POLITICS
Just Call Trump a Loser
His record is clear. Some nervy Republican challenger
should say so.
By Mark
Leibovich
APRIL 27, 2022
Let’s
assume Donald Trump runs again for president in 2024. Yes, I know, caveats,
caveats. Republicans say it’s too early to discuss ’24. A lot can change
between now and then. Maybe Trump won’t actually run. Maybe he’s just teasing
the possibility to milk the attention. Apparently, he likes attention.
But if
Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the
clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the
GOP. This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread
lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016.
Trump’s
bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many
Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something
they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several
Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president
who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose
Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as
brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a
one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and
heir apparent. In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s
feelings.
“Why on
earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the
popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House,
and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former
Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace
the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on
him.”
Trump’s
wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger
needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose
reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and
insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in
chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a
lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first
president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House,
Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger
could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the
person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of
presidential politics.”
This is a
devastating point of attack against Trump. He knows it, too, which is why he
has taken such pains to loser-proof himself and scrub his MAGA universe of any
doubt that he was in fact reelected “in a landslide.” Don’t let him get away
with that, the cabinet of critics urged. Abandon all deference, and don’t
forget to troll the troller.
“It is
erroneous to think there’s a benefit to being the adult in the room against
Donald Trump,” said Michael Cohen, the former president’s fixer turned
antagonist, who clearly knows him and all of his trigger points.
“There’s a
way of going after Trump that I would call intelligent mockery,” continued
Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges for lying to Congress on
behalf of his former client and paying hush money to Trump’s porn-actor
paramour, Stormy Daniels. “If you can make your criticism personal to him, he
will become flustered. And when he gets flustered, his level of stupidity rises
and then morphs into complete idiocy.”
If it was
true in 2016 that other Republicans couldn’t touch Trump, it’s not necessarily
so now, given the win-loss record he has since accumulated.
“The
problem with 2016 is that people waited ’til they were at their politically
weakest point before they started pounding Trump,” said Tim Miller, a former
top campaign aide to Jeb Bush who now writes for The Bulwark. “Could that have
worked for Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz if they started in September? I don’t know,
but it helps not to be on your deathbed.”
Miller and
others point out that Trump’s defeats in office go well beyond the loss of just
his job. Despite Trump’s repeated claims of “promises made, promises kept,”
most of his big-ticket promises from 2016 never came to fruition.
The attack
riff practically writes itself: “Remember how Trump kept saying how easy it
would be to balance the federal budget (‘very quickly’), repeal Obamacare and
replace it (‘with something terrific’), and sign a massive infrastructure bill?
None of those things actually happened, except the infrastructure bill—which
was signed by Joe Biden.”
Trump’s
“big, beautiful wall” along the southern border? Only about 80 miles of new
barrier were built where no structure was in place previously. Trump mostly
presided over repairs and enhancements to the existing wall. And Mexico paid
for none of it.
Another
inconvenient data point for Trump is that he left office with a 34 percent
approval rating, the worst of his presidency. The average throughout his
term—41 percent—was four points lower than that of any other president in
Gallup’s history of polling. (President Biden’s approval numbers haven’t
exactly been gangbusters either—stuck in the low 40s since the fall.) “Voters
can be practical,” Miller said. “They want to win, and they need to be reminded
that you can’t win with a big fat loser.”
We’re
already seeing contours of some early strategies for running against Trump.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is mostly ignoring the former president while
establishing his own cachet of lib-owning, base-arousing, culture-splitting
bona fides. Former Vice President Mike Pence is pursuing a loyal-deputy and
next-man-up course, despite his refusal to go along with Trump’s January 6
caper, which rendered him dead to his old boss and sentenced to hanging by
Trump’s “Stop the steal” brigades.
Both of
these are Trump-adjacent approaches predicated on keeping the faith with “the
base” while asserting that, in many ways, Trump was still a great president. Essentially,
DeSantis and Pence are positioning themselves as more competent and disciplined
versions of Trump, without the baggage.
I doubt
that this Trump-but-different tactic would work, especially with Trump himself
in the race. Plus, why waste so much good material? A “He’s a loser” strategy
would be way more direct and satisfying, and would have the added benefit of
driving Trump nuts.
Who could
make this work? Perhaps a popular Republican governor such as Maryland’s Larry
Hogan or New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, neither of whom has much use for Trump.
“You know, he’s probably going to be the next president,” Sununu said of Trump
earlier this month in a comedic speech at Washington’s annual Gridiron Club
dinner. “Nah, I’m just kidding; he’s fucking crazy.”
The line
killed, according to Comstock, who was at the dinner. It underscored how
effective humor—or ridicule—can be in the airing of unspoken and commonly
understood truths. “This will be an important weapon for some Republicans to
use against Trump at some point,” Comstock told me.
Chris
Christie, the former New Jersey governor, also could serve as a useful nuisance
against Trump. Christie used to brag in Trenton that he knew how to deal with
bullies: “You can either sidle up to them, or you can punch them in the face. I
like to punch them in the face.”
Christie
dropped out of the 2016 presidential race after New Hampshire and promptly
sidled up to Trump, where he remained for the better part of four years before
reaching his end with Trump late in his term. The final indignity occurred when
Christie attended the September 2020 super-spreader reception at the White
House for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, after which the
president, the first lady, and several guests, including Christie, tested
positive for COVID-19. Trump was nice enough to call and check in on Christie
when he was laid up in a New Jersey ICU. “Are you going to say you got this
from me?” Trump asked, according to Christie. “It was one of the few laughs I
had in the hospital,” Christie told me later of Trump’s gesture of deep concern.
“I got off the phone, and I just shook my head. Like, this guy will never
change.”
Christie is
probably doomed to being dismissed as both a Trump traitor (by MAGA world) and
a Trump doormat (by anti-Trumpers), but he could still make for an effective
pugilistic foil. He has been a vocal proponent of Republicans moving on from
2020—which Trump of course has taken note of, and not in a nice way. The former
president put out a statement saying that no one wanted to hear from a guy like
Christie, “who left New Jersey with a less than 9 percent approval rating.”
In fact,
Christie’s approval numbers in New Jersey bottomed out at about 13 percent, but
that’s beside the point. The main point was how Christie came back at Trump.
“When I ran for reelection in 2013, I got 60 percent of the vote,” Christie
told Axios on HBO. “When he ran for reelection, he lost to Joe Biden.”
That could
bear repeating.
Mark
Leibovich is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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