The greatest trick The Donald ever pulled was convincing the world that he would never do the thing they most feared. In 2015, that thing was to run for president. In 2016, it was to actually win while running for president—even after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. Now, the latest thing Republicans are sure Trump would never, ever do is to run for president again after being impeached for a second time—and win.
While I’ve been advising Republicans to kick him when he’s down, Donald Trump’s political fortunes continue to benefit from the naive assumption that he’s become a harmless little fuzzball. “He’s not going to run for federal office again,” Nikki Haley predicted in a much ballyhooed Politico profile. “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture,” she continued. “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”
She’s not alone in thinking this. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said virtually the same thing to the media during the Senate impeachment trial. “After the American public sees the full story laid out here [in the impeachment trial],” she said, “I don’t see how Donald Trump could be re-elected to the presidency again.” Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me a gazillion times?
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In fairness, it should be noted that Murkowski voted to convict Trump on Saturday. But a story in The Hill also references other Republican senators who are similarly quoted (without attribution). “If winning the Republican nomination in 2024 appears increasingly remote for Trump,” The Hill’s Alexander Bolton sums up the consensus, he “may not want to risk becoming a two-time loser in presidential elections, lawmakers say.”
The point is that this is not a fringe view. And my guess is that some of Murkowski’s colleagues made the same rationalization in order to justify voting to acquit on Saturday—if they think he’s not running, they see no point in alienating base voters by convicting someone who is, after all, a private citizen. But the notion that impeaching (but not convicting) Trump would deter him from seeking a second term is, like second marriages, based on “the triumph of hope over experience.”
Trump could win another Republican nomination for the same reason that 43 of 50 Republican Senators were afraid to convict him: Republican voters love what he’s selling! Likewise, Trump knows that once you win the nomination, it’s a binary choice, and all bets are off. There is precedent for this sort of comeback. Maybe he could be the next Grover Cleveland.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the Haleys and Murkowskis of the world are correct—that Trump will lose trying to win the nomination or ultimately decide not to even seek it. That still means Trump would likely freeze the 2024 field for years, preventing the rise of new, pseudo-independent leaders. During that time, Trump’s lingering as a viable candidate would also prevent Republicans from breaking up and moving on from him. He’s the ultimate narcissistic, abusive partner of the GOP.
What will stop Trump from using the next two-and-a-half years to gain the buzz, adulation, and money by being a possible candidate? Do you think his loyalty and reverence for the Republican Party will do it? His love for America? Forget doing the right thing, this is exactly why self-preservation alone should have led ambitious Republicans to vanquish him when they had the chance.
By the way, if they had taken my advice and done so in January 2020, then Mike Pence would have been running as the incumbent president, and probably with fewer dead Americans and a less-wrecked economy, because Pence would have acted more responsibly when the pandemic was declared.
Republicans have made this same miscalculation for five years now. When will they learn from their mistakes? Remember how Ted Cruz buddied up to “Donald” all through the fall of 2015, calling him “terrific” and providing him cover? Trump even called it “a bit of a romance.” This was all based on the assumption that Trump would drop out, eventually, and that Cruz would inherit Trump’s voters. “I don’t believe Donald Trump is gonna be the nominee, I don’t believe he’s gonna be our president,” Cruz said in November 2015.
Yet, it’s reasonable to conclude that Trump would never have won the Republican nomination without this naive assumption. Right after defeating Trump in Iowa, Cruz’s team specifically went out of their way to help Trump win New Hampshire—specifically to hurt Marco Rubio and John Kasich. Cruz first enabled Trump because he thought he could exploit him. Later, after briefly putting up a fight, he enabled Trump because he feared him.
Since 2016, many other unthinkable things have transpired. Firing James Comey was an early example. Committing impeachable acts for a second time (after Susan Collins speculated he had learned “a pretty big lesson” from the first one) was a more recent example. Even more recent: the notion that Trump’s post-election rhetoric would stoke violence (“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?”, a GOP official asked when Trump refused to accept the results of an election). These faulty assumptions, as always, are guiding the (in)actions of Republicans.
Since they can’t stand up to him, they rationalize that Trump will either be checked out of concern for his reputation or reigned in by sane voices or advisers. Surely someone else (maybe the Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor?) will do the hard work of stopping him, and Trump will lose and slink away with his tail between his legs. But this never happens. Republicans assume that if they ignore Trump, he will go away. He won’t. And they will never learn.
I hate to contribute to the influx of martial rhetoric, but I think it’s appropriate here. In general, American politics is not war, and our adversaries are not our enemies. But Republicans don’t realize that this is not a game. This is a fight for survival. In a schoolyard fight, you pull punches and shake hands later. But the battle against Trump is a street fight for survival. This is something that Marco Rubio might find out if Ivanka primaries and defeats him in Florida.
Trump is a political arsonist. Having knocked him down and hobbled him, you can’t let him reanimate and get back up like a horror flick monster. Instead of listening to the moderate voices of civility and decorum, Republicans would be better off following the advice of sensei John Kreese of the Cobra-Kai dojo: “I want him OUT OF COMMISSION.” “Sweep the leg.” “No mercy!”
With acquittal, Republicans missed their best chance to keep Trump from tormenting them indefinitely. Going forward, they should support a 9/11-style commission to discover even more details on what happened on 1/6—including what Trump was doing during the insurrection. With more evidence presumably impacting public opinion, Republicans should then muster the courage to support censuring Trump and invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868, and aimed at former Confederates) to bar Trump from ever again holding public office. That is what they should do, which, of course, means they won’t.
