Trump still calling the shots in the GOP?

SO IT’S true. Since that famous golden escalator rise on 16 June 2015, when that famous real estate tycoon and former television reality host kicked off his bid for the US presidency, many in the media, including your trusty reporter here, have been predicting his political demise, insisting that “there was no way” the Donald would survive the latest scandal. And winning the presidential election? Don’t make me laugh.

So it’s unlikely that you would encounter a political pundit in Washington these days who would be willing to bet even five bucks that former President Donald Trump wouldn’t run for president in 2024, that he wouldn’t be nominated by the Republican Party as its next presidential candidate, or that he wouldn’t be occupying the White House in 2025.

So don’t expect me to suggest that the former president intends to remain cocooned in his magnificent Mar-a-Lago estate in the Florida enclave of Palm Beach in the next two years and that he has given up his dreams of returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in less than three years.

And there is certainly no reason for him to retire from politics at this stage when his popularity among members of the Republican Party’s electoral base, aka MAGA (Make America Great Again) base, according to opinion polls, remains high as ever.

In fact, recent polls suggest that Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, with his nearest challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, at least 20 percentage points behind him.

Moreover, the vast majority of Republican voters seem to agree with the former president’s unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. In a recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, conducted by YouGov, only 21 per cent of Republicans said that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. 

There has been an expectation that after a mob of 2,000 to 2,500 supporters of then President Trump attacked the Capitol Building in Washington on January 6, 2021, many Republicans would desert the former president as part of a backlash against him.

But that, at least according to the polls, hasn’t happened. A majority of Republican voters, as well as a handful of GOP political candidates, have embraced Trump’s claim of widespread voter fraud in 2020, as evidenced by the large number of “Stop the Steal” rallies even as some Republicans drifted away following January 6.

But if that is the case, how does one explain the results of the recent Republican primaries in Georgia? To recall, Trump lost the presidential race in Georgia in 2020, followed by a defeat of two leading Republican candidates in the Senate races that year.

The former president blamed those losses in that traditional “red” state on Republican governor Brian Kemp and other Republican office holders, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr, for their alleged failure to “find” President Trump’s “missing” votes and for certifying President Biden’s victory in 2020.

So when the popular Governor Kemp announced his run for re-election, the Donald vowed to marshal his supporters in Georgia against his enemies in the Peach State and supported another Republican politician, former Senator David Perdue, in his challenge against Kemp in the party’s primaries.

The Donald probably fantasised that all his many fans in Georgia would show up for the vote and punish a sitting governor who dared to question his lies about the 2020 election.

But despite several rallies and a barrage of television commercials depicting Kemp as a stooge of the Democrats, an effort backed by US$3.1 million in campaign contributions, Governor Kemp ended up beating Senator Purdue 74 per cent to 22 per cent and carried all the state’s counties.

Attorney General Carr and Secretary of State Raffensperger have also overcome the challenges from Trump-backed candidates, as did Idaho Republican governor Brad Little, whose main sin in the eyes of the former president was that he congratulated Biden for winning the presidency.

Trump’s gubernatorial endorsee in Nebraska’s Republican primaries has also lost the race by a wide margin, although the former president’s picks for governor in Pennsylvania and Arkansas as well as for the Senate nomination in Ohio, did win.

The losses of Trump’s candidates don’t necessarily signal that he himself has lost his influence over the Republican Party. But they indicate that his momentum may be ebbing as more Republicans aren’t willing to follow his lead as he tries to turn every contest into a referendum on whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen or not.

A clear majority of Democrats and Independents certainly don’t buy into these lies anyway and most Republican strategists recognise that any attempt on the part of a Republican presidential candidate to focus the agenda of the 2024 race on the “stolen” 2020 election is going to backfire against the GOP in the same way that such an effort damaged Senator Perdue, Trump’s candidate in the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary.

If anything, the Republicans have a better chance of winning in 2024 by drawing attention to serious policy issues, like the surging inflation and the Democrats’ positions on social cultural issues, like preoccupation with identity politics. Very few voters are going to support the GOP as a way to help heal Trump’s injured pride.

Much of what will happen in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries would depend of course on the willingness of other potential candidates, including Governor DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, to challenge former President Trump for the nomination.

Until recently the conventional wisdom has been that if Trump would decide to run for president again, he would win the primaries with almost no competition from other Republicans. Nothing was going to stop him.

The losses in Georgia, however, have damaged that sense of invincibility. As the Donald himself knows, being a loser is the worst thing that could happen to any public figure, which is the main reason why he continues to insist that he had actually won the 2020 presidential race.

But even if Trump doesn’t emerge as a winner in 2024, his MAGA agenda, his ideas in the form of Trumpism — that explosive mix of nationalism, protectionism and xenophobia — would probably have to be embraced by any Republican candidate who wants to win the support of the “base” and the party’s presidential nomination.