Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
January 18th, 2022
Donald Trump looks likelier than Joe Biden to be on the ballot in November 2024. Trump already appears to be running, and polls suggest he will easily claim the Republican nomination. This worries GOP strategists, but their fears about his electability are little different from those they harbored in 2016. Trump won then, of course, and outperformed expectations in 2020.
With Trump at the top of the ticket two years ago, Republicans sliced the Democrats' House majority to the smallest margin of control for either party in postwar history, while Democrats failed to win an outright majority in the Senate.
If, as political scientists think, presidential elections are a referendum on the incumbent party, Biden or a Biden substitute will be desperately vulnerable in '24. His first year has been disastrous, and if Republicans take Congress this November, Biden will have little chance to stage a recovery. Bill Clinton did it in 1995, but he was a younger man, charismatic enough to defy his party's brand.
Trump nearly prevailed in his own referendum two years ago; he believes he did prevail. But no president has been returned to office in a recession year since 1924. In 2024, Trump will not be dragged down by the pandemic and its economic consequences; instead, whatever maladies and malaise the country suffers will redound to the discredit of a Democratic administration.
Some strategists think Trump isn't worth the risk: any Republican could win in this environment. But Trump will be a centerpiece of the 2024 campaign whether Republicans nominate him or not. The press will never tire of demanding that another nominee denounce Trump, and if he or she does the party will split and lose. A nominee who doesn't denounce Trump has to defend him, but the only really effective salesman for Trump and Trumpism the party has yet produced is Donald Trump himself.
The bigger question is not whether Trump can but whether he should win. To answer this, think how headlines would have read if the debacles of the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations had occurred under Trump. A successful terrorist attack on 9/11, the needless invasion of Iraq, the Great Recession: Trump would have been crucified. How about Libya and Benghazi, Russian annexation of Crimea, and American life expectancy declining for the first time? Obama's record would look very different if it were being covered the way the media covered Trump.
This exercise serves to remind us of the magnitude of ordinary leaders' failures before Trump. COVID is not something any president could have prevented. But Trump committed none of Bush's national-security blunders, which were far graver than anything associated with Trump's wild personality or refusal to concede defeat. The Iraq War was worse than the riot on Jan. 6. Democrats, meanwhile, have become political accessories to murder in the streets, with their race-based view of justice and the accommodation shown to criminals by Democratic prosecutors, city-council members, and other officials. Donald Trump is saner than these alternatives.
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