poorly,”
Trump said of Republicans who “didn’t want the embrace” from the former
president.
As
the party shed its moderate members in competitive districts and states, that
string of losses had the perverse effect of transforming the Republican Party
into a vehicle for candidates who closely mimicked Trump’s personality quirks.
They accepted “the embrace,” so their failures could not be their own. They had
to be Mitch McConnell’s.
With
the inception of the “rigged election” narrative in late 2020, Trump had a
ready-made excuse for electoral outcomes that appeared to reflect poorly on his
brand. When Democrats captured both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia from
Trump-endorsing Republicans in 2021, Trump blamed electoral malfeasance, of
course. But also McConnell’s failure to support giving American
taxpayers $2,000 stimulus checks. Trump insisted that McConnell’s recalcitrance
was foolish since Democrats “who bought the Georgia election” would do it
anyway. Trump was right, and the Democrats’ raid on the Treasury proved inflationary.
Trump
blamed McConnell again after the GOP came up short in 2022 despite the historic
environmental tailwinds favoring the party. “It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,”
the former president groused. “He blew the Midterms, and
everyone despises him and his otherwise lovely wife, Coco Chow!” Trump’s blame
game helped him avoid confronting the conspicuous correlation between candidates up and
down the ballot who endorsed the 2020 election fraud narrative and the
candidates who lost.
When
the GOP turned in yet another underwhelming performance in 2023’s off-year races, Trump zeroed in only on
Republican Daniel Cameron’s failure to unseat Kentucky’s incumbent Democratic
governor, Andy Beshear. “Daniel Cameron lost because he couldn’t alleviate the
stench of Mitch McConnell,” Trump wrote. “I moved him up 25 Points, but the McConnell
relationship was ‘too much to bear.’” So much for what Cameron embarrassingly
praised as the “Trump culture of winning.”
It’s
unwise to overanalyze the results of any single special election — particularly
one that took place in a unique district in New York City and Long Island. But
it’s just as foolish to ignore the observable trends in results across special, midterm, and off-year elections over nearly seven
years. Donald Trump hopes you will. Or, at the very least, he hopes you
won’t blame him for the steep decline in the GOP’s electoral fortunes over
which he has presided as the Republican Party’s lodestar.
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