Even
Losing May Not Stop Trump’s Campaign of Vengeance
But on
the eve of another razor-thin election, it sure beats the alternative.
November
4, 2024
Barely more than a week ago, it seemed as though the
Washington political class and their big-money counterparts in New York had all
but written off Kamala Harris, on the basis of what, exactly, I
was never sure, given the essentially unmoving polls and the absence of any
notable events that might have changed large numbers of minds. Nate Silver’s
prediction model had Donald Trump with a lead from mid-October
through the end of the month; on October 24th, the Democratic super PAC Future Forward privately
projected that Harris’s probability of winning was down to just thirty-seven
per cent, according to the Washington Post, before it claimed to
see a late shift in her direction in recent days. The point is: forget the
noise. Amid all this, it seems best to heed the adage of Jim Messina, the
Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reëlection campaign:
“Don’t pay attention to Washington conventional wisdom, Wall Street
conventional wisdom, or Nate Silver.”
This is especially the case given the
stakes—2024 is nothing like a repeat of Obama versus Mitt Romney. America would
be lucky to have that kind of sane choice. Instead, it is Trump’s possible
return to the White House that looms when the polls open on Tuesday morning. In
such a situation, it strikes me as almost irresponsible to succumb to the
undeniably positive rumblings that have tentatively begun to emerge from
Trump’s opponents, no matter how seductive or psychologically soothing we may
find the photos of empty seats at the ex-President’s latest campaign rallies.
(The lead headline on the Drudge Report as I’m writing this: “Last Days of the
Don?”) In truth, we are all survivors of 2016; the shock of Trump’s victory
over Hillary Clinton casts a long shadow over any predictions today about a
woman on the brink of winning the American Presidency.
At a minimum, it just seems like a
poor strategy of self-care, with so many indicators of a dead-heat race, to
read too much certainty into the increasing number of political observers
predicting that—the margin of error and Silver be damned—Harris is on track for
a historic victory. If that is, in fact, what happens, great—let’s make sure to
give those predictors due credit. I’m thinking of you, James Carville, Matthew Dowd, Paul Glastris, Mark McKinnon, and all those #BlueWave tweeters
who got on the bandwagon before the past twenty-four hours. If Harris wins
Iowa, the legend of Ann Selzer will justifiably be burnished by the decision to publish, on Saturday night, a
shocking and unexpected poll for the Des Moines Register giving
Harris a three-point lead in the state, which Trump has won twice by large
margins. In the meantime, it’s probably best to consider the survey a highly
pleasant outlier rather than proof that the senior women of the Midwest are
about to deal a crippling blow to Trump’s frat-party-from-hell of a campaign.
Republicans, with their congenitally
overconfident candidate and an entire political operation premised on telling
the Republican electorate that Trump’s defeat is literally impossible, have a
different problem. How do you prepare your team for a loss that, in a dead
heat, has a real chance of happening? (Whether the G.O.P., the party of literal
election denialism for the past four years, is willing to acknowledge such a
defeat is another matter entirely—one that may well consume the seventy-six
days between now and the January 20th Inauguration of a new President, but that
is not a today problem.) For months, Trump has said variations of “Harris
cannot win. It is impossible.” So, it was treated as news on Monday morning
when Axios obtained an internal memo from one of
the Trump campaign’s managers, Susie Wiles, using phrases like “should we be
victorious” and “God willing,” which seemed to leave open the possibility of a
Trump loss. And then there was the ambiguous statement from the candidate
himself, who, when asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about the possibility of not
winning, claimed that he had a “substantial lead,” but also replied, “I guess
you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right?”
All of which is to say—we still don’t
really know what is going to happen. But what we do know is that these are the
final hours that Trump will spend as a Presidential candidate, assuming—big
asterisk here—that he keeps his word not to run again. Flying across the
country, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, from Georgia to Michigan and back
again, Trump has ended his campaign career with such erratic behavior and
alarming statements that they should not be overlooked and subsumed by the
understandable obsession with trying to figure out what’s going to happen on
Tuesday.
The temptation is, with the election
so close, simply to forget about whatever he’s threatening and just hope that
he loses. But I say losing is not enough; 2020 and Trump’s unequivocal defeat
by Joe Biden did not spell the end of his political career. We cannot assume
that it would this time, either.
Because Trump, even if he loses, will
have proved once again that he holds an entire political party in his thrall.
He will have proved that tens of millions of Americans will follow him even
past the point of inciting an insurrection against the U.S.
Capitol. He will have proved that the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny,
racism, and xenophobia ever waged—and yes, I am including his previous two
campaigns—was not enough to stop nearly half the country from supporting him.
Even in a best-case scenario of Trump accepting defeat—I will not fantasize
about him gracefully conceding, which seems to be a fantastical outcome from a
man who still believes he was robbed of proper accolades for his cameo in “Home
Alone 2”—there remains the matter of his various pending criminal cases; what
more evidence could we need to believe that Trump is prepared to do anything,
up to and including torching the American political system, to avoid
incarceration?
So take note: as Trump travelled the
nation in his final push asking to be the only convicted felon in history to
serve as President, he called Democrats “demonic” and repeatedly threatened to
go after the “enemies within” and mused openly about inflicting violence on
those enemies, whether Liz Cheney or members of the “fake news,” who, as he put
it in a particularly vituperative rally speech in
Pennsylvania on Sunday morning, might well come into the line of fire if
someone were to go after him. “I don’t mind,” Trump said, of a would-be
assassin taking a shot at the press. In just the past few days, he has promised
a new Administration that will be “nasty.” He has vowed to “protect the women
of our country . . . whether the women like it or not.” He has
attacked Harris in vile personal terms and apparently agreed to unleash the
science-denialism of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the entire U.S. health system.
Tired Trump is often the most revealing version of Trump, and so perhaps it’s
no mistake that at that Pennsylvania rally, Trump finally admitted publicly
what he had privately told some of his advisers four years ago—that he did not
willingly depart the White House after his 2020 defeat. “I shouldn’t have
left,” he said.
Trump’s 2024 campaign of vengeance was
born out of that moment. No matter what anyone says, it is not over yet. ♦
