Will he run or not is the big question in MAGA world and it’s being teased out and foreshadowed, as you would expect, in proper reality TV-esque terms. I have said many times that I don’t think Donald Trump is going to announce he’s running any time soon because to do so would take his PAC activities out of the scheme of laws controlling those things and place his fundraising squarely under campaign finance law, which is not so fluid or lucrative for him. He wants to keep the coffers of the PAC flush and full because that’s his grift du jour.
However, there may be a compelling reason that Trump will in fact announce that he’s going to run and that’s because it would turn the media narrative back on him. And this is very plausible. Trump is starving for media attention. He only exists when the cameras are trained in his direction and the red lights are on. He has been languishing in relative obscurity, without Twitter, without Facebook, just an occasional Fox News appearance and shows on the far right-wing media outlets. He hates this.
But, the minute he declares his candidacy, the narrative changes dramatically. Then he’s not The Former Guy griping about what the current administration is doing, then he’s the presumptive Republican nominee and that gives him a completely different standing. Philip Bump, Washington Post:
Want to know how mainstream conservative media might treat a Trump candidacy? Consider a column from the Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. Jenkins has long been an enemy-of-my-enemy defender of Trump. (“Having the right enemies made him president in the first place,” Jenkins wrote on Jan. 5.) On Tuesday, Jenkins argued that Biden’s failures had positioned Trump well for a told-you-so tour — though Jenkins’s presentation of Biden’s failures is intentionally generous.
Lines like this, though, show the willingness of some to forgive even Trump’s most flagrant and dangerous dishonesty:
“America doesn’t feel noticeably less chaotic with him out of the picture. A cynic might also notice that, for all his bluster, Mr. Trump generally refrained from letting himself be pinned down on any specific allegation of voter fraud. It was always ‘people tell me’ or ‘what I hear.’ So Mr. Trump perhaps did not completely throw away the possibility of digging out from under his post-election behavior, with some typically brazen piece of Trump revisionism.”
This is delusional. Trump has repeatedly made concrete claims about fraud that have been debunked. He made specific claims in his speech before the rioters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. He made specific claims when pressing authorities in Georgia to subvert the election results. He’s made specific claims in the speeches he’s given since he lost, over and over again, none of them proven. Trump can’t pivot away from his fraud claims no matter how much Jenkins wishes he would. He couldn’t even if he wanted to.
And he may not want to. See, this is where it gets scary. Right now there is an alternative reality in MAGA land, which Trump started January 6 when he incited a riot, and then it took on a life of its own, becoming an overnight industry: the Big Lie. Millions of dollars and man hours have been poured into everything from the Arizona audit to Mike Lindell’s absurd cyber symposium. The basis of the Big Lie is that the election was stolen from Trump, and just last night he sent out an email seeking to raise money off of it once again, claiming that unreturned ballots during the 2020 election were all ballots cast in his favor, to the tune of 15 million; which yes, if that were true that 15 million Trump votes were somehow “lost” then that would have made him the winner.
It’s his usual disinformation and sophistry, but people believe it and they shell out. Or, at least they have shelled out cash to this point. The Big Lie is the central plank of the Trump campaign, assuming he declares candidacy. He is not about to debunk the Big Lie, that’s all he’s got. That’s his grievance for his grievance-fueled base. In 2016 it was all “the Democrats are doing it wrong and I’ll do it perfectly.” In 2024 it will be, “the Democrats are thieves and cheaters and stole the election. Give me back what’s mine. Take back what’s yours.” You think he’s going to denounce the Big Lie on these facts?
But he clearly doesn’t want to. He was out there making new claims about fraud just this week, part of his effort to convince his supporters and himself that he didn’t actually lose in 2020 at all. If Trump runs for president in 2024, he’s running as the guy who tried to steal the election from Biden as he claimed that Biden had stolen it from him. He’s running not as he did in 2015, as an outsider to the politics game. He’s running, instead, as a representation of an anti-democratic undercurrent in right-wing politics with the support of people who’ve triggered repeated warnings from law enforcement about their willingness to use violence in defense of Trump’s claims.
Remember what happened when Trump ran in 2015 and 2016? He repeatedly encouraged his supporters both tacitly and explicitly to physically attack the demonstrators who showed up at his rallies. One study found a link between his rallies and reported assaults.
That was when he was a candidate on his way to losing the popular vote by a bigger margin than any elected president in history. In 2020, he received more votes than any prior incumbent president, as he will be the first to mention. This is in part a function of population growth, but it’s also a function of his building more energetic support during his time in office. It’s a base that’s comfortable with Trump’s dishonesty and conspiracy theories in a way it wasn’t in 2015. It’s a base whose energy manifests in large rallies at which attendees berate the media. It manifested on Jan. 6 at his rally at the White House and at the Capitol. It manifests in the response to the arrests that followed the Capitol riot and in the emerging argument that those who were arrested are the equivalent of political prisoners. Law enforcement is warning about the danger of an upcoming D.C. rally centered on those arrests.
Trump has always been as much a follower of the fringe right’s obsessions as a driver of them. He won in 2016 in part because he reflected the complaints of the far-right back at them, unbound by the political propriety of doing so. He is championed by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys in part because they see him as a vehicle for their desired outcomes, not because he inspires the outcomes they seek. His 2016 election helped the illiberal far-right establish a beachhead in traditional politics, and he spent four years expanding that. The aftermath of his loss has not seen the Republican establishment retake that terrain but, instead, a further expansion of his claims and territorial disputes over what he commanded.
This is fact. The Republican establishment has not bounced back. They have not denounced Trump as an outlier and returned to traditional conservative values. The Republican party has become the Trump party. DeSantis, Hawley, Cruz, the lot of them can’t do enough to imitate Trump’s style and pray to be the inheritor to his throne. The fringe loonies have taken over the GOP asylum and outliers like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are trying to right the boat and they’re threatened with political extinction for their efforts.
Trump may well run. And he may well declare sooner than expected, because it will put him back in the spotlight and give him a platform to tear down the Biden administration. The 2024 campaign would effectively begin the day that Trump declares.
He may do it this weekend. On a day, September 11, when other former presidents are visiting gravesites and making somber speeches, Trump is planning to be on a stage in Hollywood, Florida giving ringside coverage of a championship boxing match. He is expected to complain all night about the stolen election and he may declare his candidacy then and there.
It would be a fitting venue for him. All of MAGA of tuning in, this is their kind of a scene, and in front of his acolytes and disciples he might announce his second coming. I’m giving a 70/30 chance that that’s the way it’s going to go down. Or, he may declare at his Iowa rally October 9. That rally will either be a place for him to declare or a place to do a victory lap if he declares this weekend.
And bear in mind two points: the Big Lie is now ensconced in Republican dogma. Fox News is blasting it in the wake of the California gubernatorial recall election. Second point is that his email sending has become more frantic and more deranged of late. Some of them compare Anthony Fauci to Hitler or promise “Biblical weapons” which one reporter says sound suspiciously like home grown marijuana. It is conceivable that he’s trying to lay in as much loot as possible before he declares and the game shifts, to the money being governed by campaign finance laws.
Just saying what’s going on out there. This could be an interesting weekend. If he does declare, he’ll be back in our lives on a daily basis. And it won’t be like 2016 or even 2020. The Big Lie and the Capitol riot have put things on a totally different footing. This time it will be a war between truth and lies like we have never seen, not even close.
We’ll have a spectacle in government like we have never seen: on the one hand, Joe Biden sanely steering the ship of state and on the other the Donald Trump freak show, back for a return engagement, spewing conspiracy theory like a whale spews foam.
The only thing Trump is running for for the rest of his life is away from prosecutors, creditors and anybody else who wants him ruined or dead.
Absolutely. He’s running away from prosecution and in the meantime if he can grift donations and get some emotional juice from the crowds, that’s what he’s going to do.
I imagine in Trump’s mind, running 1. Protects him from prosecution, since he can claim persecution, 2. Offers endless donations at a moment when his financial empire is collapsing.
So yeah…this isn’t an Agatha Christie novel…not a big mystery where this is going.