Democrats and disaffected pre-2016 Republicans have been foiled for eight years now in their efforts to put an end to Donald J. Trump’s political career. When will he meet his Waterloo?
Peggy Noonan evoked Napoleon’s fall in her op-ed column for The Wall Street Journal last Saturday, “May Trump Soon Reach His Waterloo.”
“Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden,” Noonan writes. “So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.”
While the WSJ op-ed columnist has a point, she makes it with a heavy hand. And though Trump is crushing Christie and “several GOP candidates now in the field,” it’s far too early to say the former president is the only Republican who can win next year’s nomination (Noonan makes no mention of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose ‘24 campaign is already considered a failed one by the Republican punditocracy).
If it takes a hard-core Trumper to claim today that no one else can possibly win next year’s nomination, it takes a hard-core conservative like Noonan to make the bold claim that Christie “could easily defeat Joe Biden,” ignoring Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, school loan forgiveness, high Democratic and independent turnout in the ‘22 midterms, and the fact the GOP has adapted as its key plank the anti-”woke” position advanced by the aforementioned failing candidate, Ron DeSantis.
On the same Saturday, David French, conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times, wrote about Trump’s endurance as the GOP frontrunner. The dyed-red-in-the-wool MAGA crowd, French posits, thrives because they mix joy with their rage, practically squealing with delight over supreme ownership of the libs. At Trump rallies, the former columnist for The Dispatch writes, “Front Row Joes” follow the ex-president who they will not admit lost re-election from rally to rally to watch their “drain-the-swamp” hero drone on for hours at a time.
French is on to something that Noonan and Democrats have yet to grasp. No matter what happens to Trump in the various courts, he is the GOP frontrunner for as long as his myriad challengers, announced or not, fail to capture the imagination of the majority of the party, including both the MAGA loyalists and the disaffected never-Trumpers sitting on the sidelines.
Journalists have attempted to figure out how and why Trump endures despite demonstrable lies, racism and authoritarian tendencies. Though French’s analysis is far from a revelation, it can provide a roadmap for how to objectively cover Trump while working to save our democracy.
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