Trump: the dark side of the moon
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Florida saw the launch of a project that already feels out of its time. Sitting on the cutting edge of obsolescence, the large orange vehicle took flight on a mission that its supporters believe will make America great again.
Also, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Florida saw the launch of Artemis-1, the large orange rocket that marks the start of NASA’s return to the Moon.
The former event was, of course, Donald Trump’s long-heralded announcement from Mar-a-Lago that he’s seeking the Republican nomination for 2024. Yet, of the two, it’s Artemis that stands the greater chance of success. The world’s largest rocket might be competing against Elon Musk’s Starship, which leverages dexterity and reusability against Artemis’s hugely expensive one-shot approach, but some of the technology is repurposed from the Space Shuttle. In this case, what came before is a useful foundation for the next leap forward.
The opposite is true of Trump’s re-election campaign, which already feels like we’re going to experience a journey to the dark side of the moon. Ivanka Trump’s statement about prioritising her family over politics feels like a useful bellwether. If Trump’s loyal daughter isn’t up for the two-year round trip, what hope does he have of carrying the country?
If Trump’s eventual failure is already baked in, what we don’t know is how that failure manifests itself between now and 2024. The timing of the announcement might be indicative of what is to come. Wiser heads within the GOP had been arguing that the former president needed to delay his announcement to give the Republicans the greatest chance of winning the Georgia runoff on 6th December. Yet with the Senate already lost, it became something of a moot point. It also makes one question if Republicans even want to win Georgia. If the seat doesn’t materially change their position in Senate, is winning worth being saddled with Senator Herschel Walker for four years?
The fact we can ask such questions shows how quickly Trump has been diminished and can now be seen to be working against the interests of the Republican Party. He has become an outsider outside the GOP, as he was in 2016, rather than the outsider inside the GOP, which he was until the scale of the GOP’s midterm failure became apparent last week. He is already pushing the underdog narrative, hoping that his independence will remind people that he was dismissed in 2016, though that’s not entirely true. Anybody who watched his early rallies and then the Republican debates will remember the disruptive energy he brought to the stage. He was different enough from the other candidates, and then from Hillary Clinton, to make his victory easier to predict. This time the outsider will fulfil a very different role: the spoiler-in-chief. In one form or another, Trump will linger on the edge of the Republican Party. The challenge for the GOP and their eventual nominee is how they minimise Trump.
In those terms, the GOP’s poor midterms are not without some benefits for the Republicans. Just a few weeks ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene was presumptuously signing autographs as “Speaker Greene”. It was never entirely clear how serious her challenge was, but it did reflect the power that Trump proxies had within the Senate. That has now changed. Kevin McCarthy now looks set to inherit the gavel with a margin of just three seats. Even if a wafer-thin majority in the House will require considerable coordination to manage, it is still a step in the right direction for a more moderate GOP moving forward. A little of the Trump poison has been drawn from the party. A little more might be drawn too with Senator Rick Scott challenging Mitch McConnell to become the Senate Minority leader. Scott has the backing of Trump and would project the larger power struggle upon the Senate. If McConnell can emerge victorious – the most likely outcome – it should strengthen his position as the party seeks to shake off the Trumpian fever.
The former president, meanwhile, faces a problem of his own making. Verbalising his inner monologue worked for four years but the lack of new material is stifling his electability. His announcement on Tuesday proved that he would be the comedian touring with the same two-hour set for nearly a decade (by the time of the election). “Lock her up” worked in 2016. In 2022, we’re deep in the territory of the end-of-career nostalgia tour. Unless he changes his routine – and right now it’s hard to believe he will – then Trump’s appeal is going to be diminished. Unless he can galvanise grassroots anger with something more than a few nicknames he will prove too ineffective to become their nominee, yet not so incompetent to lose significance.
Republicans finally seem ready to acknowledge that Trump has been a presence in four elections: one as the Republican nominee (2016), two as president (2018 and 2020), and a third as the embodiment of a movement (2022). Only the first of those can be considered a win and even there he lost the popular vote. Ron DeSantis already looks like a better bet, even if his appeal is overstated as it is unproven at a national level. It’s often said that those that praise the Florida governor have just not had time to witness him in action. However, for the moment, he has powerful backers, with Rupert Murdoch now evidently backing him. Trump, however, will retain a following and that following can still shift percentages in an election.
The worry for the GOP is if Trump eventually stands as an independent candidate, as many now believe he will. That, for the moment, remains a much longer bet. People remember his ego but forget his parsimony. He rarely commits his own money to his campaigns and unless it could be self-funded through donations it’s not entirely clear he’d fancy his chances. That doesn’t, however, discount the possibility that he runs a budget campaign, relying on his rallies and clever use of the media to do much of the heavy lifting. Yet that, ultimately, might be his weakness. If the media forget him (CNN cut away from his announcement last night, though Fox stayed with it) and he remains locked out of Twitter, then the GOP might stand a chance of minimising his influence. If Elon Musk reinstates him (and assuming that Twitter doesn’t implode in the next two years) then the GOP might have a problem, and the Democrats will feel even more confident about their chances in 2024.
As it stands, however, NASA will probably put a woman on the moon long before a person called Trump again wins the White House.
You can follow David on Twitter @DavidWaywell
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life