Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign Will Be Insane. It Also Might Win.
President Donald J. Trump holds up his fist during farewell ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Jan. 20, 2021. This is Trump’s official goodbye after serving as the commander-in-chief for four years. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kevin M. Roy) [Public Domain]
Donald Trump is clearly running for president again. The 45th president has started to amass fundraiser dollars and speculate on his 2024 running mate. Actual developments from the Trump campaign have led to a flurry of news stories, then a similar flood of recriminations and responses from those who never want to hear anything about Trump again. But this latest firestorm belies an unfortunate reality: Trump has a good chance of becoming president once again, and it is unclear if Democrats are prepared for that possibility.
There are many reasons why Trump’s opponents are somewhat underwhelmed at the prospects of his 2024 run. Above all, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans believe that Trump’s 2024 Campaign would be a difficult prospect. In 2016, Trump was known for being popular on NBC and in New York real estate. In 2024, many Americans will remember him as the president who was impeached twice, engaged in dozens of scandals, and proved woefully inadequate in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. How could Trump run in 2024 on a record that led to a substantial defeat in 2020?
Democrats have made the mistake of underestimating their opponents’ campaigns many, many times in the past. In 1984, they did not think there was a chance that traditionally spendthrift conservatives would rally behind a president who mostly ignored the then-ballooning deficit. The 2012 election saw Barack Obama surprised at several points by Mitt Romney shamelessly fleeing from the most controversial points of Republican dogma.
That performance was repeated by Hillary Clinton and the rest of the party in 2016. They knew that Republicans believed in cutting entitlement programs and taxes for the wealthy. Therefore, they believed voters would dismiss Donald Trump’s hollow rhetoric about protecting Medicare, taxing the wealthy, and expanding social spending programs. They thought voters would see through the charade of infrastructure plans and populist appeals. On Election Day 2016, they were proven wrong.
In 2024, this pattern will recur. The United States faces a number of problems, including a stubborn pandemic, inflation, threats from China, supply chain bottlenecks, and the situation in Afghanistan. None of these problems have easy solutions. However, this reality will not stop Trump from claiming that he will solve all of them. He will argue that his policies will stop inflation. He will pledge to be “tough on China” and “get the ports working again.” He will “solve the pandemic” by either doing nothing or embracing whatever conservative meme regarding COVID-19 is popular that week.
Democrats must be prepared for Trump’s 2024 Campaign. Ignorance or outright dismissal would be disastrous. Instead, Democrats must now start to identify Republicans with their ridiculous policies and proposals and to contrast those with the Democratic solutions to the nation’s problems. Arguing that issues are complicated is good metaphysics but terrible politics.
Democrats have to argue that simply standing by and letting vaccines and shifting demand solve the nation’s problems is not good enough. A passive program will not work. The only plan that will work is implementing the Democratic platform, whether that platform is targeted regulatory changes, speeding up infrastructure funds to ports, or relaxing intellectual property regulations for vaccines. Democrats have to embrace a plan and argue for the sanctity of that plan as implemented by their chosen candidate, Joe Biden. They cannot assume that Trump’s 2024 Campaign will implode, for even if it did, Trump would still have a 50–50 chance at the presidency.
Biden ran on, primarily, “Make America Boring Again”.
The more interesting that America is, the more it benefits Trump. I mean, if you’re going to have to read tweets every day to understand what’s going on, shouldn’t at least half of them be funny?Report
😂😂😂Report
I think Trump has a better than even chance of winning.
The question of course is “What should the Democrats do to stop it?”
This is not the right question. It assumes that with some better argument, some better tactics, some superior optics and spin and messaging and sly sales pitch, some large group of people will abandon their embrace of authoritarianism and rush to support liberal democracy.
As if these people are persuadable, that their voting choices are mere whims, like choosing between a frappucino or macchiato.
All the evidence I’ve seen is the opposite, that the decision to embrace the authoritarians comes from a dark place of anger and resentment over culture and identity having nothing to do with jobs or crime or inflation.
If these people are persuadable, it would make more sense to persuade them to support liberal democracy rather than some wonkish 12 point platform.Report
Simple answer for team D is be palatable enough to enough people in the upper midwest. Stop engaging in various rationalizations of why doing so is fundamentally impossible or immoral.
I find a lot of the talk about this to be defeatism posing as realism. He lost once and can be beaten again. My contrarian take is that 2024 Trump could end up looking a lot more like 2020 Bernie. 2016 was a really weird moment for a lot of reasons but it’s over. He has a record now. He ran as a populist and instead his one lasting achievement was to cut taxes for millionaires. The wall failed to solve the illegal immigration issue. Instead of rising to the occasion with covid he beclowned himself daily in front of a national audience.
So it’s still a tough road for Democrats. They need to stop this demographics is destiny crap. Do that and play the game to win, not to cry like little b—–s about ‘white supremacy’ on twitter or democracy dying in darkness or whatever.Report
I like being aggressive and the thought that we can win is absolutely true.
But under no possible scenario will the Republicans be crushed in a landslide. They will continue to hold nearly every governorship and state legislature that they do now.
From the standpoint of raw political gamesmanship, this means that what they are doing now works. DeSantis, Abbot, Taylor-Green, Boebert- these are all winning, successful politicians. If you were a campaign consultant you would advise any Republican anywhere to emulate what these people are doing.
Obstructing whatever the Democrats propose? A successful and winning strategy.
Constantly chattering about guns and revolution and civil war? A proven vote-getter.
Race-baiting and trolling? Definitely the key to rallying the base.
After the 2012 loss, Republicans faced a choice- Moderate their message or double down.
2016 and 2020 both proved that doubling down was the key to winning.Report
Sure, the Republican party is a mess… it doesn’t have a coherent message outside of negative partisanship.
But it’s weird to say that doubling down in 2020 proved to be the key to winning as they lost the Presidency then lost two Senate Seats in Georgia that were quite literally gimme’s and practically already won.
Not to mention that Youngkin won the VA Gov. race in 2021 beating the safe pick by *not* doubling down.
I don’t have any particular confidence that the GOP will self-correct (much or at all) in the near term… but I do think that conflating the enitrety of the Right with DJT and MTG makes for a much less optimal Democratic strategy that would otherwise build on the things that are buildable.
But as I (er, others) note above, possibly Money and Status don’t align here.Report
They came within a hair’s breath of winning all three.
In terms of raw political calculus, losing by a razor thin margin means you have essentially the right strategy, just needing a few tweaks.
A Goldwater-type or Carter-esque landslide means you need to completely re-think what you’re doing.
But if I was a Republican strategist, I would definitely run the 2020 playbook. Youngkin shouldn’t be read as a rejection of Trumpism but a ratification of it- He had all the same strands of culture warring about CRT and schools and such.
And the evidence is, that’s exactly what they will do.Report
Well, he’s right about CRT and Schools… and it is DUMB and anti-popularist of the DEMS not to also be on that side as well.
That’s the point… there’s a really wide path strewn with rose petals and shade trees that either party could walk down… instead of going down that path y’all are crawling over broken glass and barbed wire and telling us it’s fine.
Calling the shady easy path the “ratification of Trumpism” is why you keep telling me its unfair that “only the Dems have agency”. Stop using the Agency like morons.Report
I don’t know what you mean by “wide path” unless what you really mean is “My personal preferences”.Report
Unfortunately for y’all that sentence works with “just about anyone’s personal preferences” other than the Dem Status Left’s.Report
You think you have me cornered but MY personal preferences are for Justice!
(looks around for approval)Report
This is pretty close to the “Popularism” discourse that was mooted by Yglesias a few months ago. It did not go over well.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/moderate-democrats-should-be-popularists
Turns out that Popular policies can often excite negative reactions from Money and Status factions.Report
I semi followed this, and I agree with the spirit of what Yglesias is saying but of course the internet turns it into this stupid zero sum, one or the other debate. IMO the real answer is understanding that politics is an art, where you have to find a way to square things not everyone can and kind of fudge across these things to win. Be willing to take risks but have a sense of the ones worth taking and the ones that aren’t.
What it isn’t is some sort of rote check these three popular boxes and you win nor is it be sufficiently on the side of the angels and God or the universe or whatever owes you victory. That’s politics by the rejection of politics and it won’t work.Report
Sure, I’d maybe redirect a little to say it isn’t or shouldn’t simply be pure rhetorical triangulation; you have to pick the popular things that you want to spend political capital on to actually deliver… then live or die by the execution/delivery.
Too much rhetoric and triangulation while delivering for small but powerful factions is what destroyed the GOP (and what stalks the Dems).Report
Agreed.Report
Republicans might take the other horn of the dilemma and stop arguing for regressive tax policy. I doubt they’d ever do this. But if they did, they’d be an electoral juggernaut that could score a lot of wins on abortion and guns and other things that seem to matter more to rank-and-file Republicans than taxes.
This is why I am so pessimistic. Most Republicans are in fact taking this very approach. Abbot, De Santis, Youngkin- they aren’t out there banging the drum for tax cuts. Sure, they will gladly sign them but they never campaign on them.
They campaign on God Guns and Moats and that’s enough to win.Report
I think that rank and file Republicans are no longer seeing corporations as their friends (for a handful of culture war reasons).
This makes it exceptionally easy to vote for the guy who doesn’t even mention the importance of lower taxes for businesses. Heck, maybe even give a listen to the guy who asks “why do corporations shoulder so little of their burden?”
And the Democrats are beginning to start calling the billionaire’s tax a “stunt”.
Huh.Report
They’re slowly groping their way towards a sort of main street over wall street/silicon valley/big business (except natural resource extraction, they’re still cool) perspective. At least rhetorically, not so much in policy.Report
It’s nationalism, mixed with socialism.Report
Are they? I think the message is really muddled. They’re still cutting taxes for the 1%, defending business owners over workers (see the anti-social distancing stuff), and not implementing ACA medicaid expansion. Nationalist, sure, albeit shallow, but a pretty funny version of socialism if that’s what we’re calling it.Report
It’s herrenvolk socialism, where the dominant ethnic group gets to control the factors of production, while the outcaste are barely tolerated spectators.
Examples are when the herrenvolk want to go maskless, the government seizes the factors of production to make it so, or when the volk want to punish transpeople every business owner must police the restrooms to ferret out anyone with noncomplying genitals.
When the volk want lower gas prices, the government springs into action, when the volk want Christmas toys delivered on time, the government is there to ensure that happens.
When the volk want cheap items, the barriers to the movement of goods are lifted; When the volk want to eliminate competition for jobs, the barriers to the movement of labor are raised.
The owners of capital and property are free to do as they please, but only within boundaries that don’t offend the sensibilities of the herrenvolk.
The herrenvolk are the Real Americans, the only rightful owners of its wealth and government.Report
I think our perceptions on this are so different I don’t really know how to respond.Report
Pretty sure a semi-competent political consultant could run a counter-ad to great effect:
When the herrenwoke want to go maskless, the government forces the production workers to wear masks.
When the Herrenwoke want lower gas prices, the government springs into action by releasing strategic reserves and touting expensive cars – let them drive Teslas.
When the Herrenwoke want Christmas toys delivered on time – wait, who doesn’t want this?
When the Herrenwoke want cheap items, the barriers to the movement of goods are lifted and human rights and ecological violations waved away by herrenwoke Sports and Cultural Icons.
When the Herrenwoke want to eliminate competition for jobs, they insist on H1B lottery barriers but lower the border barriers so they have cheap labor to fuel their dual incomes, instead of dual incomes to fuel their car.
The owners of capital and property are free to do as they please, as long as they pretend to care about the cultural issues the of Herrenwoke… cheap HR gimmicks mask the stock buy-backs.
The Herrenwoke now dominate the institutions of culture, wealth, and the federal government but play victims on TV.
Personally I’d aim that particular ad right at the Dem base. Now, you’d need a competent political party to offer an exit ramp to a new political home… so as long as the Republicans keep being Republicans the Dems are safe. But, the minute that changes? Well, you’ll know how Jennifer Rubin felt.Report
Special Bonus Edition on Taxes:
When the Herrenwoke want to spice up the Tax debate they add extra SALT.Report
I am not herrenwoke (all this sounds less like German and more like those long legged birds standing around in the wetlands) but I miss my SALT. I’d have understood giving it away for real tax reform. But as you say, the Republicans keep being Republicans, and the Democrats keep being… I don’t know the word.Report
Limiting SALT was the closest thing the GOP could find to jizya. Which also works in English.Report
Which ethnic group is this Herrenwoke?Report
The Herrenwoke are white. But the good version. The educated version. The version that pronounces all of its consonants. The version that never uses the word “ain’t”. The version that talks about “white people” derisively.Report
tired: Capital has stolen America, we need a people’s revolution to overturn the fat-cat robber barons!
wired: You know where else a bunch of angry mobs overthrew a government of knowledgeable educated persons who’d dedicated their lives to public service? That’s right…Report
It’s a good thing that we’re not suffering from inflation and a sclerotic opposition party.Report
Yeah, rhetorically there’s been a shift where corporations are not the libertarian engines of growth and personal liberation… but I’m honestly not seeing any meaningful shift in policy preferences by Republican office holders or policy makers (such as they are).
So I see something like Youngkin the Venture Capitalist talking as if Main St. matters, but not ever planning or needing to anything as if Main St. matters. Which is to say, he’s dusted off some early 80s rhetoric and will be perfectly happy to betray Main St. in exactly the same way we did in the 80s and 90s. Same playbook, same policies.
I mean, a war on HR departments and bad DEI isn’t the paradigm changing economic policies we need.Report
If the money keeps rolling in, I’m sure that legislators will have every reason to stay on the same track.
But Team Good has discovered that you can twitter mob people for donating to evil causes. And those donors have addresses.Report
A discussion we have had before.Report
My first thought was that you’re looking at this backwards. But that’s because I’m thinking in terms of the primaries, where I think Trump would be vulnerable. However, the general elections will include a lot of people who don’t think like Democrats or Republicans, or who are at least persuadable to vote either way or not at all, so it probably helps to see the election from the perspective of a Republican who didn’t vote for Trump.
“In 2024, many Americans will remember him as the president who was impeached twice, engaged in dozens of scandals, and proved woefully inadequate in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.”
You’re listing his pros and calling them cons. A lot of the things you’d call scandals, including the charges in both impeachments, don’t measure up to scandal-level for many Americans. The versions of the stories that made it into the more liberal press, maybe, but those versions were neither complete nor accurate. If you talk about the first impeachment, the subject will change to the Steele dossier, and if you talk about the second, well, just don’t, because it’ll be ugly, and also nearly every press report didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Likewise, his handling of the pandemic wasn’t as bad as you’ll want to depict it, and Biden’s probably won’t be obviously superior.
“The United States faces a number of problems, including a stubborn pandemic, inflation, threats from China, supply chain bottlenecks, and the situation in Afghanistan. None of these problems have easy solutions. However, this reality will not stop Trump from claiming that he will solve all of them.”
That’s quite a list of things that could be as reasonably laid at Biden’s feet as any of your condemnations against Trump could be laid at his. It’s very difficult to argue, for example, that no president could have been prepared for the delta variant, but Trump should be blamed for the virus in the first place.
But the key, as I see it, is that last sentence in that quote. This is where a Republican in the primaries or a Democrat in the generals could bludgeon Trump. His record isn’t all the things the Democrats don’t like, it’s all the things the Republicans, independents, and Democrats wanted to see that he didn’t get done. The Wall was never going to be supremely effective, and we can all see that the little of it that he built doesn’t accomplish anything without immigration reform. The tax cuts proved meaningless without budget reform. The woke stuff that he railed against barely slowed down during his administration, and the fights he picked, he lost. He got thrown off the social media that he failed to rein in. He got outfoxed by an old man in a basement.
Trump is a loser. He tried and failed. That’s the line that candidates can take against him. Not the policies that only one party supports, or the attitude that got as many likes as dislikes. The way to put him on the defensive is to talk about his failures.Report
He’s a criminal and a traitor. If that’s not enough to keep him out of power, God help us all.Report
Its 2021 and you’re already talking 2024.
Trump doesn’t need to run for president. He’s already living rent free in so many heads, his narcissism is more well fed than Mr. Creosote. No matter who’s in the White House, he’s already El Presidente Por Libre of all forms of media and their bored out of their minds consumers. He ran out some crappy low effort post yesterday and its already screenshotted halfway across Twitter. Left, right, or center, we just can’t get enough of him.
He won a long time ago, and everyone’s been happy with it.Report
The day after the 2020 election, one of my buds at work told me “no biggie… this was just an election to see if you wanted Trump’s two terms back-to-back or not.”
I thought that that was a funny comment but untrue. “Cope”, as the kids say.
Welp.
Maybe Harris/Buttigeig will be able to stand up to the Trumpernaut.Report
Yeah, but…hell for that man is near-constant attention from nearly everyone, especially after having had it all.Report
There was a significant lull where you didn’t hear much about Trump. If he is reelected, that won’t happen again for another four years. He likes the attention. Instead of controlling several news cycles a month, he wants all of them.Report
What would those proposals be? Few of the things they campaigned on under Trump came to fruition, because all they really wanted was another tax cut and a stacked SCOTUS. Republicans had no national party platform in 2020. And they are about to get Roe kicked back to the states, which effectively overturns it. With redistricting drawing ever more gerrymandered lines to harden existing minority rule, they don’t need counter proposals.
And yet 71 Million Americans voted for just this, believing it would keep white men in political and economic power they “deserved.”
Would that were enough. Sadly for Democrats, Republicans are all too happy to point out the great things coming to their districts and states from Democrats actions, and all the while refusing (like Jello on a nail) to be pinned down in their opposition to those things. My local Trumplican congress critter has spent days posting nothing to social media but all the benefits of the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill” that he voted against in the House.
TL:DR – you can’t shame the shameless.Report
And yet 71 Million Americans voted for just this, believing it would keep white men in political and economic power they “deserved.”
I think that seeing these votes as “voting for this” rather than “throwing the bums out” is one of the eternally recurring mistakes.
While there are always a bunch of people who vote *FOR* X, there is also a huge bunch of people who merely voted *AGAINST* Y.
I’m not saying it’s a majority and I’m not saying it’s a plurality but there does seem to be a core of partisans who do little more than vote against the other guy and a really weird bunch of swing voters who seem to just show up to throw the bums out.Report
I think there’s a lot of self-flattery that goes on with non-normie political junkies like those of us on the site. My belief is that significant numbers of people are motivated by single (or a small handful of) issues without regard to coherency of political philosophy and gut level anti-incumbency sentiment arising from things the government only has so much control over like gas prices. I used to think this was a bad thing but over time I’ve come to believe it is one of the most necessary components of our system. If we were all ideologues your divorce or war prediction would probably have already come true.Report
You’d be correct. Especially down here. Those 71 million people voted for Donald Trump because he ticked at least one major political box that they cared about, even after seeing him fumble and fail on other major important things.Report
I’d humbly suggest that this is also self-flattery, the belief that you’ve got the motivations of 71 million people all figured out, and it just so happens to conform precisely to your previously held views.Report
I just checked Wikipedia. Apparently it’s 74 million.
Anyway, the 81 million who voted for Biden probably had a bunch of motivations. Some of those voters were partisan democrats. Some of those voters were merely hardcore anti-trumpers. Some of them were motivated by the insanity of Covid. Some of them were agog at the nuttiness of 2017-2020 (and especially 2020) and just wanted things to go “back to normal”.
I’m sure I missed a dozen or so motivations.
And 2022 is just around the corner.Report
Those 74 million voters (As Jay corrects me below) were in large sub groups, many of which overlapped. There’s also been a TON of reporting on what motivated them. And i live among them – they are not hesitant to say what they based their voting on.
You also assumed in your answer that the one box he ticked was uniform across the voters in question. I said no such thing. I did say – which is correct – that they voted for him affirmatively based on him ticking at least one box they felt was important. I stand by that assertion.Report
To put it another way-
Those 74 million who were fornicating with goats were fornicating with goats for many reasons, but in the end, they were all fornicating with goats.Report
I think you are right in an eternal meta sense… every election is always about just a few things; I mean, it is metaphysically impossible to have a unified theory from Abortion to Tariffs on Soft Wood from Canada that lines up with a political party. So you vote on Abortion and get the Tariffs you deserve.
But one thing I’ve noticed over the years – and I’m not sure if it’s an internet/mass communication thing – is that the ideological stances of the party have become more uniform, without necessarily becoming more consistent.
IMO, the uniformity is driving the ideological incoherence and not to good effect.
[Insert> Marchmaine arguments in favor of voting reform to faciliate the fracturing of the duopoly]Report
You are in favor of increasing restrictions on individual autonomy, including the right to free travel within national borders (seen as penumbral to the right to protest/free association).
Roe is simply another casualty of your increasing authoritarianism.
“My Body My Choice” must die, to protect the Pandemic (So Scary!)Report
Wow. Epic trolling. Except of course it has no basis in the real world. No one is restricting the right to free travel within national borders in the US. and I want fewer permanent restrictions on individual autonomy. Overturning Roe increases permanent restrictions on autonomy.
But sure, call liberals authoritarians if it makes you feel better.Report
There are a certain number of swing voters and non-excited voters still left who can get excited by a vibrant Democratic Party running on a string of proposals that only they can enact. The issue with Democratic governance is that they pass bills that take time to come to fruition and that process is not well-suited to our 24-hour news cycle. Pretty-looking executive actions are. Biden should be focused on enacting some of those.Report
he has been where he felt they were necessary – but its not working. Take Student Laon forgiveness. Biden has issued executive orders on this, and it is resulting in some relief to some people. But you’d never know about it from the news, as the E.O. Signing got buried in other stuff that other people think is more important.
Point being that Dems have the tools. They are using the tools, but they aren’t the flashy showmen Trump is and so its not getting the media coverage he got. That’s not something the Party can overcome by themselves, no matter what tool they deploy.Report
Before trump wins, they will put a bullet in his head.
I would happily bet $1000 that Donald Trump will not win a 2024 Presidential Campaign.
Liberals must look elsewhere for a savior or bogeyman.Report
I suspect he get’s indicted for multiple things before the campaign next year. Then you have 2022-2024 for a series of trials. You don’t need to kill him to destroy him – just lock him up where no one can hear him.Report