It’s Time To Accept That Trump is Irrelevant
Editor’s Note: This article was written in April 2023
With Trump’s recent criminal indictment making him unique from his predecessors in yet another way, the former president has once again been in the headlines of every news company in the nation. Both his most loyal fans and hostile critics are eager to find out whether he’ll finally face the consequences that Democrats have been warning him about for seven years. No matter what happens, I’m having a hard time getting invested. I’m tired of how needlessly Trump becomes the topic of every conversation, especially now, when he no longer has an official role in our government, and when there are so many reasons to believe that he’ll never come back into office.
If this sounds counterintuitive, it’s because so many people are in denial… especially journalists. The primary incentive for the mainstream media to bring up Trump at every opportunity is that doing so is highly profitable. The Washington Post demonstrated this by overhauling their brand after the 2016 election, making “Democracy Dies In Darkness” their official slogan. This approach was very successful at the time, but over the past two years they’ve learned that what goes up must come down. Since Trump left office, The Washington Post has lost half a million subscribers. Similarly, CNN and MSNBC’s ratings have plummeted staggering amounts in the same timeframe until the Mar-a-Lago raid last summer, during which they saw a spike (which, of course, gave them an excuse to talk about Trump again). This all points to the unsurprising conclusion that companies with business models built around spreading the message about the danger of Trump are struggling to enjoy the same economic prosperity now that Biden has entered the White House. For the sake of their income, journalists need you to believe that Trump is a legitimate threat who warrants our attention.
The second incentive for the media is that giving free publicity to Trump undermines his rival, Ron DeSantis, who many believe stands a better chance at winning the 2024 general election. I’ll come back to what makes DeSantis a stronger general candidate later, but for now the bottom line is that his reputation explains why some figures on the left (such as The Young Turks) have been so eager to claim that DeSantis has no chance of winning the nomination. It also leads us to the other group pushing the same narrative as the mainstream media: Democrats.
Those associated with the Democratic Party seem to be the second most vocal crowd insisting that it makes sense to talk endlessly about Trump. Ask anyone with a past of voting blue whether they think Biden should run again. The answer is almost universally “I don’t know whether he should, but I don’t know who else could win.” Maybe you’ll also hear an unconfident list of names that you associate with unsuccessful campaigns from the past: “Buttigieg? Harris?” At some point, they might complain about how many former options are now too old to consider. It’s no secret that, for one reason or another, the Democratic Party is suffering a problematic shortage of well-known candidates who aren’t hated by the American public. Some Democrats have found a cynical Band-Aid solution to this dilemma — forcing voters to choose between them and the most unhinged representatives of the Republican Party that your nearest insane asylum has to offer. Case in point, the 2022 midterms.
After looking at last year’s lineup of Trump-endorsed lunatics running for office, including Oregon’s Jo Rae Perkins (a QAnon fanatic), Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano (an advocate for ending the separation of church and state), Washington’s Joe Kent (who has connections with the Proud Boys and multiple neo-Nazis) and, of course, Georgia’s unforgettable Herschel “I don’t wanna be a vampire no more, I wanna be a werewolf” Walker, you likely wonder how these nutcases could have possibly ended up on the ballot. The answer, or at least part of it, is bleak: Democrats spent an estimated $19 million to $53 million pushing the campaigns of far-right candidates. Presumably, some Democrats decided it would be easier to make supporting their opposition unthinkable than to make themselves more palatable. This enabled the “democracy is on the ballot” narrative that propelled even the most embarrassingly unready Democratic candidates like John Fetterman to success because of this approach, no matter how painfully unqualified or unwatchable the Democrats were, Pennsylvania voters had no other alternative. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that I doubt the party will make a noteworthy change in strategy in 2024. I don’t expect the Democratic platform to improve what it has to offer between now and the next election. With that in mind, many believe that Trump offers a unique opportunity — he’s a figure so undesirable to independent voters that nominating him might actually make it possible for Biden to win. Among other examples, this sentiment was recently expressed on The View by Joy Behar, an openly liberal host of the talk show: “Trump is the one who needs to get the nomination, because then the Democrats will win.”
This takes us back to why so many think that Ron DeSantis has more potential than Trump. The two represent practically identical policy positions, making their character a more relevant factor than it would be for comparisons between other candidates. With this in mind, Trump is losing what made him appealing to many voters before 2020: being seen as a winner. In recent years, he was defeated in a presidential election as an incumbent, he was deplatformed from Twitter, he had his home raided by the FBI, he watched countless of his hand-picked candidates get their teeth kicked in during the 2022 midterms, and he faced the first indictment of any former president in U.S. history. It would be a hard sell to claim that Trump can still market himself as a winner, but his challenges go beyond this.
Without considering any arguable merit of his policies, Trump’s qualifications as a candidate have always been weakened by his lack of experience in government and his reputation as a bad role model (a reputation he earned by selling $100 narcissistic NFTs, having affairs, attending Epstein’s pedophile island, and more). This inherently makes DeSantis more desirable to conservatives who liked what Trump did as president, but not what he said. Add an unprecedented debacle of election-fraud conspiracy and the riot on January 6th into the equation, and Republicans end up with a very compelling argument to jump ship from Trump to DeSantis. Democrats and the mainstream media recognize this, which is why they would much rather suppress the right-wing candidate who would be far less divisive among potential supporters.
Outside the fringes of Trump’s most fanatical advocates — the ones who didn’t care about politics until Trump entered the picture and will stand by him until his death — there is no longer a reason for conservatives to go along with all of his drawbacks. Regardless of the damage that this reality will do to the paychecks of journalists or the optimism of progressives, it would be shortsighted of conventional Republicans to make Trump their nominee. If conservatives pay even the slightest attention to what’s going on, the Trump movement is over, and continuing to portray him as a viable candidate is a waste of time.
Before wrapping up, I’d like to explain why I’m so confident that Trump’s ongoing campaign will fizzle out, and also acknowledge some common responses from those who are skeptical of this argument. A Trump victory would mainly surprise me because of the Republican Party’s extensive failure in the recent midterms despite absurd crime rates and soaring inflation. Every single one of the Trump-promoted candidates I mentioned earlier lost in 2022, meaning that his contribution to the campaigns heavily sabotaged the “red wave” that everyone thought was inevitable.
Next, a counterpoint that I want to address is the vast amount of polling data indicating that Trump currently seems to have widespread support among the GOP. I’m unconvinced for several reasons. To start, primary elections, and the campaigns leading up to them, tend to misrepresent fringe candidates as having more momentum than they really do. This is because the most loyal and partisan supporters are ideologically committed enough to vote in primary elections more often than independents, maintaining the illusion that mainstream candidates are weak. Additionally, while “candidates who appeal more to independents” generally refers to moderate candidates, in this case it also includes anyone who isn’t named Trump, whose base of supporters has increasingly dissociated from so-called establishment Republicans. This is why, regardless of whether DeSantis is more moderate than Trump, I still expect him to gain traction once the support from independent voters becomes more important. Lastly, we need to keep in mind that DeSantis still hasn’t formally announced that he’ll run. In contrast, Trump made the announcement for his campaign abnormally early. This has given Trump a head start in perceived popularity which I expect to evaporate once he has to officially compete with legitimate opposition.
The final response that I want to bring up is the fact that countless public figures claimed Trump would never beat Clinton, and they were dead wrong. For the sake of fairness, if Trump is elected again in 2024, fine, you can laugh at my arrogance for expecting a different outcome. That said, I’m not declaring that it’s impossible for him to win either the primary or the general election. This is only speculation, and the polls in 2016 and 2022 should be more than enough of a reminder that it’s impossible to predict election results with certainty. I’m only arguing that I think Trump’s odds are very low, and that if he manages to succeed I’ll be shocked.
Alex Lee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu