In Donald Trump’s quest to maintain his dominance over the Republican Party, his claim of being robbed of victory in 2020 has been a crucial talisman, granting him powers denied to previously defeated presidential candidates. By insisting he had been cheated for victory, Trump made himself a king-in-exile rather than a loser—an Arthur betrayed by the Mordreds of his own party, waiting in the Avalon of Mar-a-Lago to its prophesied yield.
However, as with many forms of dark Trumpian brilliance, the former president is not exactly in control of this strategy. He had calculated intuitively rather than his way to its effectiveness, and he seems too invested in its central conceit – the absolute justice of his “Stop the Steal” campaign – to modulate when it begins to reap diminishing returns.
That’s a big part of why 2022 wasn’t a particularly good year for Trump’s 2024 ambitions. In 2021 he has manipulated important parts of the GOP, but in recent months his powers have diminished – and for the same reason, his story of expropriation, that they were so strong at first.
While Ron DeSantis, his strongest potential rival, throws himself into almost every issue Republican primary voters care about, Trump has marinated in grievances, narrowed his inner circle and continued to harass Republican officials about undoing the last election. While DeSantis sells himself as the scourge of liberalism, the former president mostly sells himself as the scourge of Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.
Judging by early primary polls, the DeSantis strategy is working at the expense of the Trump strategy. The governor is effectively linked with the former president in recent polls by New Hampshire and Michiganand lead him in easily Florida – which is DeSantis’ home state, yes, but now Trump’s as well.
These early numbers do not prove that Trump can be defeated. But they strongly suggest that if his case is before 2024… nothing but that he was robbed in 2020, it will not be enough to achieve a restoration.
This isn’t because the majority of Republicans changed their minds by the Jan. 6 committee, or suddenly decided that Joe Biden won fairly. But the commission has likely played a part in bleeding Trump’s power, holding him into the 2020 election and its aftermath, giving him one more reason to be obsessed with enemies and traitors, and his more lukewarm Republican supporters a constant reminder of where the Trump experience ended.
By lukewarm supporters, I mean those Republicans who would be inclined to answer no if a pollster asked them whether the 2020 election had been won fairly, but who would also dismiss the conceit — like a majority of Republicans in a Quinnipiac Survey earlier this year — that Mike Pence could have legitimately done what Trump wanted on January 6.
That’s a crucial distinction, because in my experience as well as in public polls, there are many conservatives who maintain the general feeling that Biden’s victory was unfair without being committed to John Eastman’s cockroach plans to force a constitutional crisis. Similarly, there are many conservatives who generally sympathize with the January 6 protests, believing that they were essentially peaceful and that all the riots were the work of FBI factories or outside agitators – which is misleading, but still quite different from actively wishing for a mob-led coup.
So as far as Trump is stuck suing his own outrageous behavior before and during the riots, a rival like DeSantis doesn’t need the lukewarm Trump supporter to believe everything the Jan. 6 commission reports. He just needs that supporter to view January 6 as a disgrace and Trump’s behavior worthless — while presenting himself as the candidate who can own the libraries but also turn the page.
A counter-argument, put forward Friday by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chaitis that as long as those lukewarm supporters still believe the 2020 election was unfair, Trump will have a trump card over any rival — because if you believe it was stolen, “you are perfectly rational to select a candidate who will commit the crime.” will recognize and do everything possible to prevent a recurrence.”
But it seems equally possible for the lukewarm supporter to decide that if Trump’s response to being robbed was to first just let it happen and then ask his vice president to wave a wand on his behalf, he might not be the right one. man is to next time on the Democratic machine.
There is more than one way, in other words, for Republican voters to decide the former president is a loser. The story of the stolen election has protected him from the simplest consequences of his defeat. But it does not prevent the stench of failure from rising from his worn grievances, his wails of disappointment and lamentation.