DETROIT – There’s little doubt that if Republicans were going to pick their next presidential nominee now, they would choose Donald J. Trump. “The party is his. It doesn’t belong to anyone else,” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said last month.
That may be the least controversial thing the flamboyant Georgia Republican has ever said. But what if three years from now, Donald Trump is no longer on the scene as a political force?
What if he is so diminished that he doesn’t even run – or runs and loses the early primaries, and is forced to drop out?
But could that possibly happen?
That may not seem likely, now. But in politics, three years is an eternity. Flash back to March, 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson had just won one of the biggest landslides in history, and had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. Richard Nixon was seen as a sullen and discredited two-time loser who couldn’t even get elected governor of his home state. Yet three years later, LBJ was so unpopular he dropped out after the New Hampshire primary.
Nixon went on to win the election. Nor is that story unique. After President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for insubordination, the general spoke to a joint session of Congress and got a standing ovation. He was openly touted as a Republican candidate for President in 1952, and went on a nationwide speaking tour. But after a while, the crowds got smaller and smaller. People got weary of MacArthur’s arrogance.
The general went to the Republican National Convention expecting he would be chosen, but got only 10 votes out of 1,207. The nomination went instead to a man who had once been his lowly aide, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and that ended MacArthur’s political career.
Trump is different, however; he is the leader of millions of Americans so passionate they often seem like a cult. He is undoubtedly the single most popular Republican in the country.
But he has never been able to attract a majority of American voters, winning just over 46 percent in both his elections. Karl Rove, the GOP kingmaker who helped mastermind President George W. Bush’s winning 2000 campaign, is sharply critical.
In a notable piece in the Wall Street Journal on March 3, Rove reviewed the former president’s much-ballyhooed performance at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting – and found it sadly wanting. “There was no forward-looking agenda, simply a recitation of his greatest hits. People like fresh material.”
Andy Warhol once did say that we would all get 15 minutes of fame. But when time’s up, it can be brutal.
There were also hints of cracks in Trump support from a straw poll taken at the Feb. 28 meeting. True, 97 percent of those attending gave him a positive rating. But only 55 percent said they would support his nomination in 2024, a warning sign.
That was the case, even though we have as yet no clue who other than Trump may vie for the nomination. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis? South Carolina’s Nikki Haley?)
What’s likely, however, is new stars will emerge, perhaps after the 2022 midterm elections. Trump’s real popularity among other Republican leaders, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is far less than it is with the GOP public at large.
They clearly believe that Trump’s antics cost his party both U.S. Senate seats — and crucial control of that body — in the Georgia runoff elections January 5, and don’t want him back.
And when it comes to a possible Trump 2024 candidacy, there are several big elephants in the room. Chief among them: His legal troubles. Trump faces a long list of both criminal investigations and civil lawsuits, and now that he has left the White House, he no longer is immune from federal prosecution.
Most worrisome for him may be the criminal investigation in Atlanta over whether he illegally attempted to get the Georgia secretary of state to commit election fraud, and one in Manhattan over whether he paid hush money to women and illegally manipulated the value of his assets for tax and loan reasons.
Meanwhile, the New York attorney general is investigating some of the same behavior from the standpoint of civil law, and there are other similar legal matters in the wings.
It is hard to imagine Donald Trump being able to wage a successful presidential campaign if he is still tied up in court, stripped of his assets or even, in a worst-case scenario, convicted of a crime.
There’s also the question of the former president’s physical fitness. He would be nearly a year older during the next campaign than the man he mocked as “senile Joe” was in 2020 – and unlike President Biden, Trump is heavily overweight.
All that said, however, Trump still may be a formidable force, at least so far as winning the Republican nomination is concerned. As they say, you “can’t beat someone with no one,” and there are, as of now, no other national figures in his party with personalities as strong, compelling or unforgettable.
In the words of the cliché, only time will tell. But history is against him. Know who has been the only president who was defeated and then reelected four years later?
It was Grover Cleveland, in 1892. And unlike Donald Trump, he won the popular vote every time he ran.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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