Former President Donald Trump has been undermining his 2024 bid through a series of self-inflicted political wounds suffered both before and since launching his campaign, doing for his opponents inside the Republican establishment what they are powerless to do themselves.
Trump announced his White House bid Nov. 15, only to see his poll numbers drop precipitously versus Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in a hypothetical matchup in the Republican presidential primary. The reasons behind the former president’s fall are many: legal setbacks, political failures, and politically charged statements, mostly uttered via Truth Social, the Twitter-like social media platform he founded, to name a few. Yet all are the fault of a shared culprit: Trump.
“The so-called GOP establishment and even the other presidential primary candidates really don’t need to take on Trump. He’s self-destructing all on his own,” said Jim Dornan, a Republican operative in Washington often critical of the 45th president.
Trump’s Republican critics are not the only conservatives questioning his political future.
After the former president this month teased a “major announcement” that ended up being the sale of digital NFT trading cards featuring himself photoshopped into different costumes, exasperated Trump ally Steve Bannon declared, “I can’t do this anymore.” Bannon, a leading conservative populist who served as a top official in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and in the Trump White House, made the comments on his War Room podcast.
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The Trump campaign is shrugging off the former president’s critics and doubters, insisting his bid for a second term in the White House is on track heading into 2023. Indeed, Trump was impeached twice by the House, though not convicted by the Senate, and he has survived myriad scandals that might have felled any other politician, Democrat or Republican.
“Despite years of fake news coverage and Big Tech meddling in an election, President Trump is the most dominant force in political history, and anyone who doubts him does so at their political peril,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said.
“President Trump has spent the last six years leading the MAGA movement and helping elect America First candidates across the country,” he added. “There is nobody who has worked harder to advance the conservative movement.”
Trump commenced his third consecutive presidential bid with a noticeably low-energy speech from Mar-a-Lago, his residence and private social club in Palm Beach, Florida, one week after midterm elections that saw Republicans come up short in their bid to recapture the Senate and just barely win control of the House. The GOP also lost governor’s races that once looked promising. Many Republicans blamed Trump, including establishment figures and grassroots activists supportive of the former president.
Trump is taking heat for endorsing flawed candidates in the 2022 primaries who earned his support because they vowed loyalty to the former president, not because they were viable in the general election. In key races — for example, Arizona governor and a Georgia Senate seat — those candidates lost to their Democratic opponents. Trump is also under fire for continuing to gripe about his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden, messaging rejected by crucial independent voters.
Then there are Trump’s legal challenges, including a federal investigation run by a special counsel into his possession of classified documents since leaving the White House and his potential culpability in the Jan. 6, 2021, ransacking of the Capitol and attempts to overturn the last presidential election. And then there are the provocative statements Trump is known for, although his recent call for “termination” of the Constitution was troubling, even by his high standard for controversy.
Multiple polls conducted since Trump made his 2024 bid official show him losing to Biden in a general election and to DeSantis in the primary — and by wide margins. Surveys also show two-thirds of Republican primary voters want fresh leadership atop the party.
“Putting aside the rather significant vulnerabilities the former president has around the ’20 elections, trying to overturn the results, Jan. 6, and the multitude of legal problems, I believe the biggest issue Trump has going into ’24 is that he is a loser,” a veteran GOP operative said. “He’s largely taken care of himself without the establishment doing anything.”
The question that keeps arising among many Democrats and casual political observers is why, with all of Trump’s liabilities, the Republican Party’s leading establishment figures do not work together to kneecap the former president collectively and block him from the 2024 nomination.
If Trump’s early announcement was supposed to discourage other Republicans from running for president, that doesn’t appear to be happening. Several are mulling a campaign, including his former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley; his former vice president, Mike Pence; and his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo — not to mention DeSantis. In other words, the GOP has no shortage of serious, viable alternative contenders to coalesce behind.
The answer is that the Republican establishment is not monolithic.
This supposed cabal includes Trump, who remains the titular head of the GOP. And even if the former president was ostracized by other top Republicans, the era of the smoke-filled room, when party power brokers controlled campaign funding and infrastructure and wielded the influence to elevate and sideline candidates, is long past. Social media, cable television news, and digital fundraising allow candidates to go straight to the grassroots.
That dynamic is especially pronounced in the Republican Party, although it is no less a factor inside the Democratic Party.
“Republicans are the least herdable cat nature has ever produced. Any and all attempts to try to herd them causes them to do the opposite,” said GOP strategist Brad Todd, co-author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. “To the extent elected Republicans are the establishment, they don’t have any sway at all.”
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Despite the challenges Trump has created for himself, he is still the front-runner for the Republican nomination and a formidable political figure.
His floor of loyal voter support in the GOP remains remarkably high, at around 30% — enough to advance if the 2024 primary is crowded. Trump for the last two years built a large campaign war chest, with the political committees he controls, or specifically aligned with him, reporting nearly $100 million in cash on hand in late November. And Trump boasts of experience no Republican competitor can claim: four years working in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, the non-fungible token trading cards (artificially scarce digital objects) mocked by Trump critics and supporters alike sold out within an hour of hitting the market.
