Donald Trump seems to be barreling ahead with an announcement Tuesday night that he plans to run for President again. The irony is that more Democrats than Republicans will be elated because they see him as the easiest candidate to beat one more time.
Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him to hold off at least until the Dec. 6 Senate runoff in Georgia. But Mr. Trump is announcing now, long before he needs to, for two reasons. The first is to try to clear the Republican field of potential competitors, especially Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin, who have shown they can win in competitive states.
Mr. Trump also wants to get ahead of a possible Justice Department indictment. If Mr. Trump is already announced as a candidate seeking President Biden’s job, he figures he can portray an indictment by Attorney General Merrick Garland as political and rally Republicans to his side. Herschel Walker’s fate is incidental to Mr. Trump’s ambition.
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These columns believe in democracy, which means trusting the decisions of voters. Even when they make mistakes, our constitutional system allows for checks and corrections. We warned about Mr. Trump’s character in 2016, but once he was elected we covered him like any other President. We owed that to readers, and he had many policy successes: taxes and deregulation, energy security, judges, the Abraham Accords, correcting illusions about Iran, among others.
But his character flaws—narcissism, lack of self-control, abusive treatment of advisers, his puerile vendettas—interfered with that success. Before Covid he was headed for re-election. But the damage from his shutdown of the economy combined with his erratic behavior in that crisis gave Joe Biden the opening to campaign for normalcy. Mr. Trump lost a winnable election.
Had he accepted that defeat, he might now be poised for a comeback given Mr. Biden’s unpopularity. But Mr. Trump contested the outcome well past any reasonable limit and encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6. He badgered his loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, to stop the Electoral College vote count to the point where lives were in danger, including Mr. Pence’s. The deadly riot will forever stain his legacy.
Last week’s elections showed that clinging to 2020 election denial, as Mr. Trump has, is a loser’s game. Republicans who took this line to win his endorsement nearly all lost. The country showed it wants to move on, but Mr. Trump refuses—perhaps because he can’t admit to himself that he was a loser.
Mr. Trump will carry all of that baggage and more into a 2024 race. In 2016 voters took a chance on the brash outsider businessman against the unpopular Hillary Clinton. Now Americans know that the Donald Trump they saw in office is the same one they’d get for another four years. They voted in 2018 and 2020 to stop the daily turmoil. It’s hard to believe they’d vote in 2024 to do it all again.
Many Republicans who see Mr. Trump as their champion will want to take that chance. They say only he can take on a willful, increasingly radical left. But two years out of office, Mr. Trump remains more unpopular than Mr. Biden. He divides Republicans, while he is the most effective motivator of Democratic voter turnout in history.
Even if by some miracle Mr. Trump won, he would have a hard time filling an Administration with top-notch people. He could only serve one more term. Republicans would be nominating an immediate lame duck.
The problem for Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s base is so loyal that he might win the nomination in a splintered field. That’s what happened in 2016. And if Mr. Trump lost the nomination, would he even accept that result? Or would he sabotage the winner by urging his supporters to stay home, or by running as a third-party candidate? Recall that Mr. Trump refused to promise to support another GOP candidate in 2016.
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We believe in the durability of U.S. institutions, which is where we parted company with the left and many Never Trumpers who refused to accept Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory as legitimate. They didn’t trust democracy, even as they pretended to be protecting it. Instead of trusting voters, they cheered on FBI subterfuge in 2016, the Russia collusion fraud, opposition to nearly all Trump nominees, impeachment, and the Mar-a-Lago raid.
All of these did more to help than hurt Mr. Trump with his supporters. Next may come an indictment that could help him again. That is precisely what Democrats want as they hope Republicans renominate him.
The real restraint on Mr. Trump has been the voters who gave him his chance in 2016. Then they checked him by ousting a GOP House in 2018, defeated him for re-election, and last week trounced nearly all of his hand-picked candidates in swing races.
The GOP, and the country, would be best served if Mr. Trump ceded the field to the next generation of Republican leaders to compete for the nomination in 2024. If Mr. Trump insists on running, then Republican voters will have to decide if they want to nominate the man most likely to produce a GOP loss and total power for the progressive left.
The Wall Street Journal
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