One of the favorite parlor games of Beltway journalism is to divine the actual sentiments of the political ruling class that contradict their public positions. Since Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015 and conquered the GOP, he has been the frequent subject of such inquiries. Would Republicans be better off winning elections with Trump, who trashed so many shibboleths of Ronald Reagan conservatism and regularly embarrassed them with his crude antics? Or in the long run would they prefer he lose so they could go back to promoting free trade, entitlement reform, and forever wars while the MAGA hordes retreat into nonpolitical vices and social-media rabbit holes?
Politico’s Jonathan Martin explored this question again this week. He found that, off the record, many Republicans saw advantages for themselves in Kamala Harris taking office in January, and presiding over a potentially gridlocked Washington, D.C.:
For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole. …
The broader question among Republicans: Would it be best to endure a Harris presidency to keep Trump out of power, likely for good? Or is the better way to hasten his departure from the scene for him to win so that he could only serve one more term and be done for certain in 2028?
The trouble with secretly hoping Trump loses in order to dispose of him as leader of the GOP, of course, is that this silver lining did not appear following his 2020 defeat, even after a failed insurrection and despite the availability of 12 opponents challenging him for the 2024 nomination. Can anyone be sure a twice-defeated Trump will go away? Apparently not, Martin reports: “Should he lose this year, he [might] once again insist he was cheated and hold out the possibility of a fourth consecutive bid, prolonging the party’s capture.”
Yes, in 2028 Trump would be 82, the same age that proved fatal to Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection bid. But the 45th president has never held himself to anyone else’s standards. More to the point, J.D. Vance appears to be doing poorly in his audition as heir apparent to Trump. Does anyone imagine it would take a lot of effort to convince the former president he remains the “only one who can save the country,” as he likes to say? Becoming the only politician other than Franklin D. Roosevelt to win four presidential nominations would probably appeal to his singular sense of himself. Yes, FDR never lost, but in the minds of Trump and his devoted followers, neither has he.
The possibility of Trump ‘28 would help answer a nagging question about his current campaign. As election-law expert Rick Hasen recently explained, the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 appears to have closed off all the stratagems (notably fake electors or a coup by the vice-president and/or state legislatures) undertaken by Team Trump in its attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat. Yet he and his allies are devoting enormous resources to efforts to cast doubt on the 2024 results and to slow down their certification at every level of government. Short of an outright violent revolution to overthrow the federal government, it’s unclear there’s any positive endgame for Trump — unless the whole point is to extend his grievances into the next presidential-election cycle.
No wonder the headline of Martin’s piece is “If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big.” Given the vast scope of Trump’s perpetual claims about Democratic voter fraud (he has emphatically revived his bizarre and unsupported 2016 charge that millions of noncitizens can and would vote) and election fraud (he’s been arguing for months that the 2024 election has already been rigged via legal actions against him and also by the replacement of Biden with Harris in a “coup”), it’s unclear what sort of unlikely Harris landslide would be necessary to send him off to permanent Loserville. An awful lot of Republican politicians have already been burned once by urging Trump to concede in 2020 and then deploring his conduct on January 6; nearly all of them have come crawling back into his tent. Is there any chance they’ll toss him out of the party if he predictably renews his election denial in November? No.
The Republicans Martin talked to who want to get rid of the old demagogue but don’t have the courage to do anything about it probably lost their best chance to be rid of Trump when they failed to unite behind a viable 2024 GOP challenger. Or perhaps they never had a chance at all, and will just have to wait him out for the foreseeable future. If so, they have richly earned their discomfort, if only because they shared it with us all.
