ANALYSIS:
Donald Trump’s unusually early announcement of a third presidential campaign was aimed in part at clearing the Republican field for 2024, but his first three weeks as a candidate have undercut that goal, highlighting his vulnerabilities and giving considerable ammunition to those in the GOP arguing to turn the page on him.
Since emerging from the November election with a string of humiliating losses to show for his pretensions to be a midterm kingmaker, Trump has entertained a leading white supremacist and a celebrity anti-Semite at his South Florida mansion.
He has suggested terminating the Constitution — the one that a president swears to preserve, protect and defend — in furtherance of his long-running lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
His business was just convicted on all 17 counts in a tax fraud case in New York City.
And his hand-picked candidate for the Senate in Georgia — Herschel Walker, the football star Trump employed in a brief stint as a pro football team owner in the 1980s — went down in defeat on Tuesday night after a campaign that will be remembered as a string of scandals and self-inflicted wounds.
Extending his streak of self-sabotage, Trump spent Tuesday night entertaining yet another fringe character, posing for thumbs-up photos at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, with an adherent of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, ABC News reported.
For Trump, the losses and embarrassments are rapidly piling up, aggravating long-standing concerns among his fellow Republicans that his 2016 victory may have been an aberration — and that his persistence with a comeback attempt could sink the party’s hopes of reclaiming the White House in 2024.
“I know a lot of people in our party love the former president,” Utah Senator Mitt Romney said Wednesday on Capitol Hill, responding to Walker’s defeat. “But he’s, if you will, the kiss of death for somebody who wants to win a general election. And at some point, we’ve got to move on and look for new leaders that will lead us to win.”
Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist and former top adviser to the US Chamber of Commerce, called the past three weeks “devastating for Trump’s future viability”.
“His rushed announcement, serious legal setbacks and the defeat of his hand-picked Senate candidates — which once again cost the GOP control of the Senate — have raised serious concerns with his donors and supporters,” Reed said.
“Abandonment,” he added, “has begun.”
It is too soon to weigh the long-term effects on Trump’s latest candidacy of the current run of defeats and denunciations, especially given his long track record of weathering controversies.
His rise reflected, and accelerated, the ascendancy of the right wing of the Republican Party, and with a solid one-quarter or more of the GOP still solidly in his corner, he remains a clear favourite in polls of potential Republican contenders. But it is not clear that Trump will be able to replicate his appeal to the much broader coalition that delivered him an unexpected victory in 2016.
It has been an inauspicious beginning for Trump, who has now led Republicans to defeat or disappointment in three straight election cycles.
Ignoring most of his advisers, Trump chose to announce his campaign a week after the midterm election, counting on a strong result for Republicans. Instead, the GOP barely captured the House and failed to take the Senate, prompting many in the party to assign blame to Trump for endorsing flawed candidates and pressuring them to embrace his lies about the 2020 election.
“If we would have taken the Senate, and the House by a good majority instead of a slim margin, then that would have paved the way for Trump to get the nomination and wrap it up quickly,” said Lori Klein Corbin, an Arizona member of the Republican National Committee. “Now, we just don’t know.”
Trump has held no campaign events since he got into the race, has yet to name people to key campaign posts and has not established a campaign headquarters. He has largely kept to Mar-a-Lago, participating remotely in just a few public events, like a rally by telephone for Walker in Georgia.
Yet Trump found time to dine on November 22 with Kanye West, now known as Ye, the rap artist whose approval Trump had repeatedly sought as president, and who had been widely denounced for a series of anti-Semitic comments, and with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, a notorious racist and Holocaust denier. (And when his former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, was among those to chastise him, Trump responded by privately complaining that Friedman had shown disloyalty.)
In a statement, Steven Cheung, a senior communications adviser to Trump, dismissed questions about the start of the campaign, calling Trump “the single, most dominant force in politics” and insisting that all was going according to plan.
“We’re focused on building out the operation and putting in place a foundation to wage an overwhelming campaign that’s never been seen before,” Cheung said. “We’re building out teams in early voting states and making sure we are positioned to win on all levels.”
Trump’s losing streak includes serious legal setbacks.
His four-year effort to block congressional Democrats from obtaining his tax returns ended in defeat at the Supreme Court, and the House Ways and Means Committee said on November 30 that it had obtained access to six years of his returns. A federal appeals court on December 1 shut down a lawsuit by Trump that had, for nearly three months, slowed the inquiry into whether he illegally kept national security records at Mar-a-Lago.
Then, in New York on Tuesday, a jury returned guilty verdicts against Trump’s family business on all 17 counts related to a tax fraud scheme, detailing what prosecutors called a “culture of fraud and deception” at the company that bears his name.
Walker’s defeat in his runoff with Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, came as a final blow capping Trump’s miserable year as a political mastermind.
Trump had pressed Walker to run and endorsed him early on, disregarding Republicans in Washington who urged caution before anointing Walker given the allegations of domestic violence in his past. Trump was adamant that Walker would prevail, just as Trump himself had weathered his own scandals.
But while Walker kept the race surprisingly close, given the crush of headlines about the previously undisclosed children he had fathered and abortions he had reportedly urged romantic partners to get, he lost by nearly 100,000 votes — and Democrats gained an invaluable 51st seat in the Senate.
Julianne Thompson, a Republican consultant in Atlanta and former spokesperson for the state GOP, said the overall midterm results in Georgia — where voters rejected Trump-endorsed candidates for Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general — showed that “a lot of people are questioning the direction of the party”.
“There is a big part of the Republican Party that is ready to move on,” she said.
More broadly, Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad three weeks appear to have called into question whether his seeming imperviousness to the normal rules of political gravity may have worn off at long last.
“People see what’s been happening and will interpret that as weakness and as an opportunity to challenge President Trump,” said Michael Barnett, the Republican chair in Palm Beach County, Florida. “I don’t think his influence has dropped that much — if at all — but he’s going to have opponents.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maggie Haberman and Michael C. Bender
Photographs by: Saul Martinez, Maddie McGarvey, Eze Amos and Scott McIntyre
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES