In Donald Trump’s quest to sustain his dominance over the Republican Party, his claim to have been robbed of victory in 2020 has been a crucial talisman, lending him powers denied to previous defeated presidential candidates. By insisting that he was cheated out of victory, Trump fashioned himself into a king-in-exile rather than a loser.
The former president is not exactly in conscious control of this strategy, however. He intuited rather than calculated his way to its effectiveness, and he seems too invested in its central conceit – the righteousness of his “Stop the Steal” campaign – to modulate when it begins to reap diminishing returns.
That’s a big part of why 2022 hasn’t been a particularly good year for Trump’s 2024 ambitions. Across 2021, he bent important parts of the GOP back to his will, but in recent months his powers have been ebbing.
While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his strongest potential rival, has been throwing himself in front of almost every issue that Republican primary voters care about, Trump has marinated in grievance. While DeSantis has been selling himself as the scourge of liberalism, the former president has been selling himself mostly as the scourge of Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.
Judging by early primary polling, the DeSantis strategy is working at the Trump strategy’s expense. These early numbers don’t prove that Trump can be beaten, but they strongly suggest that if his case for 2024 is only that he was robbed in 2020, it won’t be enough.
This is not because the majority of Republicans have had their minds changed by the Jan. 6 committee, or suddenly decided that actually Joe Biden won fair and square. But the committee has probably played some role in bleeding Trump’s strength, by keeping him pinned to the 2020 election and its aftermath, giving his more lukewarm Republican supporters a constant reminder of where the Trump experience ended up.
By lukewarm supporters, I mean those Republicans who would be inclined to answer no if a pollster asked them if the 2020 election was fairly won, but who would also reject the conceit – as a majority of Republicans did in a Quinnipiac poll earlier this year – that Mike Pence could have legitimately done as Trump wished on Jan. 6.
That’s a crucial distinction. There are lots of conservatives who retain a general sense that Biden’s victory wasn’t fair without being committed to John Eastman’s cockamamie plans to force a constitutional crisis. There are lots of conservatives who sympathize in a general way with the Jan. 6 protests while believing that they were essentially peaceful and that any rioting was the work of FBI plants or outside agitators – which is deluded, but still quite different from actively wishing for a mob-led coup d’état.
So to the extent that Trump is stuck litigating his own disgraceful conduct before and during the riot, a rival like DeSantis doesn’t need the lukewarm Trump supporter to believe everything the Jan. 6 committee reports. He just needs that supporter to regard Jan. 6 as an embarrassment and Trump’s behavior as feckless – while presenting himself as the candidate who can own the libs but also turn the page.
A counterargument, raised Friday by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, is that so long as those lukewarm supporters still believe the 2020 election was unfair, Trump will have a trump card over any rival – because if you believe a steal happened, “you are perfectly rational to select a candidate who will acknowledge the crime and do everything to prevent it from reoccurring.”
The stolen-election narrative has protected Trump from the simplest consequence of his defeat. But it doesn’t prevent the stench of failure from rising from his well-worn grievances.
The New York Times