He is running! In the least surprising news of the year, a low-energy Donald Trump announced that he is running for president again last night. The speech itself was also predictable, hitting the traditional authoritarian and nativist favorites. We heard about the “invasion” at the border and “radical Democrats” in the White House, all spiced up with the usual combination of self-complimenting anecdotes and self-serving lies that we have come to expect from the former president.
What was much more interesting was the almost complete absence of prominent Republicans in Mar-a-Lago and even the lukewarm interest of the US media. At various channels, journalists were “analyzing” Trump’s run while the former president was giving his speech on mute in the background. Even Fox News’s Sean Hannity cut into the speech after a little over half an hour.
How the mighty have fallen. Just a few months ago, it was received wisdom that the Republican nomination was his for the taking. After Tuesday’s uninspiring announcement, none of his competitors will feel intimidated. In fact, already before the announcement, Mike Pompeo, secretary of state under Trump, said the announcement would not change his own decision to run. Taking a clear swipe at his former boss, he said: “We need leaders that are looking forward, not staring in the rear-view mirror claiming victimhood.” Similar sentiments were expressed by other prominent Republicans, such as the South Dakota senator John Thune.
These responses are very much in line with the dominant Republican narrative on the midterm elections, ie that they were lost because of Trump. Calls for a “post-Trump” Republican party have come from all sides of the party and rightwing media system for days now. For the moment, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is the favorite to bring the Grand Old Party back to “normal”. To be clear, this “normal” party is both Trumpian and post-Trump, because most Republicans, both the politicians and the voters, agree with Mike Simpson, Republican representative from Idaho, who said: “I think his policies were good. I just don’t need all the drama with it.”
The question is, however, can anyone beat Trump in the primaries? It is true that the star of the former president was already waning among the Republican faithful before the midterms. Just under half of Republican primary voters (48%) said they would support Trump in the 2024 primaries. And while DeSantis’s star was already rising before the midterms, he was still only at half of Trump’s support level (26%). Since then, anti-Trump conservative groups have been flooding the media with new polls that show that DeSantis has already overtaken Trump as the new favorite.
As Florida governor, DeSantis has tried to stay out of the hair of his state’s most famous, and quick-tempered, inhabitant. Although he has picked up largely the same issues, his claim to fame as a culture warrior is more based on state policies than national speeches. As a local politician, DeSantis did not pose a threat to Trump’s ambitions. But as a competitor for the 2024 Republican nomination, this will change and, knowing Trump, he will go all out. In fact, he has already started using a nickname, “Ron De-Sanctimonious”, and both he and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, have made thinly veiled threats.
The key problem of the Republican party is that Trump does not care about “his” party. He does not even really care about being president again. Trump must run to stay out of jail. That is why all the media speculation about whether he has announced too early is silly. The former president is facing an onslaught of legal cases, on a broad variety of issues – mishandling of classified documents, insurrection, and tax fraud – for which he needs a lot of money and political coverage. As a mere citizen, even as a former president, he holds much less leverage than as a primary candidate, who may not be able to win the presidency for the Republican party but is probably still strong enough to lose it for them.
It is paradoxical that the midterms, in which he didn’t run, did to Trump what the 2020 presidential elections, which he lost, could not do: make him into the one thing he despises the most: a loser. And although his ideas live on in the Republican party, he himself has been deemed toxic by that same party. This is particularly ironic, as Trump himself was never interested in the ideas, just in himself.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia
