“You’re fired!” That was the message from the American electorate to former president Donald Trump. If Trump this week announces a further run for the presidency in 2024, it is as much a manoeuvre in his forthcoming legal battles as a real shot at the presidency.
But his candidacy will guarantee ugly conflict within the Republican Party and greatly handicap its chances at the presidency in 2024. Of course, it’s possible Trump could win. Anything’s possible. But his record now as a gifted election loser and destroyer of Republican chances is prodigious.
These midterm election results were a staggering defeat for the Republicans. They had the best environment the party could imagine – a deeply unpopular and frequently verbally incompetent president presiding over the worst inflation in four decades, a Democratic Party that had in many places gone to the very limits of woke insanity, and the vast majority of Americans convinced the nation was on “the wrong track” – yet still the Democrats achieved one of the best results ever for a governing party in a midterm election.
The Democrats so far have won one seat in the Senate and lost none. The Georgia Senate seat goes to a run-off in December with the Democrat ahead on the first ballot but below 50 per cent. In state governorships, the Democrats made net gains though the final tally is not quite clear yet.
The Democrats also made gains in state legislatures. And in the House of Representatives, Democrats will lose fewer than 10 seats net. The Republicans will probably just squeeze out a house majority of about three, though it’s still possible Democrats could retain control of the house.
All this is down to the baleful influence of Trump. Until the midterms, Trump certainly held sway over the core Republican activists who vote in their party’s primaries. Moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats hate him. Trump used his influence to get candidates up who swore fealty to him and his bizarre, almost lunatic assertion that he actually won the 2020 presidential election.
Trump himself doesn’t believe this nonsense as there is strong testimony from his inner circle that his first reaction to his defeat was despondency before he settled on the tactic of the Big Lie. His daughter Ivanka Trump doesn’t believe it. His last attorney-general, William Barr, who battled ferociously to implement every sensible bit of Trump’s agenda, looked at it closely and decided it was complete nonsense. For it to be true, whole battalions of Republican election officials in pro-Trump Republican-controlled states would have had to be part of a giant anti-Trump conspiracy.
Trump, and the Republicans generally, are against postal voting and early voting. That means most of their supporters vote on election day. As a result you get big Republican numbers on election day which are whittled away over time as postal votes are counted. Historically, something similar used to happen in Australian elections when postal votes were cast mostly by those affluent enough to be away on holidays. In the old days these were mostly Coalition votes. No one thought the reversal of an election-night lead through the progressive counting of postal votes indicated election fraud. Trump uses this admittedly awkward interval to foment paranoia and conspiracy.
But the Big Lie has served Trump well in some ways. It feeds his narcissism, keeps him at the centre of the story and allows him to impose an almost insane litmus test on aspiring Republican politicians. They either go along with the stolen election rubbish or he declares war on them and blights their careers.
Some Republicans resist Trump heroically (and increasingly successfully), some go along with his preposterous claims as quietly as possible but campaign on real issues, while some embrace him fully. In this election, the most identifiably Trumpist Republicans got creamed in what should have been a massive Republican victory. The Republicans most independent of Trump won handsome victories.
Thus in New Hampshire the visible Trumpist Don Bolduc lost his Senate race by 12 per cent whereas the Republican Chris Sununu won the governorship by 16 points. In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the former football star with a shocking personal history and no political experience, exactly the kind of candidate Trump loves, is trailing the Democrat in the Senate race by a per cent, while the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who explicitly repudiates Trump’s election lies, won by 8 per cent. Mehmet Oz, another Trump-acolyte celebrity candidate, lost a formerly Republican Senate seat in Pennsylvania, to an especially weak Democrat candidate.
The closer they were to Trump, the bigger they lost. Doug Mastriano, Trump’s endorsed governor candidate in Pennsylvania, participated in the January 6 demonstrations in Washington, has spoken at QAnon-related events and embraces every speck of Trump’s deranged universe. He was absolutely hammered, losing by 15 per cent in a state Republicans must win.
Sarah Palin, once a strong majority governor in Alaska, having embraced the Trump worldview barely registered a quarter of the vote in her bid to make a comeback as an Alaskan member of congress.
Trump was always a despicable person, but despite that he did some very good things in politics and in his presidency. He showed that Republicans must go after working-class votes, and that they should fight harder. As president, he called out the reality of contemporary China earlier and more clearly than any national leader. He cut taxes and regulation, promoted energy self-sufficiency, backed Israel in the Middle East, and increased the defence budget, all good things.
But he had no overall coherent program, he lied constantly, and the accounts of his White House from senior people who joined his administration as admirers determined to implement, not frustrate, his agenda – men such as William Barr, Mark Esper and John Bolton – are truly terrifying. Worse, Trump’s conduct since losing the election was infinitely more irresponsible and destructive than anything he did in office.
He has now lost a string of elections for the Republicans. He won the narrowest victory in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by three million. He suffered huge losses in the 2018 midterms. He was soundly thrashed by a near senile Joe Biden in 2020. Hundreds of thousands of Americans voted for Biden for president and Republicans in the congress in that election. And now Trump has cost Republicans victory in the 2022 midterms.
Democrats dream of running against Trump in 2024. Republicans who concentrated on issues rather than conspiracies, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, won big midterm victories. DeSantis is now ahead of Trump as Republicans’ preferred presidential candidate, so naturally Trump is insulting and defaming him.
Trump saved the Democrats. Biden hopes more than anything he’ll do it again in 2024.
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