After the Midterms

Apparently, even Trump has a half-life. We are looking ahead to a slow, ugly decay.

The rollercoaster ride after Trump's improbable victory in 2016 mostly distracted the attention from an important sequence of events. Elections. He has made every single one of them about himself and he has lost every single one as well. The 2018 midterms elections, the 2020 presidential elections (making Trump the first president in the last 30 years to be kicked out after one term, plus the first president after 1932 to lose the presidency, the House, and the Senate), 2021 Georgia Senate run-off (again costing the Republicans the Senate), and finally (so far) the 2022 midterms. In the latter, almost all of his crackpot endorsees were wiped off, making the midterms a practical Democratic victory.

I - and most other people - were wrong on Trump's prospects at least twice already. I didn't think it possible he would win in 2016, and I thought we saw the last of him after January 6, 2021. Yet he always managed to come back on top, even without his Twitter pulpit. Will he do it again?

I think not. In 2016, he eked out a narrow victory on the back of the American's craving for entertainment and rode that wave until only recently. Even after leaving the White House he could keep up the show with the incompetent coup attempt and beating the drums on the stolen election. The Republicans were in gridlock. Trump doesn't seem to be a winner anymore, but he is still the darling of enough of their voter base. 

But the midterms came, and his candidates lost the race and the Republicans lost the belief that Trump has a more special and closer relation to their voters than themselves.

There is blood in the water. Mike Pence, the most sycophant of Trump trustees (although to his credit, he refused to break the law for the dear leader), openly said that he hopes in 2024 there will be better candidates, and he didn't close out the option to be one of them. Mike Pompeo, Trump's Secretary of State, considers running himself and made disparaging remarks about former leaders whining about the past. And when even Ted Cruz seems to be hedging his bets, Trump must see that things are not going his way.

So when Trump announced his candidacy again, he did it in a very different world than the one of 2016. He is no longer the shiny new thing, he is not even much of an entertainer. He can keep repeating the stolen election mantra, but he can soon find it to be a lonely tune and a boring one. When his fellow election-denier nutjobs lost their elections, apart from Kari Lake, they just shut up and left. J.D. Vance, who won, forgot to name Trump among the 37 people he thanked after the event. Very suddenly, it just doesn't seem chic anymore.

Yet, the Republicans are still in the same gridlock. If Trump gets the nomination, they are probably sailing for another defeat in 2024. If they deny it from him, he could wreck the party in vengeance. In an era, where the voter base is so calcified that elections are decided by a percentage point or even a fraction of it, Trump can destroy the GOP's chances for at least another term by creating a new party, or just by continuing to promote the crazies.

On the top, and perhaps not independently, of that are Trump's mounting legal problems. US Attorney General Merrick Garland just named a special counsel to weigh charges against Trump over the classified documents found in Mar-a-Lago. Garland is not a partisan hack. This step against a former president and present candidate is unprecedented. Also is the hope from Trump's own party for Garland to succeed and rid them of this problem.

Just to counterbalance the above observations, let it be said that Trump has survived legal problems and political challenges, and mind-bogglingly even a failed coup. We might get surprised again. The Republicans are both stupid and coward enough to stick to him and Biden could be foolish enough to try to run again, at 82.