Stop Wish Casting: Trump Is Going to Cruise to the 2024 GOP Nomination
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The Murdoch media empire is mocking him. Former donors are abandoning him. Establishment Republicans and even former allies are denouncing him. Some state primary polls are no longer favoring him. And yet, despite the avalanche of attacks, Donald Trump remains the overwhelming favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination. He’s also, as he has been since the day he reluctantly left the White House, at worst the second-most likely person in all these United States to be president in 2025.
Ever since Trump exited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2021 — after denying he lost the election and fomenting an insurrection to overturn the results of it — a certain type of political commentator wanted to wish cast this reality away. They would refer to him as “the former guy” on Twitter, as if refusing to mention his name would force him into obscurity. They cheered every legal issue that arose, believing that finally Trump would get the justice he so long deserved. Then came the 2022 midterm elections, when many of the candidates Trump supported — particularly those who echoed his false but ego self-soothing claims about the 2020 election — lost. Finally, Trump will be seen by everyone as the loser he is, they Mastodon-ed.
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But outside of a sudden health issue — not an impossibility for an obese man approaching 80 — it is very hard to paint a picture of how Trump does not win the Republican nomination. Even if you can faintly sketch it, it is nearly impossible to do so without depicting it tanking the chances of the GOP winning the White House in 2024.
The truth is, as Trump’s political orbit has been saying to anyone who will listen, when Trump entered the Republican presidential primary in 2015, he was ruthlessly mocked by the Murdoch media empire, almost no major donors supported him, establishment Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near him, and he was not yet up in the GOP primary polls.
He’s in a far better position today than he was then. Unlike in 2015, there is tape of many of those Republicans and commentators now denouncing him as a “loser” praising him in near religious terms for the “great” job he did as President. The one guy who some state polls supposedly show him losing to — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — put out perhaps the single most humiliating ad in campaign history. When running for the Florida GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2018, DeSantis used his wife and children to tie himself to Trump by salivating over him, even going as far to dress his newborn child in a “Make America Great Again” onesie. Forget creating new campaign ads, Trump will just play that one on loop.
In 2015, Trump may have instinctively suspected that the spine of the Republican Party was as solid as jelly and, that as much as it protested his takeover, it would ultimately cave to him once he won the GOP nomination. Now he knows it for sure. Remember all those donors who funded anti-Trump SuperPACs in the GOP primary in 2015 denouncing Trump in the harshest of terms? Pretty much all of them came around to Trump in the end, with the son of one even becoming a deputy cabinet secretary. Remember all GOP senators who said that Trump wasn’t fit to be president? All of them, nearly to a person, ultimately bent at least one knee.
As for the Murdoch media empire, Trump didn’t need it to win in 2015. Just as the New York Post mocks Trump now, so did it mock Trump in 2015. While Trump longs for the days of Roger Ailes at Fox News, Fox News is arguably a much friendlier place for him now, with a primetime line-up that has Laura Ingraham as opposed to Megyn Kelly. Many critics of Trump in 2015 on Fox News ultimately became fanboys, presumably in order to maintain their status, and the most prominent of those who didn’t seemed to have gotten purged by Fox News, particularly after the 2020 election.
Perhaps most crucially, Trump has leverage. I don’t think even his harshest critics would doubt Trump’s sincerity if he threatened to abandon the party if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. Pretty much every major election Trump has lost he claimed was rigged — from the Iowa Caucuses in 2016 to the 2020 presidential election — so who in the world believes he would admit defeat and rally his faithful behind Ron DeSantis if, somehow, he lost the GOP primary to him? Trump doesn’t believe his brand can admit defeat. He would rather save face by claiming DeSantis rigged the election, even at the expense of tanking the GOP’s 2024 presidential chances. Everyone knows this.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who admits he was wrong like many pundits predicting Trump’s demise before, says he is confident in his prediction of political demise this time. Among the reasons he cites is that Trump is “finally being abandoned by many of his usually unflagging apologists and enablers in right-wing media,” citing some criticisms, not repudiations, from several usually Trump-supporting political commentators. For one, some of the commentators he cites were once vehement critics of Trump who only got on board the Trump Train when Trump won the GOP nomination. But that’s not the key point. The key point is the grand poobahs in right wing punditocracy don’t matter! Early Trump supporters Ann Coulter and for a time even Steve Bannon abandoned Trump during his presidency, and no one in Trump’s base seemed to notice, much less care. If Victor Davis Hanson abandons Trump in 2024, I assure you very few people voting for Trump in the GOP primary will care. I also assure you he will come around very quickly when it becomes clear Trump is going to win.
Watching all these pundits say Trump is toast feels like Groundhog Day. As an original Never Trumper who covered Trump’s rise and watched people I respected bend a knee to Trump in order to maintain their relevance within GOP or media circles, I sincerely hope it is true this time, but it almost certainly is not. Trump will very likely win the 2024 Republican nomination with much more ease than he won the 2016 GOP nomination — and then he will be within a recession of winning the White House in 2025. I think that’s an awful prospect for the health of our liberal democratic system, but it does us no good to wish-cast reality away.
Jamie Weinstein is host of The Jamie Weinstein Show podcast and Founding Partner of JMW Productions and JMW Strategies.
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