Members-Only Article
I watched Donald Trump’s special announcement speech last night. I don’t think it was quite as low energy as some have suggested. I’d describe it more as a greatest hits show from an old band. Some have noted that the crowd seemed not always to know when to clap. They were into it but not overwhelmed. This raised a question in my mind. This is not really Trump’s crowd. Trump’s crowd is at those red state rallies. He did himself a disservice by not holding the event at one of those venues. It’s possible that his handlers thought this was a venue where they could keep him more on script. More likely, he’s reacting in a panicked fashion to the DeSantis boomlet and didn’t have the time.
But let’s set the atmospherics aside. I think this is likely the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. But I say this with a different emphasis from most. When I say “beginning of the end” I put the emphasis on “beginning.” There can be a long time between the beginning of the end and the end of the end. I suspect in this case it may play out over a few political cycles.
After January 6th there were perhaps 48 hours of genuine turning away from Donald Trump. This came after a shocking, violent assault on the Capitol. Republicans reunited around Trump with remarkable speed. Those who didn’t were rapidly purged from the party.
One of the paradoxes of the 2020 election is that it convinced a lot of people of Donald Trump’s continued political strength. This is despite the fact that he lost the presidency and quite directly lost his party the Senate. Republicans did over-perform in the House and actually did much better than many expected in the Senate. But beating polling-based expectations in this way obscured a deeper reality. Democrats had then won two and now three successive elections in which the overriding driver of Republican defeat was opposition to Donald Trump. This explains the oddity of Republicans coming off an election in which Trump had been rejected at the polls and deciding to double down on their subservience to the man. Indeed, a signature of 2021 and 2022 is the way in which Republicans seemed to abandon any sense that Trump’s increasingly feral and malevolent politics could ever foster a backlash. It was all way more over the top in the last two years than it was at most points in Trump’s actual presidency.
People described Trump as lackluster or low energy in last night’s speech. I don’t think that’s quite it. For years we’ve known that Trump can hurt people. His supporters exult in his willingness to punish his enemies. But he most clearly hurts Republicans, any who defy him. People who watched last night’s performance, which wasn’t so different from earlier speeches, saw it through the prism of that reality. A Trump who can’t hurt people just lacks a lot of his electricity and charge.
All this said, the question is not so much whether a DeSantis can beat Trump but whether he can unify the GOP after defeating him. In other words, if DeSantis and Trump run through the primaries and DeSantis comes out on top, does Trump say, “Well, okay I guess I lost. I’ll endorse Ron and just become an elder statesman.” I kinda doubt it. I suspect he’d either run as a third party candidate or play the churlish role of DeSantis’s tormentor in the general election. Either would be devastating for any GOP nominee’s chances.
This isn’t the only possible outcome. Trump is at heart a coward. It’s the mirror image of his world of the dominating and the dominated. If he faces true defeat he’ll want to change the game, change the challenge. So perhaps he does decide to say he never wanted to run again anyway. But I doubt it.
Nor have we seen the range of tricks Trump has up his sleeves. As the federal investigation bears down on Trump does he challenge or demand DeSantis pick sides between him and the DOJ? Between him and Joe Biden? Does this work? I don’t know. But there are many possible permutations of this tactic. Trump’s real power has never been that he’s so loved. It’s that he hates and is hated by the right people. There’s a lot he can do to heighten that sense of “which side are you on?”
What this all comes down to is that Donald Trump has deeply insinuated himself and his movement into the deepest fibers of the Republican Party. He will not be easy to shake off. He will not go quietly. He’ll create a major fracture in the GOP if he doesn’t win the nomination outright. Indeed, that was key to his original rise to power. It was the fracture in the GOP that made Trump’s conquest of the GOP possible. As Will Saletan put it in that memorable phrase: The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord.
As I said, I think we will in the future recognize this election as the beginning of the end for Donald Trump. But the end of the end is probably still some ways off.
