For the time being, Donald Trump towers over the Republican roster of presidential candidates.
This does not mean he will be the GOP nominee next year, but it does acknowledge that the former president now has the largest voter base in that party, and that none of his rivals have yet shown sufficient presence to defeat him in next year’s Republican primaries.
The word presence is important. The first debate in Milwaukee illustrated its significance. Those who qualified for the debate were articulate and had, for the most part, strong resumes and serious political experience. But none of them dominated the debate, although some of them were very aggressive and held the stage longer than the others.
The former president did not participate in the debate, but did a pre-recorded interview with Tucker Carlson on X (Twitter), and released it during the event in Milwaukee.
It is unclear what the ultimate impact of the four separate sets of Trump indictments — one in New York, one in Florida, one in the District of Columbia, and one in Georgia — will have on the upcoming primary races for the Republican nomination. Their initial impact, however, was to rally support for Mr. Trump among Republicans who have considered the criminal charges to be politically motivated and directed by the Biden administration and Democrats against the frontrunning GOP candidate.
Some commentators have suggested that the indictments were initiated by cynical Democrats who knew in advance that the prosecutions would enhance Trump’s chances of being nominated — their (possibly incorrect) assumption being that the former president would be the easiest GOP nominee to beat in November 2024.
This speculation was supported by earlier polling that had indicated a majority of voters overall would not vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election against President Biden.
This view, however, has become increasingly complicated by the continuing plunge in popularity of Biden, and his apparent physical and mental decline in his public appearances — resulting in a growing sense of alarm among Democrats, including pollsters, strategists, and officials, that the Biden-Harris ticket cannot defeat ANY ticket the GOP puts up in November. Now, Trump leads Biden in some hypothetical 2024 matchup polls.
The problem with speculating about this race five months before the first primaries, eleven months before the two national conventions, and fourteen months before Election Day, is that so much is likely to change in this volatile political environment.
Each week, for example, more prominent Democrats advocate a new liberal-progressive ticket for their party in 2024. The biggest prospective Biden challengers are so far holding back, but potentially serious candidates like California Governor Gavin Newsom are making themselves very visible, and would need little impetus to enter the race if the Biden-Harris ticket continues to flounder. It would take only one major figure such as Mr. Newsom to enter to trigger a flood of candidates and create an open, possibly bitter, contest.
While former President Trump now enjoys large leads in primary states, bolstered by reaction to his indictments, some state polls show those leads becoming smaller as the large number of GOP candidates become better known. Governor Ron DeSantis, whom many pundits predicted would mount a real challenge to Mr. Trump, has not seen his campaign take off as he and his supporters hoped it would, but he remains in double digits in most state polls.
Two events could alter the present political chemistry. Mr. Trump could make the kind of mistake that would hurt him with his base of voters, and Mr. DeSantis (or another candidate) could break out in a dramatic way through something he or she might say or do. With some GOP voters still uneasy about a third Trump nomination, and so much time remaining, this hypothetical turn of events is perhaps possible even if it does not now seem likely.
In any event, the current Trump “tower” remains on unprecedented, and therefore potentially shaky, ground as the legal and political scenarios play out.
In history, the Tower of Babel was destroyed, the Leaning Tower of Pisa still stands but is sinking into the ground, and the Eiffel Tower remains triumphal in place in Paris.
The fate of the Trump “tower,” that is, his ongoing high stakes electoral saga, is tantalizingly now unknown, as is the whole course of the 2024 presidential campaign, with its epic story yet to be fully told.
