The anti-Trump alarm goes off
Byron York
THE ANTI-TRUMP ALARM GOES OFF. Around this time in 2015, some in the political commentary class had a collective realization: Donald Trump could win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. A freakout of sorts ensued, although many remained confident that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in the 2016 general election. An even larger freakout occurred on the night of Nov. 8, 2016.
Now we are seeing a repeat of the events of late 2015. The Iowa caucuses are six weeks away. Trump has an overwhelming lead in national polls — 47.3 percentage points over his nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Trump’s leads in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are 29.7 points, 27 points, and 30.5 points, respectively, although the polling in those states is getting old, with the most recent polls measuring opinion about three weeks ago. But the basic fact is: Trump is far, far ahead. He is the favorite to win the GOP nomination.
That’s certainly alarming to many in the political commentary world. Even more alarming has been a spate of polls, too many to be ignored, showing Trump defeating President Joe Biden in a head-to-head general election matchup. Put all those surveys together, and it is freakout time again. Here are four examples.
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1) On Thursday, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.” The piece began, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
2) On Sunday, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the de facto leader of the House Jan. 6 committee, said the U.S. is “sleepwalking into dictatorship” with the possibility of a Trump victory.
3) On Monday, The Atlantic released a special issue, “If Trump Wins,” devoted entirely to articles warning of the threat Trump allegedly poses to various areas of American life and government.
4) Also on Monday, the New York Times published a top-of-the-homepage story headlined, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” which reported exactly what the headline promised.
Of course, you’ve heard things like this before. Still, the timing and dire nature of the warnings suggest another collective realization has moved through the commentary class. Why now? It’s not entirely clear. The dynamics of Trump’s lead in the Republican race really haven’t changed much in the last few months. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has moved up, DeSantis has moved down, and everybody else is fading away. Through it all, Trump has remained far ahead — actually, a little farther ahead today than he was a couple of months ago.
It’s more likely that the Trump vs. Biden polls had a greater effect. Perhaps many in the commentariat had assumed Trump would win his party’s nomination, but just as in 2016, they also assumed the Democratic candidate would defeat Trump in the general election. Now, with voters disapproving of Biden’s performance in virtually every aspect of the presidency, plus the widespread opinion that Biden is too old for a second term, there is no reason beyond wishful thinking to assume a Biden victory. Thus the freakout.
What to think about all this? Certainly, some of the voices behind the new wave of Trump warnings have a serious boy-who-cried-wolf problem. They’ve been issuing hysterical warnings about Trump for many years. In particular, they got caught up in the frenzy of speculation and slander that Trump was a Russian asset and that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to fix the U.S. presidential election. In other words, they have been discrediting themselves for quite a while.
Some are even worse than that. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the author of the Washington Post Trump dictatorship article, the neoconservative writer and scholar Robert Kagan, did as much as anyone to advocate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Kagan was so dreadfully, confidently, and persistently wrong about something so enormously consequential — a major war begun on the basis of false intelligence, with nearly 4,500 U.S. military men and women dead and more than 32,000 wounded — that it is sometimes amazing that readers still pay much attention to what he says. But they do, and in the Trump dictatorship article, Kagan was clearly telling an anti-Trump audience what it wanted to hear.
So there will be a tendency among Trump supporters, and among Republicans generally, to dismiss the latest round of hair-on-fire warnings as simply not credible. That’s entirely understandable. But at the same time, Republicans would do well to think carefully about what a return to Trump will mean, both for the party and, more importantly, for the country. It’s an on-one-hand, on-the-other-hand question.
There’s a revealing moment in the Kagan article in which he bemoans the fact that in 2024, Biden, as a president seeking reelection, will have to answer for the nation’s problems. He’s the man in charge. But Biden faces a bigger challenge, Kagan argued, because he is running against a former president. “Most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with … crises,” Kagan wrote. “Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”
That’s a pretty strong rationale for a second Trump term. On the other hand, as this newsletter wrote last year, “Yes, Trump unquestionably accomplished a lot as president. But it is also true that everything he did after Nov. 3, 2020, Election Day, was a disaster, both for himself and for the country.” Trump put the country through a lot with his refusal to accept the results of the election. From the newsletter: “Trump’s core supporters, of course, do not view his efforts to remain in office, after Biden’s election was fully decided and certified, as disqualifying. They do not view his efforts to whip up supporters to believe the election was stolen, and to come to Washington to protest on Jan. 6, as disqualifying. They do not view his efforts to impede the certification of electoral votes as disqualifying. But millions of Democrats, independents, and some Republicans do. And even some of those who don’t view Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election, his accusations that it was stolen, as a backward-looking bore. They want to move forward.”
That is all still true. So Republicans need to take a long, hard look at their choices. One problem with the kind of over-the-top analyses favored in publications such as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other outlets is that they are so over the top that they are easy for Trump voters to dismiss. But that doesn’t mean those voters don’t need to think the Trump question through for themselves.
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