Donald Trump, Again

The Biden strategy is succeeding. Democratic operatives, local prosecutors, lawfare activists, and the Biden White House have colluded to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy. A number of legal cases against Trump are under way. Liberal media support these prosecutions as honorable applications of the rule of law, necessary to save “our democracy.” The upshot: Trump’s support among Republican voters has increased. Results from Iowa and New Hampshire indicate that he will be the Republican nominee. Many political savants believe this outcome favors Democrats: The Orange Man’s capacity to turn off voters will pave the way for a Biden victory in November.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins has warned that cynical Democratic Party leaders and their media enablers have miscalculated. Their machinations have kept Trump in the public eye. More importantly, the orchestrated prosecutions have burnished his image as an outsider. And because we are living in a time when the American public is angry, alienated, restless, and eager to punish establishment leaders, Trump’s put-upon-outsider image turns out to be a valuable asset.

America’s liberal elites (and their Never-Trump allies on the right) are playing a dangerous game. Having learned nothing from 2016, our establishment is framing the upcoming election as a referendum on its own leadership. As 2024 began, The Atlantic ran a special issue warning that a Trump victory would usher in an authoritarian regime; the New Yorker evoked the fascist threat with a cover cartoon of Trump goose-stepping in a military uniform. The message is clear. It’s either the good people, the smart people, the people who bought into being today’s wonderful, inclusive, innovative, prosperous world (Diversity is our strength!)—or the disastrous ascendancy of the bad people, the insurrectionists, the authoritarians, the fascists, the racists (Jim Crow 2.0!).

Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg insists (again and again) that Trump is a clear and present threat to all that is good and decent. The New York Times and Washington Post run article after article warning that Trump will undermine the “rules-based international order” and prevent the free movement of labor, goods, and capital. (The Wall Street Journal often echoes this charge.) Trump will encourage racists and xenophobes. He will derail the great project of constructing, for the first time in human history, a genuinely “open” society, one that strives toward ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. No human being is illegal!

By framing Trump’s campaign in this way, the most powerful people in America are taking a grave risk. Our elite are ensuring that voters will go to the polls knowing that a vote for Trump is a vote against their leadership, against them. What are they thinking? Have they forgotten the endless wars, the uncontrolled border, the deindustrialized heartland, the epidemic of overdose deaths, drag queen story hours, concerned parents deemed domestic terrorists, and homeless encampments? Harvard, the cynosure of elite pride and aspiration, made a plagiarizing social-justice hack its president. Do the high-minded folks currently cheering Trump’s indictments not realize that John Q. Public recognizes that there are rules for ordinary people and rules for elites and their favored clients? (Two lawyers who tossed a Molotov cocktail into a police car during BLM unrest in New York received sympathetic coverage in the New York Times and fifteen- and twelve-month sentences. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes got eighteen years for his involvement in the Capitol riot.) It’s hard to know which is more damning in the framing (yet again!) of the upcoming election as a choice between the Responsible and the Deplorable: the arrogance or the stupidity.

Voters have many hopes and fears. It had been my wish that Ron DeSantis would lead a new generation into power on the right. But very nearly everyone agrees on the role that Donald Trump plays in our increasingly decadent political culture. He is Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. His election—a second time—against every effort of elite-generated propaganda, massive campaign expenditure, manipulation of mail-in voting, and relentless legal warfare would undermine our already unpopular and wobbling system of power and privilege. Goldberg and his friends view this destabilizing role, so central to Trump’s appeal, as prima facie disqualifying. Their governance is good and benevolent. They rely on knowledge and expertise. They follow the science! Any deviation from or opposition to their ascendancy must be evil and wicked. We can’t have ignorant people, unqualified people, running our country.

In my estimation, a Trump victory in November is likely. It is true that outside his circle of devoted followers he is not a beloved candidate. But a majority of Americans are bitter about the current state of our country. Goldberg and his allies, both Democrat and Republican, repeatedly insist that it’s either them or Trump. Given this choice, a surprising number of voters will opt for Trump. His margin of victory will increase in proportion to how many times Joe Biden conjures the ghost of Bull Connor and Washington Post columnists evoke Hitler. Holman Jenkins is right: Our hapless establishment, which has made a mess of so many things over the last thirty years, will ensure the election of Donald Trump.