Five reasons why Donald Trump is doomed

Donald Trump’s self-belief may be unwavering, but he’ll never be president again. This is why his third tilt for the White House is guaranteed to fail.

COMMENT

In the opening scenes of Gladiator the General Maximus’s legate says of the Germanic barbarians: “People should know when they are conquered.”

To this, Maximus replies simply: “Would you Quintus? Would I?”

Two millennia later another Germanic rebel has declared war on the modern Rome that is Washington D.C. And just like his ancestors, he doesn’t know that his war is already lost.

There is something almost reassuring about Donald Trump’s nuclear-proof self-belief. In a world that is currently so crazy and unpredictable – largely because he made it so – it is one of the few things that hasn’t changed.

But his resistance to reality is just as futile as his forbears’. Even if he wins the Republican nomination for president, there is no chance he can win the big race. Here are five reasons why.

One: Trump’s biggest weapon is, well, bigness. He is a war machine based on shock and awe, but having already fought two presidential campaigns and injected the phenomenon of Trumpism into American politics, he is a victim of his own success.

Donald Trump no longer has the shock value that helped catapult him to the White House in 2016. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

In short, Trump is no longer shocking nor awesome. His campaign launch was larger than life but that is what we have come to expect. He made the same claims he has been making for the past two years, many of them true, many others ludicrous, all of them familiar. Trump’s essential appeal was the shock of the new. Now he and it are old.

This feeds into the second problem he faces, which is the element of surprise. In 2016 everyone underestimated Trump, most especially his Democratic opponents. They were dismissive and complacent and they paid the price.

In 2020 the party machine and all its various allied anti-Trump forces made no such mistake. They threw everything at him and won, even with a somnambulant semi-hermitic candidate.

In the midterms last week they did so again. The Democrats were ready. If Trumpist Republicans couldn’t generate a landslide against Joe Biden and the equally addled John Fetterman, then there is no way they’ll be able to generate enough oomph in two years’ time.

In 2024, Trump needs his supporters to support him in an electoral process he previously convinced them was corrupt. Picture: Giorgio Viera/AFP

This brings us to the third factor, which is momentum. In politics – especially US politics – momentum is everything. Thanks to the lacklustre midterm result, Trump has none. If the much-vaunted Red Wave had materialised, Trump could surf it to victory, but he is now merely paddling in circles on the still lake of his most loyal supporters.

The fourth problem is Trump himself. The truth is in 2020 there were two candidates in the presidential race and neither of them was Biden. It was Trump vs anyone but Trump. While Trump commands a massive personal following that would be the envy of any populist politician, it was not as big as the vast coalition of voters who were opposed to him.

In other words it was not a contest between who liked Trump vs who liked Biden – which Trump would have easily won – but a contest between who liked Trump and who didn’t like Trump, which is a contest he cannot win.

And this brings us to the last barrier, which is perhaps as close to poetic justice as politics can deliver.

Even for many diehard supporters, Trump completely trashed his reputation and credibility when he denied the 2020 election result, made all sorts of crazy claims about vote-rigging and stolen ballots, and implicitly encouraged the Capitol riots.

Even many of Trump’s former supporters deserted him after the fallout of his last election loss. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

He could have pointed to the fact that on sheer force of personality he had commanded the second highest number of votes for a presidential candidate in history while Biden relied on everyone from moderate Republicans to radical socialists. But like the Germans in Gladiator, Trump could not accept defeat as a reality.

The result of this was that he had to declare the electoral system corrupt and that is a pretty big problem when you need your supporters to participate in the electoral system.

Again, we saw this in the midterms where Democrats demolished the Republicans in mail-in ballots because Trump was telling Republicans they could not be trusted.

And so Trump’s message to his supporters and would-be supporters is essentially: The voting system is untrustworthy and rigged against you but I want you to take part in it anyway so you can vote for me.

That is like telling a football team: Look, you’re going to lose because the ref’s been paid off but I want you to go out there and play your heart out.

I am no Trump hater – in fact I thank him for righteously exposing the failure of the new left to speak to working-class people – but I am a democracy lover. And by undermining democracy, Trump has fatally undermined himself.

It is too much to hope that Trump has learned his lesson from this. The only question is if the left has learned theirs.