If you’re waiting for Trump to disappear, be ready to wait past 2028
Timothy P. Carney
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Most of the Republican presidential candidates in the first debate refused to criticize former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, even though what Trump did was stupid, dishonest, and harmful, and even though these candidates are purportedly running against Trump.
The GOP field basically agreed it would support Trump in the general election were he convicted and still the nominee.
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It’s enough to make you wonder if these guys are actually running against Trump.
“A Potemkin primary,” columnist Jonathan Martin of Politico aptly called it. Martin wrote that Vivek Ramaswamy is “effectively running as a down-payment on a future race, at which point he hopes to gather support from Trump’s base.”
A similar suspicion is warranted for the candidacies of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). They both trail Trump by massive amounts in early states, yet the criticisms they offer of Trump range from nonexistent to gentle.
Meanwhile, all the speculation around Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) is that he will sit out this race to avoid having to challenge Trump and then run for president in 2028.
There are plenty of strategic reasons for a Republican to avoid a battle with Trump. Trump is a ruthless counterpuncher. If criticized at all, he doesn’t bother defending himself but instead tends to launch a totally off-topic attack on his critic, often striking at a personal sensitivity or weakness.
If you point out in a debate that Trump basically ceded all pandemic management to Anthony Fauci because the pandemic bored Trump and because Trump doesn’t really care about individual liberty, he is likely to respond with some insult of your wife and a half-true critique of some vote you cast 12 years ago. Who wants to go through that?
The greater danger to a GOP politician challenging Trump is that you will turn off a significant portion of the Republican base. For millions of Republican voters, the only thing they believe in is Trump. He is the beginning and end of their political belief system. You can never win over an Only-Trumper because simply running against Trump makes you a traitor.
Given all this, you understand why DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Scott, or Youngkin would decline to challenge Trump directly and simply wait until 2028 to pursue the GOP nomination.
One problem with that approach: There’s a decent chance Trump will run again in 2028 — and maybe even in 2032.
If Trump gets the GOP nomination, there is at least a 50% chance that he loses the general election — I would place the odds higher. If Trump loses to President Joe Biden next year, it is guaranteed that Trump will once again whine that the election was stolen from him.
He will continue to act as though the GOP and the White House are rightly his, and some portion of the Republican base will continue to agree with him.
That will put any Republican presidential hopeful in the same old position: having to convince the GOP base that Trump is a loser who cannot win a general election and harms the party with his conspiracy theorizing and narcissism. Maybe that case will be easier to make if Trump loses by a larger margin in 2024 than he did in 2020, but it will still involve trying to hold on to Trump’s entire base while attacking him.
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As long as he can legally serve a second term, Trump will run for that second term, which he believes he is owed.
Sooner or later, you have to go full-bore after Trump unless you’re simply waiting for him to die.