On Tuesday night, Donald Trump emerged as the winner of New Hampshire’s Republican primary and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, handily defeating Nikki Haley. He is the first non-incumbent Republican to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina’s contest is next month and those that follow are formalities on the road to coronation.
The Republican party belongs to him. “It has to be Trump as long as … he can fog a mirror,” Steve Bannon told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Haley has pledged to remain in the race, but the fall campaign has begun. As the polls closed in New Hampshire, the Biden White House announced a campaign shake-up. This is not a well-oiled machine.
For the third time, Trump is his party’s standard bearer. Maybe this run will be a charm, so to speak. Maybe for the first time he will garner a plurality, if not outright majority, of the popular vote, a feat that has previously eluded him.
By those metrics, Hillary Clinton bested him in 2016 and Joe Biden did the same four years later. To put a point on it, no non-incumbent Republican since George HW Bush in 1988 has garnered that level of national support. Rather, like George W Bush in 2000, Trump owes his initial win to the mechanics of the electoral college.
Election day 2024, however, may be different. The Democrats had best be prepared for that possibility and for the day after. At the moment, Biden lags Trump in trial heats. Among independents, the president trails by as many as 10 points. Beyond that, Biden, 81, exudes frailty. His speeches are dull affairs, often more closely watched for signs of infirmity, as opposed to policy.
His mantra of democracy being on the line in 2024 is true. Yet it repeatedly falls flat. In too many instances, he discounts prevailing public sentiment. Popularism, the notion that politicians ought to follow the polls and do what’s electorally expedient, is honored more often than not in the breach. Triangulation, as mastered by Bill Clinton, is a thing of the past.
To illustrate, Biden continues to double down on porous borders, poking a stick in the eye of public opinion. His win on Monday before the supreme court on Texas and its razor-wire barriers may eventually prove politically self-injurious. The justice department may have scored a victory for federal supremacy and executive power at the expense of Biden’s own standing.
Beyond that, no Republican sits in the cabinet, breaking a tradition upheld by re-election-minded Democrats. Barack Obama placed Republicans Robert Gates at the Pentagon and Ray LaHood, a former Illinois congressman, at transportation. Appointing Arizona’s Cindy McCain, wife of the late Republican nominee and Trump nemesis, and Jeff Flake, a former Arizona senator, as ambassadors doesn’t quite make the cut. Out of country, out of mind.
In case Biden needs further reminding, he didn’t win in a landslide. Obama’s vice-president never was and never will be the second coming of FDR, much as he attempts to convince himself that he is “transformative”.
Meanwhile, Trump praises authoritarians. He vows to act as a dictator on day one, at least for a few hours anyway. Take him seriously on that and wonder if he means it literally or not.
What dictator can push himself away from the table of dictatorship after just one day? Just before the New Hampshire voting, he mused about 12 more years in office and let the word “fascist” slip from his tongue.
America ought to be frightened, but less than a majority actually fears the prospect of Trump as American Caesar. The rest is open to arguments that Biden is over his head and that Kamala Harris should have starred in Veep, the HBO sitcom, rather than be a heartbeat from the Oval Office.
Trump is the strongman his base yearned for. Back in 2016, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, made it explicit: “We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country.” So much for 1776, the declaration of independence and the US constitution.
As in Iowa, Haley’s candidacy served as a magnet for high-end suburbanites, a constituency whose clout diminishes daily within the Republican party. Looking back, she never had a chance.
Haley mulled cuts to social security and raising the age for retirement. These days, Americans live medically challenged lives. Chronic illness supplants death on life’s back nine. Her pitch might have been designed for her donors, and there are too few of them to matter.
Under Trump, the party of Lincoln has been transformed into a mixed martial arts octagon. The ex-president channels his core supporters’ resentments better than anyone. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship. Gladiator, the Oscar-winning Ridley Scott film about Commodus, the debauched and unhinged Roman emperor, remains the movie for our time.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
