Trump

Trump. Trump Trump. Trumpity Trump Trump. Trump!

If you have read more than two words of this blog you can probably tell I’m pretty well to the right. I might even dare to call myself “far right.” Yet I grew weary of hearing the name “Trump” sometime shortly after the 2020 election fiasco. I had no particular desire to write anything about Trump, but the indictment saga has made it clear that he will be a central figure at least through 2024, so I suppose I have little choice but to address the spray-tanned elephant in the room.

I should preface by saying that I considered myself a “Trump supporter” through both 2016 and 2020 (much more so by 2020), in the sense that I greatly preferred Donald Trump as president over either Hillary Clinton or our current empty-suited puppet president. I would consider myself a “Trump supporter” again in 2024 if he were the Republican nominee, because I would sooner have a rock in the White House than a Democrat.

With that said, it is my opinion that Donald Trump’s continued political existence is now a millstone around the neck of the right, that since 2020 he has done more harm than good, and that he is likely to continue doing more harm than good through the 2024 election as well. The basic premise here is that if you just look objectively at the election results, it is impossible to deny that The Donald has been a loser, big league as he likes to say (and yes he is actually saying “big league,” not “bigly,” although it’s funny because wordsmithing the term “bigly” would still fit perfectly if that was actually what he were doing).

Now now now, before I get called a RINO or a traitor or what have you, I know a lot of people think 2020 was rigged and stolen. That’s the thing—it actually doesn’t matter whether you believe Trump is a loser because Democrats cheat, or because he’s just bad electorally. Either way, all the implications remain the same. The Democrats have cleaned house in the past three elections. I think it was plausible enough to say, well just let people have a taste of Biden and Democrats back in charge, and when the country starts falling apart then we’ll get a red wave.

This theory was tested in 2022 and it failed. The “red trickle” or whatever you want to call it was a historically bad performance for the Republicans given all the circumstances which should’ve stacked things in their favor. Again, I know, maybe you think that was a lot of cheating and stealing. And maybe it was. I don’t find it at all hard to believe that Democrats cheat and the government covers for them, but again, the ultimate result is the same either way.

If Democrats have been cheating, they’ve been getting away with it scot free. And so running Trump again means giving them cover to do the same thing all over again. And likewise, if these elections are just being lost the good old fashioned way, that means Trump sucks for national elections. The Democrats ran on abortion and “election denial,” which is basically a euphemism for Trump, in 2022. And it appears to have worked. I don’t like these results any more than the next right winger, but the results are what they are. No amount of personal affinity for Donald Trump can change his terrible record at the ballot box.

Going forward into 2024, we can therefore expect a repeat of 2020 if Trump is the Republican nominee. Nothing in the political calculus has fundamentally changed since 2020. Trump is still Trump. Minds have been made up about Trump for a very long time now, I imagine. When Trump was indicted, I saw a lot of conservative talking heads saying bombastic things to the effect of “they just handed Trump the White House in 2024!” If that were really how it worked, they probably wouldn’t have indicted him. The indictment might hand him the Republican nomination, but there is no reason why it will magically cause him to win in a general election.

The indictment, and really any further legal drama that follows, is simply another incident in a string of politically motivated hatchet jobs against Trump going back nearly a decade now, all the way back to Russiagate at the beginning of his presidency. Sure, it’s an escalation I suppose, but it’s the same basic song and dance over again. People’s minds are made up on this stuff. Anyone who is still in Trump’s camp at this point has probably been there for a while and vice versa. No one who opposes Trump politically is all of a sudden going to vote for him because he got indicted, even if they are aware that it’s an unjust indictment, which they probably won’t be if they’re the type of person who would consider voting Democrat in the first place.

Returning to our dueling theories of losing legitimately vs cheating, this means that either Trump will get cheated and nothing will be done about it, again, or Trump will just lose straight up and claim he got cheated, again. Both of these outcomes are disastrous for conservatives and should be deemed unacceptable. The usual suspects might even be able to squeeze another January 6 out of the whole deal if Trump really plays into their hand, again.

The “Trump just sucks” theory is pretty straightforward and needs no further discussion, but we should discuss the cheating theory in a bit more detail here. There seems to be a sort of oppositional-defiant disorder among Trump diehards by which Trump must be run again in order to somehow punish Democrats for cheating him the first time. As if the best way to deal with that outcome is to just do the same thing over again which produced it in the first place.

If that’s the course of action, then when the same thing predictably happens again, everyone who just blamed Trump for it the first time are going to just blame him again. I’m sorry, but the whole “Stop the Steal” thing just blatantly failed. Not enough conservatives believe that that election actually was stolen. You can scream and call them RINOs and throw a tantrum all you want. But none of that will change their assessments. When they see Trump lose again in 2024, they’ll just blame him again and not believe any claims of cheating, again.

What if the nominee were someone other than Trump, though, implicitly DeSantis for the time being, and then the Republican still lost? If nominee DeSantis runs in 2024 and the result is the same as Trump’s run in 2020, then conservatives may be forced to do some genuine soul-searching. And I don’t mean the usual shallow “let’s go back to being neocons” defeatism, because DeSantis is the bulwark that “moderate” conservatives are hoping to throw up against Trump. If Trump runs and loses, then only the MAGA people really lose, while the moderates are vindicated.

But if DeSantis runs and loses, everyone loses. Except the left, of course. But the entire right loses, MAGA, moderate, and everything in between. This doesn’t affect MAGA much, as they’re already used to losing at this point. But all those moderate neocon types hoping for a post-Trump “return to sanity” to salvage Republican electoral prospects? Now their theory would have been tested and falsified. Whatever’s going wrong isn’t actually Trump at that point, it’s something else, whether we want to say it’s cheating, insurmountable systemic bias, or whatever else. But at least we could finally put all the endless Trump drama to rest, once and for all.

If you’re a MAGA person, this is the best way to unify with all the Trump-skeptical moderate types. You can point out to them, now with irrefutable evidence, that you and they are in the same boat together. Moderates will really be forced to ask some hard questions if they get their favored candidate and it’s still a blowout for the Democrats. Maybe they start warming up to the possibility that Democrats really are cheating, maybe they come to understand that national elections really might be lost to the right for other reasons, but you could have that conversation then. If they have to make do with Trump and he loses, though, they’re just going to blame Trump for everything.

Now the objection I anticipate here would take the form of some sort of loyalty to Donald Trump personally. He was cheated out of the election in 2020! It’s so unfair, shouldn’t he have a chance to be president again? We can’t let them get away with what they did to him! I have bad news for you, they already got away with it. If you are actually a right-wing ideologue who wants to win political victories for right-wing policies, causes, and ideals, then indulging in a cult of personality whereby you sacrifice the fortunes of your political movement out of loyalty to a single person makes absolutely zero sense.

If you are someone who feels loyal to Trump personally, and DeSantis runs and wins, what have you really lost or given up? I suppose the temptation here will be to say DeSantis is a “RINO” who will not govern conservatively enough, but frankly I don’t see much evidence of that. The fact that he seems to actually have a spine is the very reason he’s become so prominent to begin with. If we go with the objection that anyone other than Donald Trump is a RINO by default, that theory is unfalsifiable.

In my view, if you really think a Trump loss is still better than a DeSantis victory, you’re clearly pursuing some sort of personal loyalty to Trump over any real dedication to right-wing ideals. At that point you actually are the Trump cultist that the left wants to paint you as. This attitude matches the behavior of Trump himself, who responded to his indictment by a corrupt Democrat by… taking more shots at Ron DeSantis. Trump’s wild swings at DeSantis clearly suggest that he is more concerned with his own status than with destroying the left.

If he had his eye on the target, he’d focus more on reminding people that no matter who the Republican nominee is, the only thing that really matters is defeating Joe Biden. Democrats understand this mentality and behave accordingly. When it seemed that Bernie might actually have a shot at their nomination, what did they do? They all unified behind Joe Biden and condemned Bernie in lock step to make sure Biden got the nomination, and their support for Biden has been utterly unflinching ever since. They didn’t do that because they love Joe Biden or hate Bernie Sanders, they did it because they cared more about beating Trump than about their own internal squabbles.

Republicans would do well to learn that lesson. Unlike Donald Trump, I am a right-wing ideologue. I want to see right-wing ideals win and left-wing ideals lose. I have no particular preference for which individual achieves this goal, so long as it is achieved. I will favor the ability to achieve this goal over nearly any other consideration in choosing which politicians I support or do not support. Any serious person should do the same. Again, the left is deadly serious about their politics, and it shows in their continuous string of victories. People on the right have been far too unserious for far too long.

This brings me to my final point, which is that looking back on Trump’s term in office, I simply don’t believe that he was all that serious about enforcing hard-line right-wing policies and goals. I do believe that he was better than a President Jeb Bush, but in hindsight I’m not all that sure he was better than a President Ted Cruz might have been. He did do some good while in office, but not enough, and whatever he did accomplish was wiped away instantly when Biden replaced him. Perhaps if I thought he was a committed ideologue who did the best he could, I could forgive that, but I just don’t think that’s the case.

If we’re going to be serious, we have to demand better than that from the next Republican president, if there’s ever another one at all. And if you think no one could have done any better than Trump did, at that point I think you would have to conclude that voting is pointless and the situation is hopeless. Which maybe it is. But if that were really the case, you’d want to start having some very different discussions. It doesn’t make any sense to believe that and then to just keep cheerleading for Donald Trump in another ultimately futile political circus.