Republican turbulence may revive lacklustre Donald Trump

The former president has some catching up to do when he steps on stage in South Carolina on Saturday.

Experts say Donald Trump trails Ron DeSantis in polls while others believe he isn’t committed to another run at the presidency.

For weeks Donald Trump has occupied a peripheral role in US politics as attention has focused on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, and Republican infighting in congress. Next weekend, he will be back, hoping that his first political appearance of the year will jumpstart his presidential campaign.

Mr Trump, 76, is the only realistic contender for the White House to have declared, but with just over 12 months before Republican voters begin choosing their candidate, the ex-president has some catching up to do when he steps on stage in South Carolina on Saturday.

Midterm elections in November were a disaster for Mr Trump. He promoted candidates for the Senate and various governorships based largely on their loyalty to his false claim that he was cheated out of victory in the 2020 election. Almost all of them lost and Mr Trump was blamed by many in the party for costing it control of the Senate. His most likely Republican rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 44, romped to a second term by a landslide.

Days later, Mr Trump announced his decision to run for president again but failed to follow up with anything resembling a campaign. He soon found himself trailing Mr DeSantis in the polls by as much as 23 percentage points. Last month, the January 6 committee investigating the storming of the Capitol two years ago recommended Mr Trump be charged with assisting an insurrection. This month his Trump Organisation was fined $US1.6m for tax fraud. Yet there remain shrewd observers who see a path to the nomination, and even the White House.

“Most of the voters are still with him, even if party officials, donors and some right-wing media people don’t want him,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who quit the party over Mr Trump.

Mr Trump is expected to go hard at the President’s stockpile of classified documents following the raid on his Mar-a-Lago property.

FiveThirtyEight, a polling data website, says that in a contest between Mr DeSantis and Mr Trump: “A simple average of head-to-head national polls taken since the midterms puts DeSantis at 48 per cent and Trump at 43. But in national polling questions that included DeSantis, Trump and at least one other candidate, Trump has an average lead of 41 per cent to 31 per cent.”

Some question whether the former president is truly committed to another run. “There’s no sign he’s actually serious,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, a foreign policy magazine, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. “The only thing that could rescue him is a repeat of 2016, when we had a scrum of Republican candidates and Mr Trump can hive enough of the vote off.”

The two big dramas of the year have played out to Mr Trump’s advantage. The battle among Republicans to elect a House of Representatives speaker ended with Mr Trump’s candidate, Kevin McCarthy, holding the gavel. Then it emerged that classified government documents had been found in Mr Biden’s private home and in an office he had used. A much larger haul discovered at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump’s residence in Florida, was already being investigated. Now the attorney-general has appointed a special counsel to look into the Mr Biden papers, as he had for Mr Trump, taking the heat out of the latter case.

The next looming crisis could help Mr Trump more. Trump loyalists in the house appear intent on blocking an increase in the US debt ceiling. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has warned the US could default on repayments by the summer. The economic impact of that on ordinary Americans would be disastrous, feeding grievances that Mr Trump has proved adept at exploiting. “If the country were to crash . . . then all bets are off,” said Heilbrunn. “What he needs is chaos.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES