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WITH JUDSON BERGERAugust 26 2023
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The Candidate Who Isn’t There
Dear Weekend Jolter,
The candidate helped along in his improbable 2016 victory by his opponent’s own hubris has entered the next phase in his hoped-for comeback by following in her footsteps — and skipping Wisconsin.
Euripides couldn’t have scripted it better. But the irony is only tragic — for Donald Trump — if he loses.
The Republican front-runner’s decision to sit out Wednesday’s kickoff debate and let the undercard cast scrap was made primarily because of his lofty position in the polls. As Rich Lowry writes, the GOP presidential race in some ways resembles an incumbent president’s effort to manage his marginal challengers. Trump’s 40-point leads make him look, and evidently feel, indomitable — potentially more secure in his position in the party than the incumbent president should feel in his.
Indeed, the debate in Milwaukee had the feel of a rowdy House subcommittee meeting about a bill that’s never going to pass. The disagreements were pointed at times, the enmity toward one candidate in particular profound — and theoretical. The primary campaign, moreover, has the feel of a race that’s never going to launch, in part because its front-runner is campaigning as the candidate who isn’t there. Trump, aside from skipping this week’s, has indicated he doesn’t plan to do any debates. His stop at the Iowa State Fair lasted all of about 45 minutes. Brittany Bernstein and Jeff Blehar did the yeoman’s work of reviewing his 2024 campaign appearances to date and counted a paltry number in comparison to his opponents’. Brittany reports Trump has held fewer than 40 campaign events since entering in November, “and just 17 of those events have been in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.” Contrast that with Ron DeSantis (78 campaign stops in early primary states) or Nikki Haley (88) or Vivek Ramaswamy (105). This infrequency may become more noticeable as he’s pulled from the campaign trail and into various courtrooms (and jails) in the months ahead.
As Jeff observes, it is all so arrogant and high-handed, and yet “it is also a perfectly intelligent, sound strategy. . . . Trump is playing a ‘prevent defense’ for at least one manifestly obvious reason: because he is, at this point, lapping the field in all polls.”
But just as the sense of inevitability harmed Hillary Clinton, twice, the new basement campaign could harm Trump. Rich writes, in arguing that the GOP race is not as “over” as it looks:
The cockiness could well be justified, but a sense of inevitability can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it disheartens the opposition and communicates strength; on the other, it can fade into a high-handed sense of taking the voters for granted.
Charles C. W. Cooke seconds that notion:
In 2023, Trump is cutting an arrogant, lazy, bored figure, whose lackluster vapor-campaign seems to have more in common with 2016 Hillary Clinton and 2020 Joe Biden than with his 2016 effort.
Whether this hurts him is a question, at least in part, for his challengers to resolve. Their conundrum is a maddening one: How to compete against a candidate who not only isn’t there but seems to be politically impervious to cannonballs’ worth of bad headlines and who, in the minds of many campaign strategists, cannot be reproached too severely for fear of alienating his soft supporters? (Natan Ehrenreich gets into that challenge here.)
Wednesday’s debate showed the candidates scattering into starkly different camps in their approach. While Ramaswamy continued to gush only praise for Trump, and Chris Christie was characteristically unequivocal in his disdain for the man, Mike Pence and Haley were appropriately firm and forceful. DeSantis struggled, initially deflecting the question of whether Pence did the right thing on January 6, and later conceding “Mike did his duty.” The candidates don’t need to go the full Christie, but, as NR’s editorial states, Republican voters won’t move on from Trump “if none of Trump’s rivals ask them to.” Phil Klein urges DeSantis to stop campaigning with an “abundance of caution” and worrying about whom he’ll upset. And Noah Rothman offers a specific suggestion for candidates at these debates — home in on how the former president’s legal woes will take him off the trail. The message looks something like this:
Unfair and undesirable though it may be, Donald Trump is not here for you because he cannot be here for you. Yes, he has avoided this stage in part because the polls have convinced him that he can take your votes for granted. But the former president is going to have to spend most of the next year of his life devoting his attention to things other than the future of our party and our country. Get used to it.
