If Trump Republicans propel Donald Trump over the top in the primaries, they will be doing and will have done two things. They will have made him their nominee for the presidency, and they will have ended the Republican Party.
I don’t mean this rhetorically, in the way of people walking around the past eight years crying, “The party as I knew it is gone.” I mean it literally: The GOP will disappear as a party. Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear.
Whether you approved or disapproved, tearing the party off its deep-dug tracks in 2016—away from things it had stood for since 1980, away from the sort of candidates it had generally put forward—was a wrench, for some a trauma. But the party proved itself able and elastic. There was “a great deal of ruin” in it, as Adam Smith said. It had enough give to absorb and endure.
But a third Trump nomination? The third time it breaks.
Put another way, once is what you did (made a mistake, as people and parties do). Twice is what you did (almost out of loyalty to the first mistake). But a third time—that isn’t what you did, it’s who you are.
If the party chooses Trump in 2024 it will mean it has changed its essential nature and meaning, and that it is split in a way that can’t be resolved by time. Republicans of the suburbs, of the more educated and affluent places, won’t agree to be the official Trump Forever Party. They just won’t. They will leave. Some will go third-party and try to build something there. Some will blend into the Democratic Party and hope they can improve things there.
Trump supporters will stay on in a smaller, less competent party. But they will, as time passes, get tired of losing and also drift on somewhere.
But there will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race, which, again, means the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone.
So the question right now isn’t so much whether you like Nikki or dislike Ron, it is: Do you wish the Republican Party to disappear as a force in American political history? If you answer honestly that you do, you will be leaving the entire national field open to the Democratic Party, where the rising energy will continue to be from the hard left. (The old boomer moderates of both parties are aging and leaving.) Do you want to abandon America to progressive thinking? If you do, you are no longer a politically involved conservative, but more like a nihilist. It’s all ugly and corrupt, blow it up. Like a young Antifa activist.
To think about the long term, to be strategic, to be serious about the implications of your decisions—those are good and needed things right now.
In the past we worried here that a crowded field would equal a Trump victory. This may prove true, but the field is crowding up because Ron DeSantis started to look as if he might tank, and if he does there has to be someone. The political ego always says, “I’m someone.”
Maybe at the end they will coalesce. For now the field grows. Chris Christie is—still!—expected to enter soon. A few weeks ago I wrote of his street-fighting ways. He is almost Trump’s equal in showbiz and his superior in invective, so he can do some damage. Would it be a suicide mission? I don’t know. But those kamikazes took out a lot of tankers. He has been told that if he takes down a bad guy and loses, he goes down in the history books, and if he takes down a bad guy and wins, even better. Seen this way he can’t lose.
Here are two strengths and two challenges.
Mr. Christie is a wholly undervalued executive talent. People forget what a good governor he was when he was being a good governor, which is not a typo. In eight years (2010-18) in deep blue New Jersey he capped property taxes, used the line-item veto to limit spending, increased school funding, got more charter schools, and got the state through the true disaster of superstorm Sandy.
He shared by text a few weeks ago what he considers his two biggest policy achievements: He won public-employee pension reform with big Democratic majorities in both state legislative chambers and despite huge and intense public union opposition. And, interestingly: “Camden was the most dangerous city in America in 2013. We fired the entire police department, rehired a new force built around community policing and violence de-escalation. . . . Ten years later murder is down 63%, shootings down 68%, and robbery down 70%. No violence after George Floyd.”
Love him or hate him, he knows what to do with power. He isn’t secretly frightened of it, as many politicians are.
Second, he is politically gifted. In 2013, the year he won re-election by 22 points, I spent a day with him on the trail and wrote of what I saw—the presidential-sized crowds, the affection and something else: the lost joy of politics. His pleasure in the game and the meaning of the game, his remembering that on some level it is a game, to be won or lost to cheers or boos. What a figure.
A challenge: People don’t remember what a golden boy he was. He was at his political height 10 years ago, in a country that barely remembers last week. He is going to have to do a lot of reminding without sounding like the guy at the bar remembering that time he kicked the field goal.
And there were scandals. He’s from Jersey, where by tradition they play fast and loose and there’s no Big Journalism to patrol the streets and scare the alderman on the take. And Bridgegate. People may not remember the specifics—for days in 2013 his office secretly blocked and diverted traffic on the George Washington Bridge to punish a local political foe—but they remember the outlines. He said he didn’t know what his office was up to, but the damage was severe. People thought: Whatever he knew, whatever he did, the leader sets the tone. At one point in the 2016 cycle he led Hillary Clinton, but his primary bid failed, getting only 7% in New Hampshire.
From the Department of Unasked-For Advice: Own it, big boy, own it all. Scandals like that either deepen you, make you wiser, smack you in the head and make you reflect—or they kill you. It’s one or the other. He doesn’t look dead to me.
Make it part of the story. You had everything and lost it in a big mistake that was linked to personal flaws. “I broke my own heart.” All that unused talent, all the guts. What did he learn? What is it like to be, as he said, “humiliated” in front of the whole country?
He did break his own heart. He can’t say it? This is America, 2023; no one here hasn’t broken his own heart.
Radical candor for your last-chance power drive: Concede what people know and tell them what they don’t, or have forgotten.