Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele joins Morning Joe to discuss the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, as GOP leaders reject Pres. Trump’s suggestion to delay the ‘rigged’ election in November.
ALTITUDE
Why Trump might quit
There is logic behind saying to hell with reelection.
By JOHN F.
HARRIS 7/30/20, 12:08 PM CET
Altitude is
a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective
on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
The purpose
of the nationally televised Oval Office address was to announce new peace
initiatives in Vietnam, but Lyndon B. Johnson saved the most startling news
until the end of his speech on March 31, 1968. With his country badly divided
over a grinding war, he didn’t believe as president he “should devote an hour
or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.” He was dropping out of
the presidential campaign.
Now there
was a president who knew how to shake up the plot.
Among
Donald Trump’s problems in his long, hot and mostly housebound summer is that
he has lost his once unparalleled gift for changing the story. He still can
stir outrage, but even among his supporters he no longer has much capacity to
surprise. “Every hero,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson a century before the
president was born, “becomes a bore at last.”
But here is
a way Trump could demonstrate that an old master still knows how to tear up the
script and leave the audience gasping. It is late but not too late to pull an
LBJ.
For decades, Trump has fashioned a leadership persona
around the mystique of success and strength and indomitability.
As it
happens, the "Trump drops out" scenario is one I have trafficked to
colleagues and sources for a couple years now, usually to dismissive grunts or
quizzical stares. It is true that there is scant time left for the scenario to
come to pass. It’s true also that, if I were a reliable predictor of Trump’s
political fortunes, Hillary Clinton would now be running for reelection.
But even if
one doesn’t really think Trump will drop out of the race — as a proselytizer of
the theory I acknowledge it is a stretch — it is worth examining the reasons he
just might, as a way of illuminating the bleakness of his situation with just
over three months to go before the general election.
No doubt
Trump would savor the validation of winning a second term. Under the current
trajectory, that looks less likely than not; by the light of some evidence it
looks highly unlikely. One question is whether Trump genuinely believes he has
a plausible plan — beyond throw a lot of stuff against the wall and hope some
of it sticks — to change that trajectory. The second question is how Trump
conceives of the balance of his lifetime — and his historical reputation after
that — if he were to lose to Joseph Biden and join the ranks of defeated
incumbents.
The
"Trump drops out" scenario hinges on the assumption that Trump is
less concerned with wielding the levers of government than he is preserving his
role as disrupter at large in American politics over the next decade. The
latter might be much easier to maintain if he avoids being tattooed as loser in
November — especially if the margin is larger than could be attributed, even by
his most conspiracy-minded supporters, to media bias or vote-counting
manipulation by Democrats.
The
scenario hinges also on an assumption that Trump’s political project is more
weakened internally — in the psychological sense — than it is even in the
external sense, as measured by polls and campaign coverage.
Trump in
recent days has scotched a planned rally and canceled plans for a massive
partisan extravaganza at the Republican National Convention. He has gone from
saying the coronavirus pandemic would be quickly routed in the spring to
acknowledging, five months into the crisis, that the situation will probably
“get worse before it gets better.” After saying masks weren’t for him, and
implying that they are for weak spirits, he finally began wearing one and
urging others to do so.
Most of the
coverage has been on the theme that Trump is now right and is tacitly admitting
he was wrong before — wrong not to take these and other steps much earlier to
unite the country around the importance of deferring to health experts and
rigorous social distancing.
But Trump
surely must wonder — on the question that matters most to him — whether he was
right before and is stuck in the wrong place now. For decades, Trump has
fashioned a leadership persona around the mystique of success and strength and
indomitability. He has long acted as if he believes that mystique is highly
perishable. That’s why he never apologizes or says he was wrong. Once one is
exposed as having erred, or even having normal human doubt about the path
ahead, perceptions change irreversibly from strength to weakness.
People who
recoil at Trump’s boasting, bullying and bombast generally know much more than
he does about how conventional presidents act. But Trump surely knows much more
than the critics do about how to manage the Trump persona. The pictures of
Trump a few weeks ago after the weakly attended Tulsa rally — his tie undone,
his face twisted in a dispirited scowl — suggest he knows that once his aura of
success is punctured it will be difficult to recover. When was the last time
Trump seemed to be really enjoying himself in the presidency?
Trump knows
also that perceptions of power and success have an intimidating effect. As he
looks to the fall, it is not opponents that he needs to keep in line. It is
allies. Trump’s presidency has been propelled by two great engines of
enablement. One of these, Fox News, has been robustly enthusiastic. He’s been
great for business, and Fox News’ most loyal viewers are loyal to Trump. The
other enabler, personified by Mitch McConnell, is not enthusiastic but sullenly
transactional. McConnell and the business wing of the GOP don’t much like
Trump, but they do like the chance to push their agenda on judges and
deregulation.
What are
the incentives of these enablers if, in late September or early October, Trump
looks as beleaguered as he does in late July? In either case, an outright break
with Trump is unlikely. Fox is concerned most about preserving its huge
profitability. The network’s leaders would presumably be wary of potentially
sustaining permanent brand damage with corporate advertisers by joining Trump
in a last-ditch campaign of racially charged cultural warfare. That’s
especially so if they perceive Trump is going to lose anyway. In the case of
McConnell, he knows that Trump’s unpopularity is the primary factor that
continued GOP control of the Senate is at best a tossup. He and other
Republicans already are trying to localize their races, not splitting with
Trump but finding distance from him.
These
incentives mean Trump could be a very lonely figure this fall.
Yes, but:
Hasn’t Trump been lonely before, as after the Access Hollywood video in October
2016? True enough, although in circumstances in which the gravity of the
nation’s challenges and the voter’s choice seem much less severe than now. And
wouldn’t dropping out of the race brand him as something worse than loser, a
quitter?
That one
Trump could plausibly answer with an unusual approach: say something
approximating the truth. This doesn’t sound much like how Trump talks but, in
some moods, it may be close to what he thinks: Fellow Americans, I know I am a
disrupter, and everyone knows I thrive on conflict. I believe that disruption
is what Republicans and the country needed when I ran for president in 2016,
and that is what I delivered. But I realize the pandemic creates a whole new
agenda. I am going to devote the balance of my term to trying to get this
country opened up safely, and allow someone without my sharp edges make the
case for Republicans this fall.
Just this
week Trump pondered why Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have higher approval
ratings than he does, even though he is their boss. “It can only be my
personality, that’s all,” he told reporters.
Winning a second term was always going to be a
challenge for a president who has never had a majority job approval.
Long term,
forgoing the race with a measure of self-awareness conceivably could elevate
Trump’s historical reputation higher than it would be if he loses reelection
after a remorseless and demagogic campaign. In the near term, if a replacement
nominee (presumably Vice President Mike Pence) would be indebted to Trump and
subject to his leverage if he managed to beat Biden. If he lost, Trump could
complain that his protégé blew it, and play GOP kingmaker (perhaps on behalf of
one of his children or other allies) in 2024 without the stigma of having been
expressly rejected by voters.
How
plausible is this? Not terribly.
But how
plausible is Trump reversing the astonishing decay in his political foundation
in recent months? Winning a second term was always going to be a challenge for
a president who has never had a majority job approval. At the start of the
year, however, his advisers described a plausible path to reelection. The
strategy had three main elements. One assumption was that, even if he was
running slightly behind in swing states, his financial and organizational
advantages, combined with the passion of supporters, would mean he would outperform
polls by 2 to 3 percentage points. The second assumption was that Trump had
room to grow his vote share with minority voters, especially African American
men; even modest improvement by Trump could weaken the Democratic coalition in
devastating ways. The third assumption was that Trump could repackage his
divisive style as an asset. “He’s no Mr. Nice Guy,” the narrator intoned in a
Trump TV ad that aired in the 2019 World Series, “but sometimes it takes a
Donald Trump to change Washington.”
Five months
into the pandemic, not one of those three assumptions looks secure. In key
swing states he is currently running much more than a couple points behind.
After the George Floyd murder and Trump’s response, the notion of gains with
African American voters is highly unlikely. His plan to portray himself as an
ass-kicking chief executive who presided over a booming economy is in tatters,
amid vast joblessness and the prospect that the pandemic will shadow virtually
every corner of American life well into 2021.
In
circumstances as grim as these, it would be surprising but not inconceivable if
Trump decided it is time for a séance with LBJ.
