Why I Was Wrong About Trump
Last April, I wrote an article titled “It’s Time to Accept That Trump is Irrelevant.” Given the current state of the primaries, it speaks for itself why that spectacularly wrong prediction is so laughable in highsight (for those who disagreed with me all along, this is your time to be smug). While I was clearly off with my expectation that Trump’s momentum would deteriorate over the course of the race, it’s interesting to look at why specifically my assessment was incorrect. As the primaries have progressed, and Trump has ignored all other Republican candidates, I’ve realized that I severely overestimated how much his supporters value electability and policy positions.
The crux of my argument last spring was that Republicans would catch on to the unique obstacles that Trump would need to overcome to win a second term, and they would then decide to get behind someone else who was making similar promises but had a better chance of winning: “If conservatives pay even the slightest attention to what’s going on, the Trump movement is over,” I said. In hindsight, I can see that I didn’t put nearly enough emphasis on the “if” in that claim. I still stand behind my reasoning that if Republicans were voting rationally in this primary, they would have moved on to a candidate who isn’t held back by legal expenses and unmatched resentment from Independents. Evidently, I failed to recognize the extent to which Trumpism is a cult.
His fanatical loyalty from his supporters has allowed Trump to brute-force his way past several candidates who don’t infuriate anywhere near as much of the country
That choice of words is only partially obnoxious hyperbole — CBS polled Trump voters on their trust of various sources, asking whether they “feel what they tell you is true.” The results included 71% answering “yes” for Trump, in contrast to 42% for religious leaders. On its own, such a statistic already makes “cult-like” feel like an unsettlingly appropriate description for this movement, and this impression is only reinforced when you consider that Trump’s campaign released an ad saying that “God looked down on His planned paradise and said ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” As unbelievable as this is, no, unfortunately I’m not making any of it up. Trump’s percentage in the CBS poll was also higher than those for “friends and family” or “conservative media figures.” This fanatical loyalty from his supporters has allowed Trump to brute-force his way past several candidates who don’t infuriate anywhere near as much of the country (namely DeSantis, Haley, and Christie).
This raises the question of what will come from a candidate having such an absurdly tight stranglehold on the hearts of his followers. So far, this means that his base has excused and overlooked a long list of news that would be considered problems if they applied to any other candidate. Trump supporters don’t seem to care that Trump and the candidates associated with him have underperformed or lost in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general, the 2022 midterms, and the 2023/2024 special elections. They’re unworried by the idea of Trump facing a candidate who already beat him at a time when he benefited from incumbency, a campaign budget unscathed by legal expenses, and a population of independents who were not yet sickened by January 6th. They’re unmotivated by the fact that, before Nikki Haley dropped out, every single mainstream poll showed her winning the general election by a wider margin than Trump. Similarly, while they’d picked up the habit of labeling her a supposed Democrat and a RINO (Republican-in-name-only), they ignored the number of ways that she aligns with right-wing ideals more than Trump: according to Politico, “she’s running as a conservative. Trump’s running as a populist.”
The list goes beyond the discussion of whether Trump can make it past the finish line. The loyalty of his base also stretches far enough for him to hijack the primary by acting as though he’s entitled to a second term. The first and most obvious example of this is when he simply denied losing the 2020 election and continued doubling down on this narrative to this day. The second example is Trump’s threat to run as a third-party candidate if he isn’t nominated by the GOP (which, in other words, means that if the majority of Republicans wanted someone else, he would override their preferences as a kamikaze spoiler-candidate and keep Biden in office by splitting the conservative vote). Third is when he decided that convincing anyone else to join his side was unnecessary and refused to show up to the Republican debates, insisting that no other candidate deserves consideration (and, of course, his supporters were not embarrassed that Trump was too afraid to face his opposition). The fourth is when, as in the 2016 election, he made himself the only candidate in the race who didn’t promise to endorse the frontrunner should he lose the primary.
Not only do Trump’s fans tolerate these problems, but they’re still enthusiastic about supporting him. A distinct demonstration of this reality was Haley’s embarrassing defeat to “None Of These Candidates” in the Nevada primary. Another reminder of it has been ongoing for almost a year: look at the comment section of any social media post from any of the Republican candidates before they dropped out (particularly Nikki Haley). You’ll find endless pro-Trump spam, proclaiming that they’ll vote for him, insisting that he’ll win, parroting the superficial ad-hominems he’s smeared his opposition with, and demanding that his opposition drops out of the race. Many of these accounts bear all the classic red flags of bots (no followers, created recently, lacking a full name, anonymous profile picture, etc.), but some of them are real people who feel compelled to go out of their way to harass Trump’s rivals at every step of their campaigns.
The takeaway from all of this is that, somehow, Trump has created a base that is willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for him. Looking back, I probably should have seen this coming. After all, eight years have passed since Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” While I’m inclined to think that someone claiming to be a patriot would face disapproval after mocking Nikki Haley’s husband for serving in the military, this problem didn’t present itself years ago when he called veterans “suckers and losers.” Similarly, I would expect religious conservatives to take issue with Trump literally referring to himself as a divine figure in the aforementioned ad, but in previous elections these same self-proclaimed traditional moralists had no trouble shrugging off Trump’s affair with a pornstar. My prediction about DeSantis was wrong because I underestimated how much Trump could continue to push boundaries without consequence, and while the list of reasons to support someone else has grown, what we’re seeing is not fundamentally different from the last eight years. In a sense, this unconditional commitment to Trump is just more of the same from his supporters.
Without exaggeration, he won’t stop running, and his followers won’t stop supporting him, unless he dies from a heart attack
So, where does that leave us? The cult-like passion from Trump’s base allowed his campaign to steamroll through the primaries. Without exaggeration, he won’t stop running, and his followers won’t stop supporting him, unless he dies from a heart attack (at which point we would hear endless conspiracies claiming that he was assassinated and likely see riots break out). Because his supporters will stand by him even if he’s put behind bars or is somehow denied the Republican nomination, I’m not convinced there’s any possible outcome where he’s still alive but isn’t on the ballot in November. As someone with absolutely zero medical expertise, I would say that the odds of Trump dropping dead before the general election are unsubstantial (despite his old age and poor physical shape). This means that, maddeningly, there is actually reason to discuss the likelihood that he can win against Biden.
The natural question after this realization is whether he can win in 2024. Even in my ridiculously outdated article last April, I acknowledged that no one can know the answer with any kind of certainty, not when so much can change between now and November. I’ve already had one swing and a miss, but there’s no fun in not guessing how the election will go, so I might as well throw out another prediction: it will most likely be a coin toss. There are plenty of reasons to think that Trump will lose the crucial swing states — Democrats have outperformed virtually every expectation since the overturning of Roe, independents have detested every headline involving Trump’s name after 2020 (most notably January 6th and the legal battles), many independents have said they would be unwilling to vote for a candidate who was convicted, and Trump no longer has an incumbent advantage.
At the same time, Biden has disappointed an almost unbelievable number of voters who were willing to support him in 2020 under the assumption that his presidency would be less of a disaster than what we’ve endured for the last 3 years. I won’t even try to unpack the list of how Biden has destroyed the enthusiasm that once existed among his base, but it’s difficult to rally behind a leader who simply cannot be trusted to step in front of a microphone (or traverse a flight of stairs) without humiliating himself. Now that his incompetence has been on full display, there should be little surprise that Trump is polling higher than in 2020, but before Trump’s fans get too excited, let’s remember that polling for the 2022 midterms projected a “red wave” that never came. All things considered, it looks like a close race that I’m not looking forward to.
Alex Lee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu