With Trump’s recent indictment making him unique from his predecessors in yet another
way, the former president has once again been in the headlines from 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, and saw
a spike during the Mar-a-Lago raid last summer (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 word about the danger of Trump are
struggling to enjoy the same 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 candidate later, but
for now the bottom line is that this 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
nominee. It also leads us to the next group pushing the same narrative as the
mainstream media: Democrats.
Those overtly 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 bandaid-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 wondered 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
of them 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 – because of this approach, no matter how painfully unqualified or
unwatchable the Dems were, voters had no other alternative. I don’t think it’s too harsh
to say that I doubt the party will make a noteworthy change in strategy by 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 he might actually make it
possible for Biden to win. Among other examples, 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, one problem for 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 hand-picked candidates get their teeth
kicked in during the 2022 midterms, and he faced the first indictment of any former
president in US history. It would be a hard sell to claim that Trump can still market
himself as a winner. His challenges go beyond this, though.
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 radical 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
brought up 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/partisan supporters are ideologically committed
enough to vote in primary elections more often than Independents, leaving 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.
Finally, the second 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 studied in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu.
This article was originally published as part of the 38.3 WashU & St. Louis issue in spring 2023.