Donald Trump has lost presidential elections and pursued the overthrow of the constitutional order. Despite this, he remains the defining figure in the Republican Party. But the air is getting thinner.
“They never come back” – that’s the rule in heavyweight boxing for beaten world champions. Even US presidents who have chased the citizens or their own party to hell after just one term in office are almost always denied a return to the White House. Nine of the ten presidents who met such a fate did not even attempt re-election. Only the Democrat Grover Cleveland at the end of the 19th century managed to win another term after a defeat four years later.
But lo and behold: With Donald Trump, 130 years later, a president who has been voted out is working on his comeback for the first time. Although “comeback” doesn’t quite capture the point: Trump was actually never gone, even after his defeat he remained the dominant figure in his party. If there were primary elections for the nomination of the Republican candidate today and not in 2024, he would have the best chance. At the end of June, the Morning Consult survey institute saw it at 53 percent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis followed with 22 percent and ex-Vice President Mike Pence with 8 percent.
He’s like a drug
The most important reason for Trump’s staying power: His disciples, whom he gathered around him in 2015 and 2016 and with whom he won control of the Republican Party, remain devoted to him. They make up a good half of the party’s base, and they’re organized, vocal, and combative. Even today, Trump’s universe of communication shows hardly any cracks. He may be banned from Twitter and Facebook, but the media, both right and left, eagerly absorb his every statement. It’s like a drug that the US can’t get off because it induces a constant bliss or outrage high.
Trump is also benefiting from the new explosiveness of his issues: illegal immigration is at its highest level in two decades, inflation is through the roof, the murder rate is rising rapidly, the Democrats are drifting to the left, Joe Biden seems restless and weak in leadership.
The Republican Party today looks like a cult, following the leader’s promptings implicitly.
Nothing shows how much Trump controls the party better than the following fact: Almost all Republican candidates who have to face internal party votes this year have made a pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida in recent months. The support of the ex-president is considered indispensable for one’s own career. Because of gerrymandering, the manipulation of constituency borders, and party political polarization, there is hardly any competition in congressional elections. Next November, 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 in the Senate are up for voting – less than 10 percent of them are hard-fought. Rather, the real hurdle is the primary in his own party, and that’s where Trump can send his loyal battalions into the field.
Seasoned Republican politicians vie for his favor like second-rate mobsters for Don Vito Corleone’s in The Godfather. In the important Senate primaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the candidates accused each other of not being loyal enough to Trump. There is hardly a website by a Republican politician that does not praise the ex-president and, at best, shows a picture of the two shaking hands. The party now looks like an obscure sect that unconditionally follows the promptings of the leader. The lie about the stolen 2020 election is a political-religious litmus test: only those who subscribe to such esoteric nonsense will be admitted to the Trump world.
Lost unique selling proposition
So, is the return of the undead a foregone conclusion as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee? Not necessarily. Seven years ago, when he announced his candidacy with fanfare in front of paid claqueurs, he still had a unique selling point. No other candidate dared to make xenophobia, racism, protectionism and isolationism the core of an election campaign and make noise a trademark. Today, a career with the Republicans without these characteristics is hardly imaginable. In this respect, Trump has changed the party more than any other politician since Theodore Roosevelt in the early 19th century.
However, the fact that Trumpism triumphed across the board threatens to become a problem for its creator. Trump has ruthlessly pushed through his agenda, vindictively crushing everyone in the party who opposed him on political or moral grounds: Senator John McCain, the Bush dynasty, or the few upstanding members of Congress who voted for his impeachment. Liz Cheney, a member of the Congressional investigative committee into the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and the most important representative of classical conservatism, is likely to be the next victim.
But Trump finds it harder to get rid of competitors who ideologically emulate him. Nobody does this better than Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, the third largest state in the United States. An unknown congressman, he won his current position in 2018 by impersonating Trump and receiving his public blessing in doing so. For an election commercial, DeSantis even had himself filmed playing Lego with his little daughter and shouting “build the wall” to her. In the meantime, however, the governor is trying to emancipate himself from his foster father. He is rarely seen in Mar-a-Lago, leads his state on a strict legal course, appears almost as often on Fox News as Trump and criticizes his corona policy with lockdown and masks as a betrayal of freedom rights.
The ex-president realizes what a dangerous rival he is growing up to be. He fears that DeSantis will steal the very voters he first courted. He hates how unsubmissive the governor is. And Trump responds in typical fashion: In private conversations, he vilified DeSantis as a “boring personality” and not a serious candidate for the 2024 election.
act of disobedience
However, he learned from Trump that American politics today works like a bar fight: You have to strike first. In late June, DeSantis said he would not seek support from Trump for his re-election campaign as governor. This is an outrageous act of disobedience which, apart from Senator Mitt Romney, no high-profile figure in the Republican Party has survived in the past six years.
The fact that DeSantis is now daring shows that the first vultures are circling over Trump. Even longtime supporters of the ex-president admit that the revelations by the congressional committee on the attempted coup are beginning to hurt him. The picture of a plan concocted by Trump over weeks to forcibly abolish the US constitutional order with the help of right-wing militia is growing thicker. His ex-Attorney General William Barr stated that the President had “lost any connection to reality” at the time.
There is also the question of age. When he entered the White House in 2017, at 70, Trump was the oldest president in American history. Biden, who was four years his senior, took this record from him in 2021. In 2025 Trump would be 78 – a penalty, at least if the incumbent does not run again. Many of his fans idolize their hero because he gave them the wall, arch-conservative judges on the Supreme Court and constant rebellion against the establishment. But more and more of them are tired of his vulgarity, his scandals and his self-pity.
Above all, major donors and party strategists tire of the circus that the ex-president unleashes with each of his appearances and statements. They know that Trump can whip angry white citizens to the polls like no other. But they also know that in 2020 he not only lost the presidency for the party, but also the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Republicans’ only avenue of escape for 2024, therefore, is: find someone like Trump, but less insane.
Even the old man in Mar-a-Lago, with his animal instinct for political moods, is aware of that. Originally, he wanted to announce his candidacy for the party’s nomination after the midterm elections in November. Now he’s talking about moving this date forward, maybe to this summer. What he sees as a liberation may be interpreted by many as a weakness. And weakness, Trump drummed that into Republicans, is a political death sentence.
Stephen Bierling teaches international politics at the University of Regensburg. Most recently, he published “America First. Donald Trump in the White House” published by C. H. Beck.