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Tag: chief strategist

  • Stocks and bitcoin slide as nerves fray ahead of Nvidia earnings

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    Wall Street kicked off the week on a sour note, with stocks and bitcoin tumbling as a risk-off attitude spread through markets.The Dow closed lower by 557 points, or 1.18%. The broader S&P 500 fell 0.92%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.84%.Video above: Lawmakers try to crack down on scams using crypto ATMs with new billWall Street’s fear gauge, the VIX, jumped 13%. CNN’s Fear and Greed index traded in “extreme fear” and hit its lowest level since early April.Stocks fell on Monday as investors’ nerves intensified ahead of two key events this week: Nvidia (NVDA), the star of the artificial intelligence boom, is set to report earnings on Wednesday. And on Thursday, the September jobs report — long delayed because of the government shutdown — is set to be released.These two events will provide more insight about the issues that are “top of mind” for Wall Street, according to José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.Tech stocks have come under pressure this month as concerns linger about expensive valuations and enormous spending plans by big tech companies. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is down almost 5.5% since hitting a record high in late October.Investors are trying to discern whether the AI trade is on stable foundations, and whether the Federal Reserve will pause its interest rate-cutting cycle at its policy meeting in December.Meanwhile, bitcoin plunged on Monday to below $90,000 for the first time in seven months, erasing its gains for this year. The cryptocurrency has tanked more than 28% in just six weeks after it hit a record high above $126,000 in early October.Video below: Best Money Moves to Make Right Now in a Volatile Economy | Expert Financial AdviceTech and crypto-related stocks led the S&P 500 lower on Monday. Coinbase (COIN), a crypto exchange, fell 7%.The S&P 500 and Nasdaq on Monday dipped below their 50-day moving averages, according to FactSet. The 50-day moving average is a key threshold of support.”While the long-term uptrend is intact, we believe a corrective pullback/consolidation phase is already underway after the market’s six-month winning streak,” Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Sandler, said in a note.Stocks are coming off a volatile week. Tech stocks took a bruising last week before investors swooped in on Friday to buy the dip.Investors this week are gearing up for a potential market-moving event with Nvidia’s earnings. The chipmaker accounts for roughly 8% of the S&P 500’s market value. Nvidia shares fell 1.83% on Monday, weighing on the broader market.”The monthly jobs report would normally dominate this week’s economic calendar, but with the AI trade struggling the past couple of weeks, Nvidia’s earnings are once again looking like a key piece of the market’s momentum puzzle,” Chris Larkin, managing director at Morgan Stanley’s E-Trade, said in an email.The recent stock market rally is also being tested as investors adjust to the prospect that the Fed might pause its interest rate-cutting cycle at its policy meeting next month. Traders are pricing in a 45% chance that the Fed cuts rates in December, according to CME FedWatch. That’s down from a 94% chance one month ago.Stocks have rallied on optimism about Fed rate cuts. Nerves are mounting that the central bank may prioritize concerns about stubborn inflation.”Data releases starting this week should provide a clearer picture for one of the key risks over the coming weeks — the December Fed meeting,” Mohit Kumar, chief strategist and economist for Europe at Jefferies, said in a note.Investors this month have also rotated out of high-flying tech stocks and moved into sectors that have lagged behind and look relatively affordable.”This rotation is both expected and welcome, as it should unwind some of the frothiness … and allow this bull market the opportunity to catch its breath before resuming its advance,” Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research, said in a note.

    CNN —

    Wall Street kicked off the week on a sour note, with stocks and bitcoin tumbling as a risk-off attitude spread through markets.

    The Dow closed lower by 557 points, or 1.18%. The broader S&P 500 fell 0.92%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.84%.

    Video above: Lawmakers try to crack down on scams using crypto ATMs with new bill

    Wall Street’s fear gauge, the VIX, jumped 13%. CNN’s Fear and Greed index traded in “extreme fear” and hit its lowest level since early April.

    Stocks fell on Monday as investors’ nerves intensified ahead of two key events this week: Nvidia (NVDA), the star of the artificial intelligence boom, is set to report earnings on Wednesday. And on Thursday, the September jobs report — long delayed because of the government shutdown — is set to be released.

    These two events will provide more insight about the issues that are “top of mind” for Wall Street, according to José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.

    Tech stocks have come under pressure this month as concerns linger about expensive valuations and enormous spending plans by big tech companies. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is down almost 5.5% since hitting a record high in late October.

    Investors are trying to discern whether the AI trade is on stable foundations, and whether the Federal Reserve will pause its interest rate-cutting cycle at its policy meeting in December.

    Meanwhile, bitcoin plunged on Monday to below $90,000 for the first time in seven months, erasing its gains for this year. The cryptocurrency has tanked more than 28% in just six weeks after it hit a record high above $126,000 in early October.

    Video below: Best Money Moves to Make Right Now in a Volatile Economy | Expert Financial Advice

    Tech and crypto-related stocks led the S&P 500 lower on Monday. Coinbase (COIN), a crypto exchange, fell 7%.

    The S&P 500 and Nasdaq on Monday dipped below their 50-day moving averages, according to FactSet. The 50-day moving average is a key threshold of support.

    “While the long-term uptrend is intact, we believe a corrective pullback/consolidation phase is already underway after the market’s six-month winning streak,” Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Sandler, said in a note.

    Stocks are coming off a volatile week. Tech stocks took a bruising last week before investors swooped in on Friday to buy the dip.

    Investors this week are gearing up for a potential market-moving event with Nvidia’s earnings. The chipmaker accounts for roughly 8% of the S&P 500’s market value. Nvidia shares fell 1.83% on Monday, weighing on the broader market.

    “The monthly jobs report would normally dominate this week’s economic calendar, but with the AI trade struggling the past couple of weeks, Nvidia’s earnings are once again looking like a key piece of the market’s momentum puzzle,” Chris Larkin, managing director at Morgan Stanley’s E-Trade, said in an email.

    The recent stock market rally is also being tested as investors adjust to the prospect that the Fed might pause its interest rate-cutting cycle at its policy meeting next month. Traders are pricing in a 45% chance that the Fed cuts rates in December, according to CME FedWatch. That’s down from a 94% chance one month ago.

    Stocks have rallied on optimism about Fed rate cuts. Nerves are mounting that the central bank may prioritize concerns about stubborn inflation.

    “Data releases starting this week should provide a clearer picture for one of the key risks over the coming weeks — the December Fed meeting,” Mohit Kumar, chief strategist and economist for Europe at Jefferies, said in a note.

    Investors this month have also rotated out of high-flying tech stocks and moved into sectors that have lagged behind and look relatively affordable.

    “This rotation is both expected and welcome, as it should unwind some of the frothiness … and allow this bull market the opportunity to catch its breath before resuming its advance,” Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research, said in a note.

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  • ‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

    ‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

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    Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire.

    For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak softly about Trump and carry a sharp stick for Vivek Ramaswamy.” Recently, though, Haley has made a hard pivot.

    Read: What Nikki Haley (maybe) learned in New Hampshire

    Just two days after she came in (a distant) second to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, she began fundraising for the first time off his attacks on her—selling T-shirts with the slogan BARRED PERMANENTLY after the former president said that anyone who continues to support her will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” whatever that means.

    In the past week, Haley has been on a tear, calling Trump “totally unhinged,” “toxic,” “self-absorbed,” and lacking in “moral clarity.” Her campaign unleashed a new attack-ad series in which Trump and President Joe Biden are portrayed as two “grumpy old men” standing in the way of the next generation. And yesterday, Haley posted a gag photo of a Trump Halloween costume labeled “Weakest General Election Candidate Ever.” To paraphrase the words of the Democratic-primary candidate Marianne Williamson, Girlfriend, this is so on.

    Such an aggressive posture is new for Haley, and Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have applauded her for it. She should have been talking this way all along, some of her supporters argue. “If she started it sooner, she would’ve cut the lead in New Hampshire,” Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, told me. In his view, Haley thought she “had to play nice” to win over Trump voters: “But this ain’t a nice game.”

    Can Haley still achieve anything by playing hardball at this point? Things don’t look promising. Her bid to defeat Trump is already the longest of long shots, based on the polls coming out of virtually every state, including Haley’s own South Carolina. So what’s the point of changing things up? Why muster the courage to smack-talk Trump now, when the race seems all but over? I asked a number of political strategists and experts for their view, and pieced together a few plausible theories. (Neither the Haley nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.)

    1. Attacking Trump is easier now.
    The most obvious theory for Haley’s more combative rhetoric is that with only one other major candidate still in the primary, the task of drawing a direct contrast with Trump is much simpler. “If you have six people in a race and a couple are attacking a couple others, it’s hard to predict how that’s going to work in terms of driving your ballots,” David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican strategist, told me. “When it’s a multi-candidate field, you’ve got to tell your own story.” After Iowa, “that’s resolved,” he said, and so “she has no choice but to turn her attention to Trump.”

    The jabs are meant to draw Trump out—to pressure him to join her on a debate stage or to provoke a tantrum that turns off his potential voters and motivates her own. “She needs him to make a mistake,” Kochel said. “She needs some intervening activity, some dynamic that is not completely in her control.”

    Maybe this is a good moment for Haley to exploit Trump’s weakness with women voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Biden beats Trump with the support of women, a new Quinnipiac poll showed, and that gender gap appears to be growing. Last week, Haley dragged Trump over his defamation-case loss to E. Jean Carroll, in which he was ordered to pay $83 million in additional defamation damages to the woman whom he was previously found liable for defaming and sexually abusing. “Haley is running the Taylor Swift strategy in the primary,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s playing to the ‘Trump is toxic’ women’s vote.’” The pop star’s apparent potential to influence Americans, and especially women, to vote Democratic, coupled with the results of the Quinnipiac poll, represent “deep, underlying forces that need to be addressed,” Bannon said—something Haley will continue to seize on.

    2. Haley’s anti-Trump rhetoric represents the death throes of her campaign.
    Haley’s campaign has followed the same trajectory as several other Republicans’ efforts in the Trump era: They might have avoided attacking him directly at first, but when their prospects dimmed, they lashed out. Marco Rubio mocked Trump’s small hands just before dropping out of the race; Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar” at the tail end of his own campaign. “It seems like they all have consultants in their ear telling them if they take on Trump directly, they are going to crater support with the base, which is true,” Tim Miller, a political consultant and writer at the conservative outlet The Bulwark, told me. “Then, finally, when they’re up against the wall and in the final stages, they figure it’s worth a shot.”

    Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?

    Maybe ratcheting up the combativeness is a form of emotional catharsis. When I asked the Democratic strategist James Carville about Haley’s change in approach, he texted me that Haley “is tired, scared & pissed off.” Because she’s trailing Trump in her own state, “certain doom in SC is eating at her. NEVER discount the human element.” Haley now sounds a lot more like she did behind closed doors during the Trump administration, Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant, told me, citing conversations he’s had with former Haley staffers. “This is Nikki therapy,” he said. “She’s just having fun poking him in the eye, getting all her ya-yas out. It’s the most entertaining dead-cat bounce in history.”

    3. Haley is giving her donors what they want.
    Haley’s billionaire supporters adore this new, aggressively anti-Trump candidate, and they’re rewarding her with cash. “Nikki’s more aggressive posture toward Trump was welcomed as it is communicating the stark choice in front of the party,” Bill Berrien, the CEO of the manufacturer Pindel Global Precision, who hosted a fundraiser for Haley in New York, told The Washington Post. Cliff Asness, a co-founder of AQR Capital Management and a Haley donor, wrote on X that, in response to Trump’s attacks, he “may have to contribute more” to her.

    At least some of these funders are convinced that Haley still has a shot. “She’s got donors saying, ‘You have a credible campaign, and you never know when Trump is going to choke to death on a meatloaf,’” Murphy said. Whether or not Haley believes that, she’s going along with it. The odds that she might become the nominee through an act of God or a brokered convention, after all, are probably better than buying a Power Ball ticket. “It’s a clutching-at-straws thing, but she’s got the best straw in town to clutch on,” Murphy said. “Why the hell not? It’s free and fun.”

    4. Haley is looking to a post-Trump future.
    A few weeks ago, rumors circulated that Haley might be on Trump’s shortlist for vice president. If the decision, though unlikely, went her way, that could set her up to be Trump’s political heir. But Haley’s recent hostility toward Trump—and his splenetic response—have surely shut the door on that possibility. Instead, Haley is staking out her own territory.

    “She’s not done. She’s running for 2028,” Sarah Isgur, a senior editor at The Dispatch and a former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, told me. Trump has “changed her brand-thinking.” Instead of gunning for some sort of role in MAGA world, Haley can portray herself as the last person standing in the war against Trumpism—a position that many men before her have fought for and failed to achieve. If she can do that, she can consolidate a leadership future for herself, post-Trump, Isgur said.

    Haley will be able to say “I told you so” if Trump loses to Biden in November—or if he wins but then governs disastrously. She’ll be “the good conservative who tried to warn you,” Murphy said. This also means that after the race is over, she’ll have to lie low for a while, and not join other Trump rivals turned grovelers, including Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. She’s playing “the long-term game,” Murphy said.



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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

    The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

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    It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.

    Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.

    “It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.

    David Frum: Never again Trump

    Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.

    “At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.

    Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.

    Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.

    Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.

    Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.

    It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.

    Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”

    From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.

    But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.

    Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”

    Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.

    DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.

    Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.

    Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.

    Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.

    The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.

    Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?

    One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.

    Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.

    Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.

    Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.

    Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.

    But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.

    Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”

    Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.

    “I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. “Within so much of what we used to call the Republican establishment, there is still this denial” even after all these years of dealing with the former president “that Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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