Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are laying into each other. Trump makes his juvenile cracks about how to pronounce DeSantis’s name. Dee/DuhSantis counters by calling Trump’s jibes, well, “juvenile,” and had a bus paid for by a super PAC supporting him follow Trump across Iowa, mocking him.
Politico calls this “savagery,” or at least a “path of savagery.” That seems a little overstated to me, at least for now, but this is something new, and it’s worth thinking about: The 2024 GOP presidential primary could get mean and brittle in a way no Republican primary has been since … well, let’s think:
Since 2020? No, that was just Trump.
Since 2016? That race had its moments of bitterness, but the governing dynamic, as you may recall, was that most of the other Republicans refrained from attacking Trump on the assumption that he wouldn’t last and they would gather up his supporters. Marco Rubio notably broke from this mold and lobbed some grenades Trump’s way, but he ended up sounding more like Don Rickles than a candidate for president.
Since 2012? There were some tense moments between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. But the bottom line was that you never thought Romney was really going to lose.
And this is why 2024, just maybe, could be different: There just might be actual drama about the outcome.
I know it doesn’t seem that way now. Trump is way ahead. And the more people who join the race—there are seven well-known candidates now (and two no-names), and Chris Christie next week is going to make it eight—the more it favors Trump, because he is presumed to have his 30 percent, which leaves seven people splitting the other 70 percent. Even I can do that math.
But just this once let’s play around with this hypothetical. Trump is indicted by Jack Smith. That’ll be indictment number two. Then he is indicted by Fani Willis in Georgia. That’s number three. The conventional wisdom is that this will merely galvanize his supporters, and that’s surely true of many or probably most of them. But all of them?
Elections are about percentages. Sweeping statements of conventional wisdom tend to ignore this. Some percentage of Trump’s base will, in fascist fashion, adhere to him all the more loyally, and they’ll buy all the deep-state garbage he dumps into the civic bloodstream. Some percentage will basically stay with him but start to entertain some practical doubts about whether he’s the best person to send into battle. And finally, he’ll lose some percentage.
It’s anybody’s guess as to what that number is. But let’s say it’s a quarter of his base. If we’re calling his base 30 percent, that’s 7.5 percent of the electorate. That takes him down closer to 20 percent. That’s a different race.
Now throw on top of the indictments the reality that at least two candidates, DeSantis and Christie, will be attacking Trump directly. People tend to roll their eyes about Christie’s candidacy, and eye-rolling is the right response if the question is “Can he win?” But that’s the wrong question. Nobody thinks Christie can win. I very much doubt even Christie thinks he can win. No—he’s getting in to stop Trump. There’s no other rationale.
Christie’s track record with respect to Trump is a long way from consistent and admirable, and Fox will have no trouble finding clips of Christie sucking up to Trump. But lately, he’s been a consistent critic. He called Trump “Putin’s puppet.” As USA Today reported this week, Christie is basically going to camp out in New Hampshire, ignoring Iowa and other early states. The idea is obviously to try to convince New Hampshire’s sometimes prickly and unpredictable electorate to turn on Trump and stop him.
If that works, and Trump loses New Hampshire, then we have a race. The outcome will actually be in doubt, at least for a while. Christie and DeSantis, and by that time perhaps others, will lay into Trump. This will be new. What will this Trump—thrice indicted, under constant barrage of attack—be like on the campaign trail?
There really aren’t any serious fissures in the Republican Party today. It’s an ethnonationalist, anti-democratic, neofascist, anti-freedom party that really only cares about creating a moral panic over certain Americans it finds threatening to its brittle and reactionary righteousness. There’s no serious disagreement about any of that. There are merely people who are gung ho about it, and people who would prefer for various reasons to soft-pedal it. But they’re all on board with the basic program. If they weren’t, they’d nominate a candidate who opposed all that, but there is no chance of that.
The only fissure is a tactical one, over Trump. Is he the best field marshal to advance the moral panic? That’s what the 2024 primary will be about. The odds still favor it not being much of a fight. But the Trump-DeSantis pre-savagery this week, combined with Christie’s coming entry, means there’s a chance that all this could get desperately ugly next year. Make that nasty. It will already be ugly.
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