By Nick Catoggio
Friday, August 16, 2024
On Friday morning, the topic “TrumpIsDone” trended on
Twitter. It reminded me that there are two types of Never Trumpers.
Those who spend their lives waging rhetorical war on
Donald Trump on social media will delight in the idea of him being “done,” the
same way infantry would at a rumor that the enemy is close to collapse. It’s a
shot of morale in the thick of battle.
The second type will shudder at the thought of how many
times we’ve heard this before, only to have him come roaring back. He was done
after the Access Hollywood tape, done after Robert Mueller was tapped to
investigate him, done after the pandemic, done after January 6, done after the
GOP blew the 2022 midterms, done after Ron DeSantis challenged him in the
primary, and done after he was criminally indicted.
For the second type of Never Trumper, this isn’t battle.
It’s a Friday the 13th movie. No matter how many times you
think you’ve finished off Jason, he’s always right behind you with a machete.
Guess which of the two types I am.
The triumphalism over Kamala Harris’ polling surge has
given me flashbacks lately to a specific moment of hubris when practically
everyone assumed Trump was done and practically everyone was wrong. As
desperately as Democrats want to believe it’s
2008 all over again—and I do mean desperately—it
feels more like 2016 to me.
The news yesterday that Corey
Lewandowski will join Donald Trump’s campaign seemed like karmic
confirmation of my thesis. Lewandowski managed Trump’s 2016 campaign until
Republican demands for a more polished effort from their new nominee led to his
replacement by Paul Manafort. He’s a loose (very
loose) cannon whom Trump seems to value not for his professionalism but for
his lack thereof.
Lewandowski is essentially an enabler of Trump’s id, a “warm
blanket” who’ll reassure the boss that his instincts are right and his
highly paid advisers are wrong. From the earliest days of MAGA, Corey’s mantra
has been “Let Trump be Trump.” That was the title of his 2016
campaign memoir and also appears to be his strategy,
such as it is, for how this year’s operation should go forward.
With Trump down in the polls, Corey back on the team, and
Democrats trying to hold the White House without the sitting president at the
top of the ballot, there’s suddenly something very familiar about this
campaign. And not in a good way.
2016 all over again.
Start with the obvious. Now, as in 2016, Democrats have a
candidate who won the nomination because it was “her
turn,” not because she offered a compelling vision for the country.
In both cases, coincidentally, Joe Biden was elbowed
aside to make way for her.
In both cases, policy was largely an afterthought in the
nominee’s campaign. Hillary Clinton’s core argument was that it was past time
for America to have a woman president. Kamala Harris’ core argument (so far) is
that we
need to “bring back joy” after a very gloomy era and defeat the
weirdos on the other side.
The Democratic Party’s haste to clear the field for each
of them meant that neither faced a formidable challenger for the
nomination—although Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Clinton in 2016 became formidable
due to her unpopularity. What was supposed to be token socialist opposition, a
protest vote for disaffected progressives, became something more when pitted
against the dismal prospect of President Hillary.
Clinton and Harris both ended up with suburban-dad-ish
running mates—named Tim!—who could, in theory, connect with average Americans
where the nominee herself might have trouble doing so. And both had an
opportunity to reach out to center-right Republicans who were repelled by Trump
which they undertook to squander. Clinton maneuvered to
Barack Obama’s left on the hot topic of immigration during the 2016
campaign; Harris has launched her economic agenda in this year’s cycle by
touting price
controls and housing
subsidies.
Oh, and in both cases, Democrats were overconfident about
their candidate’s chances.
With Clinton, they were
wildly so. With Harris, it’s milder—and somewhat understandable.
Having spent the first half of this year despairing that Biden was doomed, the
party can be forgiven for treating its new nominee’s strength as world-beating.
(TrumpIsDone!) But the truth is that Harris still trails
him in most battlegrounds and enjoys only a small
lead in national surveys that’s insufficient to win given the Electoral
College’s current bias toward the GOP.
As I write this, in fact, with America supposedly in the
throes of Kamala-mentum and Trump at his nadir, a new poll of must-win
Pennsylvania has
him winning the state by a point. Trump is not “done.”
Even so, he too seems to be reverting to his 2016 form
after a long spell as a somewhat more disciplined candidate.
Until the Democratic switcheroo last month, Trump had
managed to play a reasonably effective “prevent” defense to maintain the
durable lead he’d built over Joe Biden. He wasn’t on the trail much, depriving
voters of reminders of why they dislike him. He confined most of his nuttiest
comments to Truth Social and populist media outlets, where no one but true
believers would hear. He shrewdly dodged primary debates to deny Ron DeSantis
and Nikki Haley an opportunity to target him. He kept quiet in July as Democrats
sparred with each other over Joe Biden’s fate.
Under the tutelage of advisers Susie Wiles and Chris
LaCivita, and buoyed by his unfamiliar status as frontrunner, he managed a
degree of restraint—or what passes for “restraint” by his standards. Then
Harris replaced Biden as nominee, the polls shifted, and Trump
lost his mind.
In less than a month, he went from being the favorite to
win to becoming
the underdog to a progressive woman, the same niche he occupied in 2016. Is
it surprising that he’d revert instinctively to some of his same habits from
that campaign, particularly given how it ended?
He’s bringing Corey back, along with several
other populist bruisers as advisers. He’s getting sucked into personal
attacks on his opponent and crowd-size comparisons and away from more
substantive criticisms. (His staff is so desperate to keep him on message that
they sent him to the podium on Thursday with a binder of
talking points. It didn’t
work.) He’s back
on Twitter, however haltingly, where tens of millions will see his posts.
And he’s probably going to fire some advisers soon, just
as he did eight years ago.
“No one thinks Lewandowski and LaCivita can cohabitate
for long, leading some people close to Trump to speculate that he’s trying to
push LaCivita out,” Puck’s Tara Palmeri
reported on Thursday. LaCivita has spent the last few weeks as a
populist scapegoat for Trump’s faltering candidacy, ostensibly because he (correctly)
views the nationalist Project 2025 initiative as a liability but in reality
because MAGA types need someone to blame for their man’s downturn.
LaCivita comes from the old, distrusted pre-Trump GOP.
Lewandowski, Trump’s original campaign manager, has a sterling MAGA pedigree by
comparison. You can see the gears turning in Trump’s head, egged
on by populist admirers: I’m losing because I’ve become too tame. I’m
running the campaign LaCivita wants, not the one I want. I won in 2016 by
trusting my instincts. I need to do that again.
Let Trump be Trump.
Lewandowski will not only let Trump be Trump, he’ll
encourage it. And in all probability, LaCivita will end up out in the cold: As Jonathan
Last noted recently, Trump fired his campaign managers in the middle of
each of his first two runs for president. In 2020, Brad Parscale got the boot;
in 2016, Lewandowski and Manafort were each canned, ultimately replaced by
Kellyanne Conway and populist wild man Steve Bannon.
If being lazy,
stupid, and childish won Trump the White House in his first run, why
wouldn’t he lean into it as the cure for what ails him in his third? He misses
that 2016 campaign so much that he even did a short bit
about Hillary’s emails during his press conference on Thursday at
Bedminster.
All of which hopefully helps explain my case of Never
Trump déjà vu. When I watch triumphalists hoot at his latest brain-damaged
insult to military valor—oh
boy, he’s really done it now!—I wonder if I hallucinated what he said about
John McCain or his history of
draft-dodging or his “personal Vietnam” of trying
to avoid venereal disease, never mind the comments about “suckers”
in uniform that emerged years later.
None of it stopped him from winning in 2016. Why would it
stop him now, when he’s polling better
than he did in either of his first two runs for president?
What have you seen in the character of this country over
the last nine years to make you think he could do anything that would render
him “done,” up to and including putting Corey Lewandowski in charge of it?
The difference between then and now.
Actually, there are reasons to believe This Time
Is Different. Or so I need to tell myself in order to cope with the next 80
days.
Trump’s great advantage in 2016 was his promise of
radical change relative to the Bush and Clinton dynasties. It’s always helpful
to run as an “outsider,” but it’s really helpful when the
alternative is two families that dominated American politics for most of the
previous 30 years. Hillary, the ultimate establishmentarian, was the ideal
opponent for him.
Harris is not. Despite being the sitting vice president,
she’s the closest thing to a
“change candidate” in the race this year. Trump’s turn toward Corey
Lewandowski and his demagogic id is an obvious attempt to recapture his
“change” cred as the populist outsider who took America by storm in 2016, but
that’s a hard sell for a man who’s already been president and who dominates his
own party’s establishment like no one else in modern American history.
Harris and Clinton are also poles apart with respect to
the enthusiasm for them within their own party. That’s partly circumstantial:
Had Hillary replaced an ailing president as nominee in July when all hope of
victory seemed lost, she too might have drawn rapturous audiences desperate for
a savior. But Harris has shown some real
retail political chops in her events so far and routinely projects an
attitude of giddy excitement that Clinton never approached. The comparisons to
Obama are overbaked, but she’s closer to that energy than Hillary ever was.
Interestingly, Harris also isn’t emulating Clinton’s
habit of reminding voters that she’d be the first woman president. Hillary
mentioned it repeatedly in 2016, even holding her Election Night event under a
literal “glass ceiling” at
the Javits Center. Framing a contest to be commander-in-chief of the
military as a referendum on feminism was unwise in hindsight, especially when
the alternative was a macho authoritarian who reveled in dominating his
enemies.
Harris has stayed away from identity politics to this
point. Such critiques will follow
her anyway to some degree, but perhaps less than they would if she used
Clinton’s tactics.
Trump is also different now in important ways than he was
in 2016, albeit not nearly as much as most of us would like.
If the thought of four years of Hillary was exhausting
for average Americans back then, imagine how exhausting four more years of the
Trump show must seem to them today. Now in his third consecutive campaign for
the presidency, he’s become his own dynasty—one even drearier in its own way
than the Bush and Clinton versions. “During the last hour of his convention
speech, and every day since then, Mr. Trump has offered words and actions that
remind Americans why they voted him out of office in 2020,” Democratic
strategist Doug Sosnik wrote
in an op-ed on Friday.
You don’t need highfalutin Dispatch
reasoning about saving the Constitution to justify withholding your vote
from him this year. You just need to be tired of hearing his voice.
Or of coup attempts. Either way.
Trump is also eight years older now than he was then,
which mattered a little a month ago and might matter a lot by November. A
Marquette Law School poll conducted in May found 53 percent of voters thought
Trump was too old to be president, far less than the 78 percent who said so of
Joe Biden. The latest poll finds Trump’s number ticking up to
58 percent versus just 11 percent who say so of Harris. The contrast with
his new opponent is hurting him, particularly after Americans got a hard look
during the first debate at what an 81-year-old president—which Trump would be
in 2027 if he wins—looks like in action.
There’s also reason to believe that the days of Trump
meaningfully overperforming his polls are over.
The final RealClearPolitics national average in
2016 had him at 43.6 percent. He ended up winning 46.1 percent of the
national popular vote, just enough to get him over the line in battleground
states. History nearly repeated in
2020 when the average put him at 44 percent and he ended up with 46.9.
Those of us who are stuck in a Friday the 13th
movie look at that and assume he’s destined to beat expectations again by 2 or
3 points. But those who need a shot of morale will look at it and conclude that
47 percent is his absolute ceiling, especially as his shtick grows ever more
wearisome. Even against a badly diminished Biden, he spent most of this year
hovering in
the 46-47 percent range. With Harris as his opponent, he currently stands
at—you guessed it—46.9 percent.
Even his move toward Lewandowski isn’t as much of a 2016
reprise as it might seem. Trump’s staff got gradually more professional in that
race over time, from Corey to Manafort to Conway. If Trump ends up replacing
Wiles and LaCivita with Lewandowski, he’ll have gotten considerably less
professional—with unpredictable consequences for an organization that already doesn’t
have its priorities entirely straight.
It reminds me of how Trump insisted on turning to Sidney
Powell and Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election when he had smart lawyers like
Pat Cipollone available to him. He demands to be told what he wants to hear
when he’s stressed, even when it’s not good for him. Or for us.
Letting Trump be Trump never ends well for anyone,
although it tends to end
worse for him than for his enemies.
Maybe it’ll end well for him this time. Trump has made
real gains since 2016 with
nonwhite working-class voters, after all, forcing Harris to find those
votes somewhere else. His advantage with men in battleground states is also on
pace to exceed
his margins in each of his first two runs for presidents, which will put
pressure on her to run up the score with women to a historic degree. And as
exhausting as his daily nonsense is, it’s also considerably more normalized
today—especially to younger
voters who don’t know better—than it was eight years ago. Nothing that will
happen between now and November 5 will assure that he’s “done” among an
electorate that’s grown tragically numb to his antics. Not even a
prison sentence, I suspect.
But that’s too much of a downer on which to end a Friday
post so I’ll leave you with a note of optimism instead: Every slasher-movie
franchise eventually ends. Like Jason, Trump can’t go on forever. I
think.
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