Some people like to compare Donald Trump to some sort of hero who doesn’t conform to the dominant social norms, a kind of heroic anti-hero commonly found in movies and generals who are constantly running afoul of their superiors and the media, but are necessary to set things right. Think of John Wayne’s Ethan in “The Searchers”, Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane in “High Noon”, Yul Brynner’s band of lovable rogues in “The Magnificent Seven”. Think of Patton, MacArthur, Matthew Ridgeway, William T. Sherman in uniform. Truth be told, Trump is no Ethan, or any of the others. More accurately, “populist charmer” works better, or maybe “demagogue”, and certainly not a “genius”, political or otherwise.
The characterization of Trump as the admirable renegade was used by Victor Davis Hanson to explain Trump’s appeal and his usefulness (see the Hanson video below). It’s an awkward description. The distinctive factor that separates history’s successful outsiders from the man of Mar-a-Lago is the former’s uncanny genius for success, and Trump’s lack of it. Trump won in 2016 not due to any unique insight but to a highly unusual set of circumstances that can only be described as a black swan event. A constellation of factors came together that hasn’t happened since. Trump has failed to repeat his success, having floundered in 2018, 2020, 2022, with prospects not any better for 2024.
The reason is simple. He’s been the center of attention for the past seven years and is too well-known, and repugnantly so. He’s no longer the fresh face that many people were going to take a chance on, as they did in 2016. The 2016 Trump was the new kid on the block facing a notoriously infamous one. Even with that advantage, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and could have fallen short in the Electoral College if 107,000 votes in three states had gone the other way. After that, it has been downhill for Trump. That’s hardly the genius of Patton.
It’ll be more misery if the 2022 midterms prove to be prophetic. Ferreting out the easy Republican victories and those with universal GOP support, and focusing only on the hotly contested races, Trump endorsees were either lackluster or dismal failures. Their poor performance is more than old news because it’s nonetheless real. From Georgia to Arizona to Pennsylvania to eastern Washington State, across the country, Trump monotonously helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This guy is no Matthew Ridgeway stabilizing the lines in Korea after the longest retreat in American military history, recapturing Seoul, and promising more than the one million Communist Chinese casualties that he and his men already inflicted on them. Trump is no Patton who could engineer the dash across France after the Normandy breakout and turn on a dime to rescue Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, Trump is channeling William Travis at the Alamo.
Already, 2023 polling in dribs and drabs points to a looming GOP disaster in 2024 if Trump headlines the Republican ticket. A massive poll in April of this year shows Trump to be a loser to Biden and DeSantis a winner (see below). Yet, Trump registers a 20+ point lead over DeSantis among Republicans while at the same time Trump remains slightly more repellant in his high unfavorables than Biden to the general electorate. A Nevada poll puts DeSantis ahead of Biden in the state and Trump a loser (see below). Wait for the gauntlet of legal troubles that the Democrats have in store for Trump, of course delayed till after he secures the nomination for maximum effect. Trump will smell worse than the remains of yesterday’s fish catch in a warm garbage can.
Clearly, an unflattering image has crystallized about Trump, one that has turned the reliably Republican suburbs into fertile grounds for Democrat votes. Whoever he attracts is more than offset by the numbers who run away. Plus, the Democrats won’t be caught again with their pants down. They have rejiggered voting laws to the advantage of their base’s massive cohorts of the apathetic with the wild expansion of lazy mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and blocking voter ID and efforts to clean up registration rolls of the dead and moved. What could go wrong? Lots, and none of it to the advantage of Republicans and Trump.
All Trump has to offer is the same stale act: juvenile insults, narcissism, patronizing platitudes, bragging, and bluster. The bragging centers around accomplishments that were impossible without the canniness of others, like the much-abused Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Trump benefitted from a brief two-year period of unitary GOP control of the elective branches. The economy took off after job-destroying regulations were repealed in a series of Congressional Review Act vetoes in the Ryan/McConnell-led Congress. What Republican wouldn’t greenlight pipelines and expand energy leases on federal lands during the era of the fracking technological revolution? The tax cuts were not Trump’s ideas but were germinating in the Republican congressional caucus for years. Ditto for the judges. The nominees were originalists, the official judicial philosophy of the party, whose prospects would be fruitless without McConnell’s procedural smarts. If you’re a Trumper, please leave room in your praise for Ryan, McConnell, and the Republican “establishment”.
If not, it’s another sign of blinkered cultic behavior that joins the Left’s climate cult ruining livelihoods and the neo-Marxism clan of the woke. Yes, they’re often called tribes, with the Trumpkins becoming just another one as obvious as the Yankton Sioux on the Missouri bluffs encountered by Lewis and Clark in 1804. If not treated very gingerly, a calamity will ensue. Better yet, try to reroute around them, or convince them of the wisdom of abandoning their daft ghost-dancing shaman.
RogerG
Watch and read more here:
* Victor Davis Hanson’s mention of Trump as the useful renegade: “George S. Patton: American Ajax”, Victor Davis Hanson at Hillsdale College, 2/13/2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsC-buIkSE
* An April polling assessment in FiveThirtyEight: “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, May 4, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/
* The Nevada poll: “DeSantis leads Trump in Nevada, GOP poll says”, Jessica Hill, Las Vegas Journal-Review, April 24, 2023, at https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/desantis-leads-trump-in-nevada-gop-poll-says-2767010/