For those of us who very much want to see Donald Trump defeated in November by the widest possible margin, the news on Friday afternoon that former Vice President Mike Pence would not be endorsing his former boss seemed encouraging. Not that Pence commands a large faction of voters. Given that he dropped out of the Republican presidential-primary race late last year after failing to rise above the lower single digits, there’s no reason to assume that he does. Still, every prominent, normie Republican who rejects Trump moves us further down the road.
But toward what?
A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence’s refusal to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure,” as the fashionable parlance has it) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Bill Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, Dan Coats, John Bolton, H. R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional former Cabinet members, present and former members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps guarantee Trump’s loss in November.
But is this really true? I’m quite willing to believe that some measurable number of Reaganite Republicans may be persuaded to stay home, or to vote for someone other than Trump, on Election Day. (One wonders if somewhat more of them might have been moved to do so had Pence called the post–January 6 Trump unfit for the presidency, instead of focusing on Trump’s ideological heterodoxy.) But this will doom Trump’s chances only if he fails to pick up support from different sorts of voters to replace the ones he loses from the (former) GOP mainstream. Is it possible that the very act of Republicans of the Reagan and Bush eras distancing themselves from Trump could burnish the former president’s credentials as a man seeking to transform his party in a populist direction?
The Trump presidency was peculiar. On the one hand, this highly irregular candidate who attacked the Republican establishment and dissented from the party’s long-standing policy commitments on a range of issues managed to win the nomination and the presidency. He also brought with him to the White House people such as Steve Bannon, who actively wanted to blow up the GOP’s electoral coalition in order to transform it into a “workers’ party.”
On the other hand, these radicals were severely outnumbered in the administration by holdovers from the prior dispensation of the Republican Party. These GOP normies pretty much ran the show; their primary accomplishments were helping ensure a large corporate tax cut and the appointment of staunchly conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Most of the Trump administration’s other, right-populist initiatives—such as anti-internationalism in foreign policy and funding the construction of a wall along the southern border—were blocked or slow-walked for four years.
When it came time for Trump’s reelection bid, in 2020, enough upper-income, highly educated, suburban Republicans defected to Joe Biden for Trump to lose. One path toward Republican victory this coming November would involve trying to win back those suburban voters by portraying Trump as a safe alternative to Biden, who will mainly aim to get the economy back to where it was before the coronavirus pandemic sent the country into a tailspin. If this were the Trump 2024 electoral strategy, Pence’s refusal to endorse the former president might be a serious problem for the campaign—because it would signal to like-minded voters that Trump doesn’t deserve their support.
Equally possible, though, is that Pence’s refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party that Trump and Bannon had originally hoped to build eight years ago—a workers’ party that could more precisely be described as a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.
The evidence in favor of such an evolution of the GOP has been mixed over the past few election cycles, but polling so far in this cycle has pointed to something bigger going on, with significant signs of a “racial realignment” under way. If such a shift proves real in November, it could well turn out to have been enabled by Pence, Haley, and others abandoning Trump over his divergences from Reaganite conservatism. The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer particularly popular with less educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.
I’m not suggesting that this is a ticket to a Trump victory in November. All of Trump’s many liabilities remain. He’s despised by tens of millions of Americans. He’s been indicted in multiple jurisdictions. He faces dozens of felony charges. He attempted to overturn the 2020 election by spreading delusional lies about election fraud that he continues to affirm. He incited a riot that disrupted the national legislature as it tried to certify the results of the election, making him the first president in American history to attempt a coup to remain in power.
All of this and so much more will make the 2024 election a challenge for Trump. But the very fact that polls show the election is close, even tilting against Biden, points to a surprisingly high floor under the former president—higher than was the case in either 2016 or 2020. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s on track to win. But it does suggest that the GOP’s new electoral coalition is stable and possibly growing—even as Reaganite Republican grandees express constant outright disgust at the man who is somehow behind this stability and growth.
Whether or not Trump manages to win, we’re likely to see the continued evolution of the Republican base away from what Pence, Haley, and others would like it to be. As I’ve argued before, the relatively few voters who pine for a Reagan restoration aren’t going to find it in the present-day Republican Party. They might not fully find it in the Democratic Party of Joe Biden either. But at least there, they can make common cause with centrist factions open to the Reaganite mix of low taxes, liberal immigration, free trade, and hawkish internationalism combined with a civil religion of American exceptionalism. In the post-Trump GOP, such views are actively unwelcome (aside from the tax cuts).
That’s because a sizable portion of Americans who haven’t graduated from college, of whatever race or ethnicity, have different priorities—and, more and more, they form the base of the GOP. Those voters prefer to think of the nation as an armed camp; they want to see government power used to advance what they conceive as their own and their country’s interests, and they like that message conveyed in a muscular style of trash-talking vulgarity and humor. The old high-minded, edifying, and earnest Reagan speeches that portrayed America as a shining city on a hill, with the duty to defend democracies abroad, leave these voters cold. In this respect, “America First” really does work well as a slogan for the Republican Party now emerging, eight years after Trump first captured it.
If Trump loses in November, none of this is likely to change. The new Republican base isn’t going to reverse course and suddenly decide it loves Pence and Haley after all. The old Reaganite approach is a dead end. Instead, the party will finally begin to look seriously for a Trump successor. Ron DeSantis auditioned for that role over the past year, and it didn’t work out; the voters decided they still preferred Trump himself. DeSantis will probably try again, but he’ll be joined by many others next time. (Conspicuous among them is J. D. Vance, who’s spending much of his first term as the junior senator from Ohio testing out elements of a right-populist agenda for a post-Trump Republican Party.)
No matter who Trump’s successor turns out to be, that person will be someone who speaks the language of non-college-educated voters and views the world as they do. The GOP is now a vehicle for right-wing populism. Pence expressing dissatisfaction with this fact likely does more to confirm the completion of this transformation than it does to scuttle the new GOP’s political ambitions.
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ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
Suddenly, it just tumbled out: “Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”
That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”
Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.
Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.
All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.
How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.
One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday… but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”
At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”
[Here it comes]
“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”
“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.
The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.
The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”
However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?
It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.
In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.
The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.
The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.
But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.
“Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”
There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.
But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.
Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.
To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”
David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.
The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.
The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”
The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamy.”
Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.
Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.
DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.
Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.
But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.
In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”
Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”
Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.
The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.
When Donald Trump appeared last week in a Washington, D.C., courtroom for his arraignment on federal election charges, the presiding judge gave the former president a few simple instructions for staying out of jail while he awaited trial.
Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants. But then Upadhyaya added a warning that seemed tailored a bit more specifically to the blustery politician standing before her: “I want to remind you,” the judge said, “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice.”
When Upadhyaya asked Trump if he understood, he nodded. Fewer than 24 hours later, Trump appeared to flout that very warning—in its spirit if not its letter—by threatening his would-be foes in an all-caps post on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Over the following week, he attacked a potential witness in the case, former Vice President Mike Pence (“delusional”); Special Counsel Jack Smith (“deranged”); and the federal judge assigned to oversee his case, Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama (Smith’s “number one draft pick,” in Trump’s words).
Trump’s screeds highlight a challenge that will now fall to Chutkan to confront: constraining a defendant who’s both a former president and a leading candidate to take the White House—and who seems bent on making a mockery of his legal process.
“She’s in a tight spot,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, says of Chutkan. Conceivably, the judge could find Trump in contempt of court and toss him in jail for violating the terms of his pretrial release. But even though in theory Trump should be treated like any other defendant, former prosecutors told me that he was exceedingly unlikely to go to prison over his pretrial statements. And Trump probably knows it. (Whether Trump will go to prison if he is convicted is another hotly debated matter.)
“I’m sure she would be very reluctant to do that, in light of the fact that he’s running for president,” McQuade told me. “So I think as a result, he has a very long leash, and I think he will simply dare her to revoke [his freedom] by saying the most outrageous things he can.”
At a pretrial hearing today, Chutkan issued her first warnings to Trump’s lawyers about their client, according to reporting by Steven Portnoy of ABC News and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “Mr. Trump, like every American, has a First Amendment right to free speech,” she said. “But that right is not absolute.” She said Trump’s presidential candidacy would not factor into her decisions, and she rebuffed suggestions by a Trump lawyer, John Lauro, that the former president had a right to respond to his political opponents in the heat of a campaign. “He’s a criminal defendant,” she reminded him. “He’s going to have restrictions like every single other defendant.”
Chutkan said she would be scrutinizing Trump’s words carefully, and she concluded with what she called “a general word of caution”: “Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel,” the judge said, “can threaten the process.” She added: “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
Chutkan had called the hearing to determine whether to bar Trump and his lawyers from publicly disclosing evidence provided to them by prosecutors—a standard part of the pretrial process. The evidence includes millions of pages of documents and transcribed witness interviews from a year-long investigation, and the government argued that Trump or his lawyers could undermine the process by making them public before the trial. Despite her warnings to Trump’s team, she sided with the defense’s request to narrow the restrictions on what they could disclose, and she did not add other constraints on what he could say about the case.
Yet the effect of Chutkan’s courtroom comments was to put Trump on notice. If he continues to flout judicial warnings, she could place a more formal gag order on him, the ex-prosecutors said. And if he ignores that directive, she would likely issue additional warnings before considering a criminal-contempt citation. A further escalation, McQuade said, would be to hold a hearing and order Trump to show cause for why he should not be held in contempt. “Maybe she gives him a warning, and she gives him another chance and another chance, but eventually, her biggest hammer” is to send him to jail.
Judges have sanctioned high-profile defendants in other cases recently. In 2019, the Trump ally Roger Stone was barred from posting on major social-media platforms after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that he had violated a gag order she had issued. (Stone did honor this directive.) The Trump foe Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her case against Trump and briefly considered challenging him for the presidency, was jailed shortly before his trial on extortion charges after prosecutors accused him of disregarding financial terms of his bail. “He was just scooped up and thrown into solitary,” one of his former lawyers, E. Danya Perry, told me. She said that Avenatti was thrown into the same jail cell that had held El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord. (Avenatti later claimed that his treatment was payback ordered by then–Attorney General Bill Barr; the prison warden said he was placed in solitary confinement because of “serious concerns” about his safety, and Barr has called Avenatti’s accusation “ridiculous.”)
Neither Stone nor Avenatti, however, is as high-profile as Trump, arguably the most famous federal defendant in American history. And Perry doubts that Chutkan would imprison him before a trial. Trump has ignored warnings from judges overseeing the various civil cases brought against him over the years and has never faced tangible consequences. “He has done it so many times and he has managed to skate so many times that he certainly is emboldened,” Perry said.
Indeed, Trump has also suggested he would ignore a gag order from Chutkan. “I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment rights,” Trump told a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
Trump’s political motives for vilifying his prosecutors and once again portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt are obvious: He’s trying to rile up his Republican base. Trump also seems to be executing something of a legal strategy in his public statements about the trial. He’s called Washington, D.C., “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment,” possibly reasoning that these remarks will force the court to agree to his request to shift the trial to a venue with a friendlier population of potential jurors, such as West Virginia.
That’s less likely to work, according to the former prosecutors I interviewed. “I’d be shocked to see that be successful,” Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who heads the anti-corruption advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “It’s sort of like the old joke about the child who kills his mother and father and then asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. I just don’t see a court going for that.”
Trump’s attacks also present a problem for Smith, the special counsel. On one hand, prosecutors have a clear interest in ensuring that their witnesses do not feel intimidated; on the other, Smith could feel that trying to silence Trump would play into the former president’s victim narrative. Justice Department prosecutors alerted Chutkan to Trump’s “I’m coming after you” post in a court filing, and during today’s hearing they voiced concerns that if not restricted, Trump could disclose evidence to benefit his campaign. (A Trump spokesperson said the former president’s warning was “the definition of political speech,” and that it referred to “special interest groups and Super PACs” opposing his candidacy.) But Smith’s team did not ask Chutkan to fully gag Trump or even admonish him. “You see the prosecutors being very, very restrained,” Bookbinder said. “With a lot of defendants who were bad-mouthing the prosecutor and witnesses, they would have immediately gone in and asked for an order for the defendant to stop doing that.”
Bookbinder described the citation of Trump’s post as “a brushback pitch” by the government, a signal that they are watching the former president’s public statements closely. But like Chutkan, Smith might be reluctant to push the matter very far. Fighting with Trump over a gag order could distract from where the government wants to focus the case—on Trump’s alleged crimes—and it could indulge his desire to drag out the trial, Bookbinder noted. But the special counsel has to weigh those concerns against the possibility that an out-of-control defendant could jeopardize the safety of prosecutors and witnesses. “My strong suspicion is that Jack Smith doesn’t want to go there,” Bookbinder said. “I think at some point he may have little choice.”
Vivek Ramaswamy is a tall man with tall hair. And last week, when he stood in front of a crowd in Iowa wearing a black T-shirt under a black blazer, he looked like Johnny Bravo delivering a TED Talk.
“We’re not gonna be angry tonight,” Ramaswamy told a few hundred Iowa voters before calmly explaining his theory of how America got to be so politically divided. The country is going through a national identity crisis, he explained, and people are turning toward “racial wokeism” and “radical gender ideology” to fill the emptiness inside. It’s Republicans’ job to fill that void, Ramaswamy said, “with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes the woke poison to irrelevance.”
The 37-year-old businessman turned political candidate, who seemed to appear out of nowhere on the campaign trail, is now suddenly everywhere—including tied for third in GOP primary polling and, on Thursday night, at a campaign stop in the Des Moines metro area. The setting was industrial chic: an ultra-modern flooring-and-appliance store with exposed piping, broad glass windows, and huge whirring fans overhead. The crowd of Republican voters mingled between shiny model stoves and porcelain-tile displays, waiting to hear from Ramaswamy and a lineup of other speakers including Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds.
As Ramaswamy had promised, the evening’s vibe was not pessimistic or angry. He and the other speakers echoed some familiar Trumpian culture-war and “America First” themes. But the event lacked the gloom and doom of a Trump rally; there was no ominous string music or rambling soliloquy of personal grievance. Clearly an appetite, however small, exists for Ramaswamy’s bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism.
The voters there may once have liked or even loved Trump, but honestly, they’re a little tired of his negativity. They know that Trump is the current primary front-runner; they might even vote for him again. But Iowa voters, who’ve long relished their power of first presidential pick, like to keep their options open, and they’re intrigued by Ramaswamy. “His youthful optimism is a really good thing,” Rob Johnson, a lawyer from Des Moines, told me. He voted for Trump twice, but he’s ready for something new. Trump “brings an element into [politics] that is not productive. You get more with an ounce of sugar than you do with a pound of vinegar.”
Ramaswamy, who was born and raised in Cincinnati, is the kind of entrepreneur whose actual job you can’t quite put your finger on. He got his law degree from Yale and founded a biopharma company called Roivant Sciences in 2014. He’s been brawling in the culture-war trenches for a while. In 2022, he started an investment firm explicitly opposed to the ESG framework, which involves incorporating environmental, social, and governance issues into business strategy. He’s written books called Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and, more recently, Nation of Victims, which urges Americans to “pursue excellence” and “reject victimhood culture.”
The Millennial candidate is a bit like the GOP version of Andrew Yang: a get-up-and-go business bro who does something vague in the new economy, and who seemed to wake up one day and ask himself, Why not run for president? Ramaswamy has been all over Iowa since announcing his candidacy 12 weeks ago on Tucker Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show. A national CBS poll of likely GOP primary voters showed Ramaswamy tied with former Vice President Mike Pence for third place behind Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—albeit a distant third, at 5 percent.
On Thursday, Ramaswamy was introduced by a parade of joyful Republican culture warriors, who stood onstage while a loop of Fox News clips played from a projector in the back of the room. The Dallas County GOP chair performatively discarded an empty box of Bud Lite, a brand that’s drawn the ire of conservatives for its partnership with a transgender influencer. And the crowd applauded wildly as former State Senator Jake Chapman checked off a list of successful or in-progress Republican projects: banning obscene material in school libraries; pushing for a statewide bill banning abortion after six weeks; Don Lemon getting the axe over at CNN. The cheers rang loudest for the last.
Ramaswamy’s stump speech was a plea for people to resist the “cults” of race, gender, and climate—and a call to redefine what it means to be an American. That redefinition would apparently involve a few constitutional amendments and a lot of executive power. As president, he told the crowd, he’d end affirmative action and shut down the Department of Education. He’d boost the national Republican Party by telling Americans to “drill, frack, burn coal, and embrace nuclear.” He’d send the military to patrol the southern border instead of defending “somebody else’s border in God knows where.” He’d shut down the FBI and give a gun to every adult in Taiwan to defend themselves against China. He’d prohibit young people from voting unless they performed national service or passed a citizenship test. He’d ban TikTok for kids younger than 16.
Ramaswamy left his listeners with a rosy takeaway: “The bipartisan consensus in this country right now is that we are a nation in decline. I actually think we’re a little young. We’re going through our own version of adolescence, figuring out who we’re really going to be.”
The New York Times has called Ramaswamy a “smooth-talking Republican who’d rule by fiat,” and the candidate was proud enough of the headline to put it on his website. At the Iowa event, nobody seemed alarmed by his plans for the country. On the contrary, they were excited. They’d come to the event expecting a rote political speech from a random nobody; instead, they got a grab bag of new ideas and a blast of energy they haven’t been seeing on the national political stage, where the current president is 80 and the former is 76.
“I was very impressed,” Ree Foster, a two-time Trump voter from West Des Moines, told me. “I like Vivek’s attitude much better than Trump’s.” Tate Snodgrass, a 24-year-old from Burlington, remains a Trump fan. Still, he heard something from Ramaswamy that he hasn’t from Trump. “Vivek is like, ‘I don’t even care about the political parties. This is an American ideal,’ which I found really appealing,” Snodgrass told me. “I wasn’t expecting to be wowed—but he wowed me.”
Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, spoke before a mostly white crowd, in an overwhelmingly white state, and received a notably warm reception. Unlike the Democratic Party, which has shuffled the order of its primary season and demoted the Iowa caucus, Iowa Republicans have kept their first-place spot in the nomination process. Some are confident that Hawkeye State voters can work magic for Ramaswamy the way they did for the little-known outsider candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976—or Barack Obama in 2008.
Still, Ramaswamy is a long shot to win the primary; most GOP voters back the former president, who leads by double digits. Although DeSantis is still polling in second place, the conventional wisdom that the Florida governor is the natural heir to Trump has deflated in recent weeks, given his marked deficit of charisma on the campaign trail. But Ramaswamy’s surprisingly high numbers suggest that maybe a shinier, younger, and more animated “America First”–style politics can still be competitive—or at least disruptive—in the age of Trump.
“Our country is being destroyed by stupid people,” former President Donald Trump declared during a CNN town hall tonight, shortly after he endorsed defaulting on the national debt.
Trump remains without shame. Neither impeachment nor indictment nor arraignment nor a barely day-old verdict against him in a civil suit can change the fact that he’s still leading the field of Republican presidential candidates—comfortably.
During tonight’s hour-plus live broadcast from New Hampshire, Trump steamrolled over the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, at one point calling her a “nasty” person—an echo of his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. Collins did her best to fact-check the former president, but her efforts consistently fell short. Trump’s ability to disgorge words is unparalleled. She tried to cut him off, but he battled through it.
Tonight, Trump rattled off myriad conspiracy theories about voter fraud and claimed, as he had at CPAC, that he could end the war in Ukraine in a quick 24 hours. He painted the January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as a martyr and called the Capitol Police officer who shot her a “thug.” He referred to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as a “crazy woman.” He repeatedly denigrated the writer E. Jean Carroll, who was just awarded $5 million in damages after a jury found that he defamed and sexually assaulted her. Trump repeated his earlier claims not to know her, calling her a “whack job.”
But will it matter? Has it ever mattered before?
Trump is currently leading both the incumbent, President Joe Biden, and the top Republican alternative, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, in the polls. Though the 2024 election is still a long way off, the campaign is officially under way—such was the network’s justification for tonight’s town hall. Many observers on social media objected to the fact that it happened at all.
On set in New Hampshire, Trump was speaking not just to the country, but to a roomful of undecided voters. Most of them seemed eager to applaud and giggle along with the former president, whom nearly everyone addressed as “Mr. President.” He’s still the star, the draw, the showman. When he theatrically pulled papers out of his breast pocket, the crowd hooted. He teased a few 2024 talking points: The economy? Stinks. Inflation? A disaster. Afghanistan? “The single most embarrassing moment in the history of this country.”
And then there’s the topic of January 6. The laughably big question going into the next election is whether a president who incited a violent mob and tried to stage a coup in lieu of orchestrating a peaceful transfer of power can once again be president. Has Trump taken the past two years to reflect on his actions? Has he been humbled? Chastened? Of course not.
Tonight, Trump doubled down on his claim that former Vice President Mike Pence should have overturned the results of the 2020 election. He said he was inclined to pardon “many” of the January 6 rioters, bemoaning that “they’re living in hell right now.” He referred to these insurrectionists as “great people,” a subtle callback to his comments in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which he claimed there were “very fine people” on both sides.
Next month marks eight years since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. Hardly anyone in the media seemed to know how to properly cover him then. CNN was among the networks that used to carry his campaign rallies live. Tonight’s town hall, despite Collins’s admirable attempts at pushback, felt like a regression to that earlier era. Even some of Trump’s lines felt ominously familiar. “If I don’t win, this country is going to be in big trouble,” he said. Are we really about to do this all over again?
After his historic indictment was announced Thursday night, former President Donald Trump reacted with his characteristic cool and precision: “These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America.” Presumably this was a typo, and he meant INDICTED. But the immediate joining of arms around the martyr was indeed a perfect indication of precisely who the Republicans are right now.
“When Trump wins, THESE PEOPLE WILL PAY!!” Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas vowed.
“If they can come for him, they can come for anyone,” added Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona—or at least come for anyone who has allegedly paid $130,000 in hush money to a former porn-star paramour (and particularly anyone who allegedly had unprotected sex with her shortly after his third wife had given birth).
As usual, the Republicans’ latest rush to umbrage on behalf of Trump, before the indictment is even unsealed, was imbued with its own meaning—namely, about what the party has allowed itself to become in service to him. Trump is no longer just Republicans’ unmoveable leader; he is their everyman. His life is not some spectacularly corrupt and immoral web—but rather his victimization has become a proxy for their own imagined mistreatment.
And soon enough, Trump has promised, he will be their “retribution.” He is their patron crybaby.
The GOP’s ongoing willingness to fuse itself to Trump’s deranged and slippery character has been its most defining feature for years. The question is why it continues, after all these embarrassments and election defeats. And why Republicans, at long last, don’t use the former president’s mounting milestones of malfeasance as a means of setting themselves free from their orange albatross.
The popular assumption among Republicans that Trump’s indictment strengthens him politically shows how cowed they all still are. Yes, Trump’s indictment is “unprecedented,” as his defenders keep reminding us. But this is not necessarily flattering to the former president. They perceive him to be invulnerable, and he behaves as such. In their continued awe, they see their only choice as continued capitulation.
There is, of course, an alternate response: the exact opposite. “My fellow Americans, I am personally against paying hush money to porn stars. Maybe I am naive or even, forgive me, a bit conservative in how I choose to live my life. But it is my personal view that our leaders, especially those seeking our highest office, should not be serial liars, should not be subject to multiple state and federal investigations, and should not call for the termination of the Constitution in order to re-install themselves as president against the democratic will of the American people.”
In some long-ago Republican universe, there would in fact be a dash to condemn the former president’s words and conduct. This is not who we are, some might say, or try to claim. Sure, there could be some old-fashioned political opportunism involved here. (It wouldn’t be the first time!) But what politician wouldn’t seize such an opening to score points?
Instead, the response from the GOP’s putative leaders was as predictable as the indictment news itself. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who supposedly represents the Republicans’ most promising possible break from Trump in 2024, seized the chance to pander his way back into the old tent. He vowed that Florida would “not assist in an extradition request” that might come from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office is responsible for the indictment. DeSantis called the indictment “un-American” and dismissed Bragg as a “Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney” (bonus points for Ron, getting Soros in there).
DeSantis also cited the “political agenda” behind the indictment. Or “witch hunt,” as it was decried by distinguished elder statesmen and women such as Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and George Santos, among others. Gee, where do they learn such phrases?
Former Vice President Mike Pence announced on CNN that he was “outraged” by the “unprecedented indictment of a former president.” (Pence, of course, expressed far more “outrage” over Trump’s predicament than he ever publicly did over his former boss leaving him to potentially be hanged at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.) Meanwhile, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, one of Trump’s few official 2024 challengers, rejected Bragg’s move as “more about revenge than it is about justice.” Senator Tim Scott, another possible presidential rival, condemned Bragg as a “pro-criminal New York DA” who has “weaponized the law against political enemies.”
No one knows yet how solid Bragg’s case against Trump is. But there are simple alternatives to this ritual circling of the withering wagons every time Trump lands himself in even deeper trouble. “We need to wait on the facts and for our American system of justice to work like it does for thousands of Americans every day,” Asa Hutchinson, the Republican former governor of Arkansas, said in a statement, offering one such alternative.
Or, speaking to the matter at hand, “being indicted never helps anybody,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said recently on ABC’s This Week. In a normal world, this would represent the ultimate duh statement. But among today’s Republicans, Christie was making himself an outlier.
In the early stages of the 2024 Republican primary, Christie has been the rare figure to step into a “lane” that’s been left strangely wide open. Christie dropped into New Hampshire on Monday and continued to tease the notion that he might run for president again himself. He pummeled Trump while doing so—and sure, good for Christie, I guess. Better several years late than never.
He makes for an imperfect messenger, this onetime Trump toady of Trenton. My elite political instincts lead me to suspect Christie will not go on to become our 46th president. But his feisty drop into Manchester was constructive nonetheless. “When you put yourself ahead of our democracy as president of the United States, it’s over,” Christie told a receptive crowd at Saint Anselm College, referring to Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat in 2020 and subsequent efforts to sabotage the transfer of power. I found myself nodding along to Christie’s words, and willing to overlook, for now at least, his past record of bootlicking. If nothing else, Christie knows Trump well and understands his tender spots.
You don’t always get the pugilists you want. Especially when the likes of DeSantis, Pence, Haley, et al., have shown no appetite for the job. The leading contenders to beat Trump in the primary have offered, to this point, only the most flaccid critiques of the former president, who—perhaps not coincidentally—seems to be only expanding his lead in the (very) early polling.
If Trump has demonstrated one thing in his political career—dating to his initial cannonball into the pool of the 2016 campaign—it is that he thrives in the absence of resistance. In his initial foray, none of Trump’s chief Republican rivals, including Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, bothered to take him on until he was well ensconced as the front-runner. Christie was himself a towering titan of timidity in that campaign. He dropped out after finishing sixth in the New Hampshire primary and immediately led the charge to Trump’s backside.
This time around, DeSantis, viewed by many Trump-weary Republicans as the top contingency candidate, has barely said a critical word about the former president. Trump, in turn, has been pulverizing the Florida man for months, dismissing him as an “average governor.”
Meanwhile, Pence has managed only to rebuke Trump at a private dinner of Washington journalists. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a favorite of many Republican donors and consultants, recently told Politico that he prefers leaders who can “disagree with people without being disagreeable.” He then summarized what sets him apart from Trump. “We just have different styles,” Youngkin concluded. Ah yes, if only Trump had a more agreeable “style,” everything would be cool.
Or maybe Republicans should consider a change in “style.” The delicate deference they continue to afford Trump—through two impeachments, repeatedly poor election showings, and (at least) one indictment—seems only to have solidified his hold over them.
Campaigns are supposed to be “disagreeable” sometimes, right? Especially when the face of your party is about to become a mug shot.
Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.
Not so this year. The only Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) officially trying to oust Biden is the former president he defeated in 2020. Trump announced his third White House run in November and then barely bothered to campaign for the next two months before holding relatively small-scale events in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. Trump will finally get some company next week, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, plans to kick off her campaign in Charleston. More Republicans could soon jump into the presidential pool. But the 2024 campaign has gotten off to a decidedly slow start, and the first weeks of 2023 have brought a rare reprieve from what has become known—with some derision—as the permanent campaign. This pause is not the result of some collective cease-fire; it’s what happens when you have a former president who lost reelection but still inspires fear in his party, along with a Democratic incumbent—the oldest to ever serve—who is not exactly itching to campaign.
Even New Hampshire—normally one of the first states to welcome would-be presidents—has been subdued. “Other than Trump, I can’t think of a leading person being here for the last couple of months,” Raymond Buckley, the longtime chair of the state’s Democratic Party, told me. He said he’s used the lull to prioritize party building, “instead of constantly focusing on one Republican senator or governor after another.”
The same is true in Iowa, that other presidential proving ground with a year-round appetite for stump speeches. “It’s pretty quiet on the western front,” David Oman, a Republican strategist and former co-chair of the Iowa state GOP, told me. As my colleague McKay Coppins recently reported, most of the Republicans who want the party to nominate someone other than Trump are, once again, reluctant to actually do anything about it. Trump’s potential GOP rivals have been similarly shy about taking him on; until Haley put out word about her announcement last week, no one in the emerging field—which could include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—was willing to be the first target of the barrage of insults and invective Trump would surely hurl their way.
The momentary quietude has dampened any pressure for Biden to shift back into campaign mode, and he’s in no rush anyway. Tuesday’s State of the Union address will likely yield even more performance reviews than usual, as pundits and viewers alike judge the toll that Biden’s advancing age has taken on his oratory. As for the substance of his speech, White House officials told me Biden will continue the project he began months ago: promoting the accomplishments of his first two years in office, especially his bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that he signed last summer.
In the absence of a fully formed GOP presidential field, Biden has been content to use the new House Republican majority as a foil—adopting a strategy that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama employed after Democrats lost power in Congress during their first terms. Biden has vowed to protect programs such as Medicare and Social Security from GOP budget cuts; refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling (although the White House said last week he’d entertain “separate” conversations on deficit reduction); and eagerly highlighted ill-fated GOP proposals to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent national sales tax.
Yet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy seated behind the president on the House rostrum for the first time, Biden is expected to stress conciliation over confrontation. “The president will once again amplify his belief that Democrats and Republicans can work together,” a White House official told me, speaking anonymously to preview a speech that hasn’t been finalized, “as they did in the last two years and as he is committed to doing with this new Congress to get big things done on behalf of the American people.”
Biden allies expect the president to formally announce his reelection bid sometime after the State of the Union, but they note that could still be months away. Such a wait isn’t unusual for incumbents, who don’t need to introduce themselves to the electorate and generally want to be seen as focused on governing. But no president since Ronald Reagan has faced as much uncertainty about whether he would seek a second term. (Then the oldest president, Reagan was eight years younger in 1983 than the 80-year-old Biden is now.) Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointedly referenced a reelection bid as he departed the White House last week, telling Biden he looked forward to supporting him “when you run for president in 2024.” But other White House officials routinely affix the qualifier “if he runs” to discussions about a potential campaign, suggesting it remains less than a sure thing.
Aiding Biden is the fact that no Democrats of note (besides Marianne Williamson) have made any moves to challenge him for the nomination, and the president’s allies are operating under the assumption that he will have the field to himself. “I would be shocked at this point if this becomes a competitive primary,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me.
The bigger question is how many Republicans will challenge Biden knowing they’ll have to get through Trump first—and when they’ll see fit to jump in. GOP officials told me they expect Haley’s announcement to prompt others to enter the race soon. But Trump clearly froze the field for a while. All through 2021 and most of 2022, Buckley told me, “rarely a week went by without a major visit” to New Hampshire from a White House aspirant. “It all came to a grinding halt once Trump announced,” he said. Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party chair in Iowa, told me that the first months of 2021—the brief period after January 6 when Trump’s political future was in doubt—were busier for GOP hopefuls than this past January, just a year before the caucuses.
For most of American history, the observation that barely anyone was campaigning more than a year and a half before the election would be entirely unremarkable. Only in this century has a two-year campaign for a four-year term in the White House become the norm. (As recently as 1992, the governor of a small southern state declared his candidacy only 14 months before the election, and he did just fine.)
For most of the country, this respite from presidential politics is probably welcome, especially for voters who were inundated with nonstop campaign ads leading up to the midterm election. The view is a bit different, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the quadrennial pilgrimage of politicos brings welcome attention and a sizable economic boost. Republicans in both states want to ensure that the GOP does not follow the Democrats in trying to leave them behind. Kaufmann told me he wasn’t worried; Senator Tim Scott would be coming out to Iowa in a few weeks, and others were calling to schedule events, perhaps preparing their launches. By March, he assured me, all would be back to normal. This extended presidential halftime will be over, and America’s never-ending campaign will resume in full.
That the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Florida home has become a rallying point for Republicans—ever eager to demonstrate fealty to the former president and rage at government overreach—is not exactly a shock. What is noteworthy is how the news might shift political considerations in MAGA world.
In another universe, last week’s FBI search could have provided a perfect opportunity for a wannabe party leader like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to set himself apart. A reckless has-been running off with nuclear secrets? Not my president! But in this universe—and given this particular cult of personality—DeSantis has parked his wagon next to all the others encircling Trump.
“These agencies have now been weaponized to be used against people that the government doesn’t like,”DeSantis told a crowd on Sunday at an Arizona political rally alongside the GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and the Senate candidate Blake Masters. If the Florida governor had been gearing up to launch his own presidential bid, the FBI search—and what could come after—might be forcing him to rethink his plans. “Now that Trump is beleaguered and in legal trouble and the current narrative is Rally to the king!, he will rally to the king,” Mac Stipanovich, a Florida Republican strategist, told me.
DeSantis has Trump to thank for his political success. The president’s endorsement—and multiple campaign appearances—helped him when he was the underdog candidate in his 2018 Republican primary, and ultimately led to his slim victory in the general election. In the three years since DeSantis got the keys to the governor’s mansion, he has worked diligently to position himself as the natural inheritor of Trumpism. He’s waded dutifully into the culture wars, opposing lockdown orders, blasting critical race theory and banning lessons on sexuality in school. He’s even mastered Trump’s hand gestures.
If the former president should decide not to run again in 2024, DeSantis has seemed ready and willing to accept the baton. In polls, Republican voters have consistently chosen him as their second-favorite choice for president.
Some strategists told me that DeSantis might even try to challenge Trump in a primary by arguing—carefully, respectfully—that the MAGA movement does not belong to just one man. “Before the Mar-a-Lago raid, I was of the mind that it would be a crowded primary” in 2024, David Jolly, a former GOP representative from Florida, told me. “DeSantis has been so strong that he could say, ‘Enough voters are asking me to get in the race; I’m going to stand. But if Trump wins, I’ll support him.’”
The FBI search, though, might have sabotaged DeSantis’s diligent plans. The news was read by MAGA world as the opening salvo of a war on Trump, and every Republican with a political survival instinct has proclaimed righteous anger on his behalf. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted an upside-down American flag in apparent support of Trump; “We are seeing the justice system being used as a hammer to batter political opponents,” the Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano told Newsmax. Even former Vice President Mike Pence came to Trump’s defense, despite recent reporting that Trump had expressed support for Pence’s hanging: “I share the deep concern of millions of Americans over the unprecedented search of the personal residence of President Trump,” Pence tweeted.
DeSantis, too, was not about to bite the hand that feeds. He issued an angry tweet condemning the Biden “Regime” for its overreach. As DeSantis continues to campaign for MAGA-type candidates ahead of the midterms, including Mastriano in Pennsylvania and the Senate candidate J. D. Vance of Ohio, you can bet that he’ll keep talking about “the raid,” pointing to it as evidence of a leftist takeover of American government. This may be pure pandering. “There is no [advantage] in being seen to betray Donald Trump in his hour of travail,” Stipanovich said. Doing so risks appearing like a traitor to the MAGA cause and losing the base’s admiration. The most that DeSantis or any other presidential hopeful can do is be a loyalist and hope that, eventually, Trump falls or makes room for them to run.
Still, even in his condemnation of the search, DeSantis appears to be walking a careful line. During his speech in Arizona, he didn’t actually mention Trump by name. Instead, he accused the FBI of “targeting people who go against the regime.” The remarks seemed intended to demonstrate loyalty to the base rather than to Trump himself. Maybe DeSantis assumed that the audience wouldn’t notice? Or maybe he’s making a judgment that MAGA world wants Trump’s rhetoric but no longer requires Trump the man to be its mouthpiece.
DeSantis could be leaving himself a small opening: If the various investigations into Trump never amount to anything, DeSantis might still have room to challenge the former president. But if Trump is actually indicted for a crime related to the Capitol attack on January 6, or to whatever classified documents he’s allegedly taken from the White House, last week’s rally-round-the-king moment offered a glimpse of what we can expect. Every Republican politician, including any potential challengers, would be forced to choose between defending Trump and siding with Joe Biden’s corrupt, leftist “deep state.” “The prosecution of Donald Trump would be the most catalyzing moment available to the former president,” Jolly said. “That’s a harder case for DeSantis to get into the race.”
Last week, after the Mar-a-Lago search, Trump’s lead over DeSantis in a potential primary matchup widened by 10 points. But beyond gaming out DeSantis’s diminished options, the takeaway from the federal investigation is the simple fact that an angry septuagenarian still holds the Grand Old Party in a vise grip. Whatever succession plans those who dutifully kissed the ring were hatching, their political fortunes and futures remain tied to Trump.
