He doesn't have to win to be President again.
Let's not kid ourselves. Trump's road back to the White House in 2024 is considerably easier than it was in 2016.
Given the much more riveting drama of the implosion of Twitter, you may not have noticed that Donald J. Trump is running for President again. As expected, he announced on Nov. 15, a week or so after the 2022 midterms, whose results were just disappointing enough for Republicans—despite retaking the House of Representatives—to get everybody complacent again about the political future of the United States. The dysfunctional press, the know-nothing punditocracy and pray-for-a-miracle Democratic Party establishment are all ignoring the clear and present danger to democracy that Trump’s feeble-seeming resurgence poses. The truth is, our political system is now so dysfunctional, and the deck stacked so completely in favor of an authoritarian takeover, that Trump’s potential return to the White House—assuming he lives that long—is actually much easier than it was in 2016.
Trump does not have to win the 2024 election in the way that past candidates for President, even himself in 2016, have had to. All he has to do is keep some semblance of control over the Republican Party, and keep his base happy, and then let his enablers do the rest. The enablers already have most of their infrastructure in place. As I explained in my Oct. 14 column, the Supreme Court case of Moore v. Harper, pending on this year’s docket, will, if decided in favor of conservatives (as seems likely), enable state legislatures to appoint Presidential electors regardless of the popular vote. As a commenter to that article pointed out, they may not even need Moore v. Harper, just control of enough state houses to get over the top in stolen electoral votes. Even after the 2022 elections, the GOP controls 30 state houses, representing 273 electoral votes. The red state stealers will anoint whoever gets the GOP nomination as President in 2024. The alternative, after all, is a Democrat in office for another four years, which is absolutely unacceptable to them under any circumstances. They’ve stopped being bothered by the will of the voters so there’s no need to worry about that.
Trump, therefore, merely has to stay alive long enough to clinch the Republican nomination, which he’ll easily do. His base is the largest single bloc within the universe of conservative-leaning voters. All of his ostensible opposition within the party—Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis—are either mini-Trumps themselves or never-Trumpers, who are an anathema to most conservative voters. DeSantis, though much smarter and more Machiavellian than Trump, built his career on Trumpian themes. Given a choice between the real article and the obsequious imitator, Republican voters will choose the real deal without thinking about it. Pence is the number one man hated by Trump and will never poll out of single digits. Once Trump racks up a few primary wins, the GOP party establishment will cow to him because they’d much rather win with him than lose without him. In the unlikely event that Trump is trailing in delegates by the time of the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he can just activate the Proud Boys to storm the convention. He might not even bother to show up to the convention and instead post his acceptance speech on Twitter.
Trump will not be popular. Regardless of what the country wants to talk about in 2024, he will campaign relentlessly on one single issue: his insistence that he won the 2020 election. Under normal circumstances that would be a loser of an issue. No one except him and his sycophants want to talk about that. But he doesn’t have to convince a majority of voters to back him, as other Presidential candidates have to do. He might—just barely—squeak past 40% of the popular vote in 2024. (Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, was elected with 39%). The 2024 election will undoubtedly be Trump’s poorest showing in his three runs for President.
But even if he doesn’t reach that 40% bar, it won’t matter. The campaign will be a nothingburger. The GOP will probably have no official platform. (They didn’t in 2020). There won’t be debates; they’ve already been canceled. There will not be a real contest of ideas or a real public discussion about the direction of the country. Trump will grandstand at poorly-attended rallies of red-hatted MAGA zombies whom he’ll lead in chants of “Lock her up!” The campaign will be about memes, mudslinging, racism, brigades of racist trolls on social media, Russian psyops, conspiracy theories, disinformation, riots and thuggery in the streets, and lies repeated and amplified by online echo chambers. The punditocracy will paper the internet with think pieces about how “this is the last chance to save our democracy,” and Democrats will send out fundraising emails. But that’s about it.
Pity poor Joe Biden. In 2024 he will be 82 years old. He was weak and frail when he took the oath of office two years ago; imagine what kind of shape he’ll be in when he runs for re-election. I assume he’ll try, but even if he doesn’t, who will step up? Kamala? Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden? Even if Democrats have a transformative, young, charismatic candidate in 2024 that energizes the American public—a John F. Kennedy for a new generation, which is highly unlikely at this late juncture, because where has he or she been up ‘til now—how do they overcome those 30 Republican statehouses, the GOP state-level Secretaries of State, and the Trump-appointed judges who will rule that any and all electoral chicanery that benefits Republican candidates is legal? How do they overcome the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters? Democrats can win an honest contest on policy and the direction of the country. But 2024 will not be an honest contest. That, the GOP will ensure.
The wildcard in the mix is, of course, the question of whether Trump will be indicted and/or convicted of crimes ahead of the 2024 election. While that does look more likely than it once did, I’m loath to count on that being the magic bullet that saves us from Trump. Though no major party nominee has done so, Presidential candidates have run campaigns from prison cells—Eugene Debs and Lyndon LaRouche, for instance. More likely Trump, if indicted, will use the legal process to delay or obfuscate any ruling on his eligibility to serve as President such that it will still be an open question or at least unsettled by the time the GOP-controlled state machinery anoints him as President in early January 2025. He needs only one federal judge to stay, even temporarily, a lower court’s ruling that he’s ineligible to be President to get to that finish line. And he appointed a lot of federal judges. This will not be hard for him.
Even a hard and fast ruling that he is barred from serving as President may not slow him down very much. Suppose he is disqualified, but makes a big show of “endorsing” another candidate—Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps—who then makes clear to his base voters that she’ll be only a figurehead, and that she’ll appoint Trump as her chief “adviser” in the White House? That sort of tactic has precedent in American history, though not at the Presidential level. George Wallace, for example, got his wife elected Governor of Alabama in 1966 when he was term-limited. Wallace was quite open about the fact that he would be, in effect, the governor and that voters should elect his wife for that reason. Somebody like Greene, who stands to inherit Trump’s base when he dies, would easily go for that kind of arrangement. This is even aside from the question of large-scale political violence breaking out if Trump is indicted or convicted of a crime. Democrats believe in laws and procedures. Republicans no longer do.
In the final analysis, the Republican Party in the United States has already made the choice that achieving political power is their highest objective, and, while it’d be nice to accomplish that legally and fairly, legality and fairness are not ultimately necessary. I believe that, even now in late 2022, Republican Party officials who, if given a viable choice, would rather not have to support Donald Trump for another round outnumber those for whom Trump is their first choice. But asking them to risk staying out of power for another four years to validate that preference is asking of them something they’re simply not capable of doing. The GOP has fallen in line behind Trump on absolutely everything—including an armed insurrection against the government of the United States. If there was any shred of conscience within their party to fall back on, we’d be seeing it by now.
In my opinion, American democracy is now in its final extremity. We’ve been traveling this road for more than 40 years and we seem to have learned nothing from history even when the red lights of authoritarianism are flashing us full in the face. Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of our political collapse. I certainly hope we’ll veer off the road at the last second, but that brick wall is getting awfully close.
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