By Bret Stephens
In November 2022, after the Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterms, I wrote a column titled “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.” I keep a printed copy on my desk as a humbling reminder of how wrong I can be.
How did Trump go from a disgraced has-been — even Fox News’ Laura Ingraham implied he was putting his “own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country” — to the man of destiny he had become even before he dodged that bullet Saturday?
A simple explanation goes something like this: The GOP ceased to be a normal political party in 2016 and became a cult of personality, less interested in winning elections than in burnishing the savior-victim myth of its charismatic leader. As a cult, the party could never realistically allow any other Republican to successfully challenge Trump for the nomination. And as a nominee, Trump would only gain strength once the extent of President Joe Biden’s mental decline became obvious.
But this analysis, true to a point, falls short in at least three respects. It doesn’t give Trump the political credit he deserves. It fails to reckon with the Biden administration’s political blunders. And it reduces the Democrats’ problem to a Biden problem. Their problem is bigger than that.
First, Trump. Just as Barack Obama knew that he stood for hope, Trump knows that he stands for defiance. Defiance of what, or whom? Of the gatekeepers to cultural respectability in today’s America. And who, in the minds of Trump supporters, are they?
They are the reporters who said it was a “conspiracy theory” to suggest COVID emerged from a Chinese lab. Or the academic deans who insist every job applicant write diversity, equity and inclusion statements and refuse to hire those who criticize them. Or the do-gooders who charge that Americans who want better control of the southern border are motivated by racism. Or the pundits who say, as one NBC contributor put it in 2016, that “100% of Trump voters are deplorable.” Or the journalists who claimed that “inflation is good for you.”
There is nobody in America whom the gatekeepers hate more than Trump. Ergo, there is nobody in America whom the haters of the gatekeepers love more than Trump. In his every beyond-the-pale, can-you-believe-he-said-that utterance, he signals his contempt for liberal pieties, his willingness to take the left’s slings and arrows, his willingness to be hated.
In MAGA world, all this translates into a picture of strength and a form of incorruptibility. Whatever else Trump stands for, he’s the sort of man who won’t be seduced into wanting to be loved by anyone.
Then there were Biden’s political blunders. One is obvious: He betrayed his implicit promise to be a one-term, transitional president. Had he stuck to it, he would have been spared the humiliation of last month’s debate, and Democrats would not be the dispirited and divided party that they are today.
But Biden’s bigger blunder was the betrayal of his promise, made in his inaugural address, to end “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” In September 2022, he delivered a blistering speech against “MAGA Republicans” whom he accused of threatening “the very foundations of our Republic.” But did he mean the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — or those who were “MAGA Republicans” mainly by virtue of voting for Trump?
It wasn’t clear. A speech that should have distinguished the two wound up conflating them. It cast tens of millions of Americans as if they were enemies of democracy itself.
More foolish was the effort of Democrats to try to “defend democracy” by seeking to kick Trump’s name off ballots — a fine instance of destroying the village in order to save it — while pursuing Trump in court. Whatever the respective merits of the many cases against him, the bald effort to embarrass, paralyze and ultimately criminalize a political opponent smacked, to millions of Americans, as a much graver danger to democracy than, say, whether hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels constituted a campaign finance violation.
“If his name was not Donald Trump, and if he wasn’t running for president — I’m the former AG in New York; I’m telling you that case would’ve never been brought,” Andrew Cuomo told Bill Maher last month. “And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be. Because if there’s anything left, it’s belief in the justice system.”
Finally, the Democratic Party itself, which keeps insisting it’s morning in America when poll after poll shows a country that thinks it’s darkness at noon. On the eve of the pandemic in 2020, 45% of Americans were satisfied with the way things were going, according to Gallup, the highest percentage in 15 years. Now it’s 21%. That gap alone explains why Trump looks to be on his way to victory.
It’s a fact of politics that the demagogue’s success rests less in outright lying than it does in speaking in half-truths. So long as Democrats persist in seeing nothing of Trump but his lies and outrages, they’ll miss what makes him strong. And so long as they fail to recognize their own mistakes, they may be unable to avoid the real disaster coming their way.
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