BUSINESS TIMES
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/get-popcorn-welcome-republican-crackGet the popcorn : Welcome to the Republican crack-up
Leading centrist GOP figures are out to challenge Donald Trump, the first to throw his hat in the ring for the Republican primaries for the 2024 presidential race. But a political bloodbath would just pave the way for Trump’s third shot at the presidency
UPDATED TUE, NOV 22, 2022
Starting on the eve of the 2015 Republican presidential primaries with Candidate Trump insisting that Senator and Vietnam War veteran John McCain was “not a war hero” through to his references to a female body part in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, to the many political and personal scandals and ugly public scenes that dominated his presidency (including two congressional impeachments), not to mention his four-word vocabulary and his bouts of racism, nativism, sexism, homophobia, and conspiracy theories, Trump proved to be the ultimate survivor.
And then there was the violent attack his fans unleashed on the US Capitol that he helped ignite, and his continuing efforts to overrun the results of the 2020 presidential election and his promotion of the big lie that it was “stolen” from him. Trump’s political career was over, we concluded, confident that he would soon be indicted and sent off to jail.
But then not even the Jan 6, 2021, assault on America’s cherished symbol of freedom seemed to have left a dent on the support that the former president seemed to be enjoying among Republican voters, with opinion polls indicating a majority of them would nominate him as their 2024 presidential candidate. And depending on who the Democrats choose to challenge him, it looked as though a second Trump presidency could be on the cards.
Trump’s ability to continue dominating Republican politics has stemmed not only from the wide support that his electoral base provides him. The reluctance of even moderate Republican figures – with a few exceptions, like Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former presidential candidate, Utah senator Mitt Romney – to stand up to the former president ensured his hold over the GOP. That was clearly demonstrated when his endorsed candidates were winning Republican primaries for congressional and gubernatorial races before this year’s midterm elections a few weeks ago.
Recognising that Republicans like winners and loath losers, Trump built his political career on the notion that he was a winner. “We’re gonna win so much you’re gonna get tired of winning” has been the line Trump employed since his victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.
But in the aftermath of November’s midterm elections when most of the leading Republican candidates whom he promoted ended up losing critical Senate and gubernatorial races, and ensuring that the expected “red tsunami” didn’t happen, and that the Democrats remained in control of the Senate, it’s Trump who now looks like a big loser.
The thrashing of his candidates in the midterms would amount to Trump’s third electoral loss if you add it to his defeat in the 2020 presidential race and the Republicans’ failure to maintain control of the two chambers of Congress that year. And that doesn’t even include his losing the popular vote in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
“Three strikes and you’re out” may be a term derived from baseball, but it reflects the common-sense view that after failing three times to, say, pass an exam or perform an important task at work, you’d be asked to change your major in college or you get fired from your job.
So it’s not surprising that following the outcome of the midterms, which has shocked Republicans who were fantasising about a huge victory that didn’t happen, journalists and pundits are once again starting the countdown to the end of Trumpism and are confident that the elderly retiree from Mar-a-Lago will not return to the White House in 2025.
And perhaps this time those who expect his political death are right. Although Trump has already announced that he would enter the presidential race and it seems that he continues to enjoy support among many Republicans, his losses were bound to energise top figures in the party to finally challenge the former president, with some of them jumping into the Republican presidential primaries with the expectation of beating him in the race.
The midterm results have made it clear that many Republicans and independents, especially college-educated suburban voters, are just fed up with Trump and Trumpism, his denial of the 2020 presidential election results, his mean streak, his profane language, and what can be summarised in one word, his “craziness”. By most measures, he’s simply unfit for public office.
The outcome of the latest Senate and gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, among other states, suggest that while Trump can continue to count on the votes of many of his fans in the rural and de-industrialised areas in these states, without the backing of middle-class Republicans, who constitute around a third of the GOP electoral base, Candidate Trump will not win the 2024 presidential race.
In a way, the message of those Republicans planning to run against Trump is that – as former Republican Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, a critic of Trump, put it –“I am tired of our party losing”.
Former Governor Hogan is one on a long list of Republican figures who are expected to enter the 2024 presidential race, including New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu; Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie; senator Ted Cruz of Texas; Missouri senator Josh Hawley; former vice-president Mike Pence; former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley. The last three served in the Trump administration.
Topping the list that gets longer by the day is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has just won re-election by a landslide, representing a state that demographically is regarded as a microcosm of the entire United States, and who, according to several opinion polls could beat another Floridian, Trump, in the presidential primaries.
Governor DeSantis has already won the endorsement of the New York Post, an influential tabloid owned by publisher Rupert Murdoch. A day after the Nov 8 elections, the Post ran a large headline on the front page, DEFUTURE, with a picture of governor DeSantis. The tabloid followed that the next day with a front-page cartoon of Trump teetering on the top of a wall:
“TRUMPTY DUMPTY”.
The headlines are just more signs that Murdoch’s powerful media empire, which includes Fox News, has deserted Trump Land and intends to campaign for another Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
At the same time, many Republican donors, including billionaire Ronald Lauder, have announced that they were not planning to support a Trump candidacy. Even more embarrassing for the former president, two members of his family – daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner – have told reporters that they would not join Trump’s campaign.
But short of major medical problems or perhaps legal obstacles relating to the numerous lawsuits he is facing and the high-profile investigations he is under, the chances of Trump withdrawing from the presidential race before the last Republican primary, are close to zero.
In fact, if he does lose the Republican primaries, expect Trump to launch a presidential run as a third-party presidential candidate – which would ensure that the Republican nominee who beat him in the primaries would lose in the general election.
But there is one way that, notwithstanding all the challenges he faces, Trump could win the Republican primaries – if, as expected, the Republican opposition facing him becomes highly fractured, and especially if the competition between the more centrist and more conservative candidates degenerates into a political bloodbath as they turn against each other instead of against Candidate Trump. That would allow him to emerge, like in 2016, as the winner.