The Donald Trump Legacy of the U.S. Presidential Elections: The Case For a Resurrection of the First Two Non-Consecutive Elections
The CNN political analyst is a professor of history and public affairs at the Ivy League school. He is an author and editor of 24 books, including a co-editing work on the myth America: Historians take on the biggest lies and legends about our past. You can follow him on social media. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Donald Trump is planning on running for the White House again. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail, but top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources told CNN. Trump, it seems, is hoping to be the first person since President Grover Cleveland to win two non-consecutive elections.
While Trump has been hinting at another run for months, the news would certainly send shockwaves through the political world. Trump is arguably one of the most controversial and destabilizing political leader in contemporary US history. He presidency was consequential due to his support for conspiracy theories in the GOP, as well as the toxic rhetoric and recent Supreme Court decisions.
The election for Biden will be more important than the election for Trump. Biden canut a legislative record that includes the Inflation Reduction act and the bipartisan infrastructure package, but he’s going into 2024 with baggage that plagues any incumbent. The problems that he has struggled with, including inflation and the fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will be part of the conversation in a way that they were not four years ago. Biden will no longer be campaigning for the job of boss if he runs.
If the midterm campaigns have shown the Democrats anything, it is that the Republicans remain a strongly united party. The unity can’t be shaken. After Trump left the White House, the party didn’t change in substantive ways and the “Never Trump” contingent failed to emerge as a dominant force. Indeed, officials such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney were purged from the party.
Even with candidates such as Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz running for Senate seats, polls show that the GOP is in a good position going into the election. Meanwhile, Democrats are scrambling to defend several seats and even candidates in reliably blue states such as New York are at risk.
If the Republicans are able to maintain control of the House and Senate next week, they will feel confident that they’ll be able to keep up their culture wars and economic speak into the future. And given the number of election-denying candidates in the midterms, a strong showing will likely create the tailwinds for the GOP to unite behind Trump. As the 2016 Republican primaries showed, it is likely that other Trump-like Republicans will look likeiddles once the former President formally reenters the political arena.
A win by the GOP would put Trump in a stronger position. He has not been held accountable at this point. Despite ongoing criminal investigations and the House select committee investigating January 6, Trump is still a viable political figure.
And if Trump announces his candidacy, the Department of Justice is weighing the possibility of announcing a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at Mar-a-Lago. We saw his attacks on the former special counsel who oversaw the Russia investigation. And once Trump is formally a candidate, it will make prosecuting him all the more difficult. Trump is sure to play the victim again and claim that the investigation is a witch hunt to get him out of the running.
If Trump avoids prosecution, he’d surely unleash a fierce assault on the President, who could very well still be struggling with a shaky economy and divisions within his own party. And if election deniers enter positions of power after the midterms, and Trump escapes any punishment for January 6, it’s likely he will take advantage of the loyalists who have infiltrated state and local election offices to make sure that victory is his. Trump can perfect the technique and rhetoric that got him into office because he has been to this rodeo before. And now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, Trump could be reinstated – giving him a way to direct and shape the media conversation once again. Although he has been active since he was banned from TWhc, Trump hasn’t said if he will come back.
The End of the 2024 Midterm War for the Republican Party and the Democratic Debate: Donald Trump’s Failure to Win by a Red Wave
The midterms have shown that the Democrats’ focus on the radical nature of the GOP and the dangers posed to democracy are not necessarily enough to rally voters. The dangers have been outlined many times before, but Democrats are struggling to maintain power.
There is a lot of work to be done before the GOP presidential primary in August of 2024 and the general election in November. But the way it looks, Trump’s victory might be his last election victory, so he should be happy with it.
A world affairs columnist is a former CNN producer and correspondent named Frida Ghitis. She writes columns for The Washington Post and World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
But now things might start to look different. The 2022 midterms could turn into a dividing line in the history of the Trump-Republican relationship. In Republican politics, partisan power drives decision-making above all else.
First, there was no red wave, much less a red tsunami. Predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls did not materialize. It was a deeply disappointing election for the GOP. It was a dreadful day for Donald Trump, who was hoping a Republican landslide would put him on a path to becoming the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
That’s because the movement spearheaded by Trump and his election deniers performed much worse than expected. Even some of the most dramatic Republican victories looked like a rebuke of Trump and his band of anti-democratic activists.
In exit polls, 28% of voters said they chose their House vote “to oppose Donald Trump.” Only 37% of people said they had a positive view of the former president prior to this election. The party should be worried by that.
On election night, Trump told an interviewer, “I think if [Republicans] win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” But the evidence strongly suggests he deserves much of the blame.
The Early Years of the Georgia Midterm Debale: Donald J. Biden, R. Raphael Warnock, and Brian Kemp
The opposition party has gained on average 29 seats in the House of Representatives during the past 100 years. The Republicans had a goal of five seats and most polls predicted they would clear it given the high inflation rate and Biden’s low approval. Republicans are trying to clear the low bar.
They may well do it. Even if the Republicans take the House, Nancy Pelosi would still be speaker and the Democrats would still be amazing. Biden presided over the best performance by the party in power since George W. Bush in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
Biden, in fact, has said he chose to run for president in an effort to save US democracy. Even if he loses control of Congress, he can take solace in the fact that he has made progress in achieving that goal. These elections were a victory for democracy.
That takes us to this year’s midterm debacle that saw every single election-denying candidate Trump backed for statewide office in battleground states losing. These losses weren’t happenstance. Voters from Pennsylvania to Arizona sent a loud message that they rejected Trump’s election-lying candidates.
In Tuesday’s Senate primary in Georgia, Herschel Walker lost to Sen. Raphael Warnock, giving Democrats control of the Senate. The day he posed for photos with a prominent conspiracy theorist, was also that day.
If Trump was the big loser of the night, the biggest winner was his top rival for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won in a landslide, and was greeted by supporters at his victory party with chants of “Two more years!” In a way, he acknowledges that his eyes are on the White House in 2024.
Within hours of Trump announcing his plan to run, things began to happen. The former president hinted darkly, “I know more about him than anybody, except perhaps his wife.”
Then there was Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, another Republican who won reelection, in a rematch with Stacey Abrams. Kemp refused to overturn the 2020 vote despite huge pressure from Trump and other Georgia officials.
If Trump is going to solidify his position, he will need to convince more Republicans that he can deliver votes and that he is not a “loser,” in his own parlance. Republicans seeing Democrats in power in the White House, Senate, and many state Legislatures and governorships made it harder to win. The road ahead for Trump will be a lot harder if Republicans conclude that by not fighting his nomination tooth and nail they will end up handing Democrats a united government in two years.
Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. It was good to know that democracy went well this week and that the country took a step towards sanity.
Pat Toomey and the End of the Midterm Recession: A Case Study in Dan Cox’s Failure to Win Maryland Governor’s Race
Republican Pat Toomey is retiring from his Pennsylvania Senate seat at the end of the term. But before he goes, he is speaking some hard truths to his party.
There is a group of Republicans who believe this could be their last chance to get Trump elected. Either they use what happened in the midterms to push him to the side, or he remains a dominant figure and they just keep losing elections.
Trump, for his part, is entirely unwilling to consider that he was – and is – anything but an unalloyed good for his party, declaring a “Big Victory” on his Truth Social website Friday.
A portion of the Republican Party will follow Trump wherever he goes and will not let electoral destruction stop them.
The Point: Toomey can’t be congratulated too strongly for his bravery in speaking out against Trump, given that he has one foot already out the door. But his voice is part of a growing chorus of Republicans suggesting that Tuesday’s election was the final straw for Trump. Base voters may be able to listen.
Did Donald Trump lose in the midterms? Plenty of people declared that he did, from liberal pundits to the Murdoch newspapers — the latter delivering a double whammy from the front page of The New York Post (“TRUMPTY DUMPTY”) and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal (“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser”).
It seems that the calendar is turning over on the Trump era and it might be tempting to see the strength of the Maga forces decline at last. But how do you tell the people that they’re out of a movement? It’s impossible to separate his strategy and temperament from that of the Republican Party because he feeds off each other’s worst tendencies.
Consider Dan Cox, who lost the Maryland Governor’s race by more than 25 points. In defeat, Mr. Cox issued a statement saying he had called the victorious Democrat Wes Moore to “recognize him on his being declared the winner.” The Trumpist version of concession was that the other side had been declared the winner based on the facts announced by someone else. Mr. Cox wrote, “Our internal data demonstrated a massive shift of swing voters our way and a huge turnout of Republicans — neither of which is reported to have occurred.”
The End of Marriage : Donald Trump’s Fault-Induced Demagogy in the U.S. Senate and His Loss to Melania Trump
Marriage is not easy. Couples will occasionally bicker, complain or wear on each other’s nerves. If someone’s thin-skinned, emotionally erratic, accountability-averse husband starts yelling at her for her high-profile screw-ups, things could get bumpy.
This apparently has been happening at Mar-a-Lago, where, postelection, Donald Trump is flipping out over his key role in the Republicans’ face plant in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Mr. Trump supported Mehmet Oz despite the fact that he turned out to be a loser. The former president has since been shifting the blame for his poor pick onto everyone else — including Melania Trump, according to The Times. Mr. Trump was not at all agitated when he went on Truth Social to criticize the “Fake Story” and insist he was not.
By now Mrs. Trump must be somewhat accustomed to her hubby’s tantrums. Still, this round of ragey finger-pointing must be particularly galling, considering that Mr. Trump didn’t just undermine Republicans’ chances in an eminently winnable Senate race. He helped kneecap the party up and down the Pennsylvania ballot, giving the Democrats in the crucial swing state one of their best Election Days in ages.
The Republican Party is reeling after seeing its hopes of controlling the Senate in 2023 dashed and finding itself in a nip-and-tuck battle for the House majority.
Democrats won two races in a US Senate election in Georgia on January 5, 2021, upsetting Republicans and taking control of the Senate for the first time in four years.
The Momentum: Why Donald Trump is Supposed to be President and not to be Formed by the Good of the Party, Or How the GOP Won’t
The desire to close off the momentum for other candidates is one of the reasons Trump is hoping to launch his campaign in 2020. He also likely wants to change the story from the GOP blame game where he is facing significant criticism for his role in the midterms.
Instead, the GOP will be thrust directly into the 2024 race with the former president demanding endorsements from elected officials who are still in the throes of figuring out what happened last week.
The Point: Trump is about Trump. He is the leader of the Republican Party, yes, but he simply does not prioritize the good of the party over his own good.
Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him on social media. His own opinions are expressed in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.
When Donald Trump Becomes President: Trump Can Get It Wrong, or Why He Can Get Rich, But How Bad Can He Get?
One day after asking Twitter users for their views, Musk revealed the news with his tweet: “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.” But not before Trump had taken to his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he attached the poll and urged supporters “to vote now with positivity.” He pretended that he was going to stay on Truth Social, since he did not care that much about Trump.
I say the “alleged” win by Trump given concerns raised by some about the validity of the results — such as New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, who sarcastically tweeted while the voting was taking place: “It would be impossible for the GRU or any other bot farm to influence this poll. Impossible.” (The GRU is known as the “attack dog” of Russia’s intelligence services.)
It’s difficult to believe that it was a fair election. I mean, how can we trust the results without in-person voting and paper ballots, as Trump has claimed are required to ensure elections are secure?
Assuming he won, it was Trump’s first victory since 2016 and possibly his last. In the 2016 presidential race, Trump won. Granted, winning the presidency is a big deal. The guy who promised to have so many wins with him as President that people would “get tired of winning” lost everything since then.
Fast-forward to Friday when Mike Pompeo — Trump’s former secretary of state and a possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate — needled Trump over that very line ahead of an appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition. “We were told we’d get tired of winning. I am tired of losing. “And so are most Republicans.”
In addition to her embrace of the former President’s election lies and combative way with the media, this was noteworthy given that she had been a local TV news anchor. But when on Team Trump you are required to mimic the supreme leader.
Worse for Trump is that his future is looking just as bad. His presidential announcement last week came under fire from many conservative media outlets.
The New York Post was the winner of the most vicious/comedic troll of Trump. First, the paper buried Trump’s presidential announcement on Page 26 of the paper with headline, “Been there, Don that.” An article made fun of Trump with the line, “With just 800 days to go before the next election, a Florida retiree made the surprise announcement that he was running for president.”
What everyone does not know by now is what to do with Mr. Trump’s third candidacy for president. What is the campaign about? He’s a candidate without opponents, who has made less frequent public appearances since his announcement than he did before, whose party’s other notable members seem to want to move on but often still don’t really say so publicly. The 2022. incarnation of Mr. Trump is like a trap, in part because of his nature, and in part because Republicans might not be able to win even if he wasn’t there.
In the past two years, the country has been hearing about voting machine conspiracies and the potential of subversion in future elections. Many voters didn’t approve of all that. What did the last two years bring to the candidates and Mr. Trump? For all of us? Nobody got anything of real value out of conspiracy theories and Trump recriminations. Not the Republicans, certainly, and that’s been the tenor of much post-election coverage and conversation — the way Mr. Trump’s choices produced certain outcomes that hurt the Republican Party.
The price of supporting Donald Trump to the Republican Party keeps getting higher. One of the most tumultuous weeks in history has shown that the party has a connection to the former president that could be extremely damaging when it comes to the nomination.
Trump’s Troubles with the Establishment: After Six Years of Trying to Win a Preterm Presidential Presidency, Trump Has Been Left Behind
A Manhattan jury found two of the companies in the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying tax business records on Tuesday, though Trump and his family were not charged in the case.
The Washington Post reported that a group of investigators hired by the former president’s lawyers found classified documents in a storage unit.
Nor was this week some sort of one-off. For instance, it comes after his decision to dine with Kayne West soon after Ye, as he’s now known, made more antisemitic comments. Also at the table that evening was Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is a notorious promoter of racism of all kinds.
Scott Reed said this week that the two that came before were devastating for Trump’s future viability. Reed told the New York Times that the writing on the wall was clear. “Abandonment,” he said, “has begun.”
Why do you think this matter now? The turmoil is the main source of Trump’s currency. He has always counted on controversy to be his primary strategy for getting media attention. He used investigations and attacks to create a position that he is an anti-establishment figure who sympathizes with the common person.
Trump never strives to be loved but, rather, he seeks to weaponize the anger and vitriol that he generates. He was the winner of both the GOP presidential nomination and the election. The same dynamic held true throughout his one-term presidency.
While many speculate about whether Trump has “gone too far,” this has never proven to be a concern to Republican powerbrokers such as Sen. Mitch McConnell. The issue that motivates them is not this one.
Almost nothing that happened in recent weeks is totally new to Trump, unless a person hasn’t been paying attention. He was involved in scandal from the day he entered politics. As president, he constantly flouted the limits of power. He has made comments that invoke antisemitic stereotypes.
Over the past six years, Republican officials have been able to live with Trump because of the fact that they think he can win and that his base can help them be victorious. Whether it was out of fear or hope, Republicans showed that they would tolerate almost anything – even trying to overturn an election – to protect him.
Nonetheless, the frustration is mounting. Besides actual legal peril, of all the political problems facing Trump right now, it is the most recent elections that put him in genuine peril with the party. More than the documents and more than his companies’ tax fraud, Republicans are paying attention to the ways in which Trump and the candidates he supported cost the party majority power. McConnell might be forgiven, but having to serve as the minority leader is not one of them.