The Only Way Out Is Through

American politics is a dark comedy. Sometimes it’s more comic than dark, other times it’s darker than it is comic. But ever since a certain someone rode a certain escalator, political news in this country has been a daily blend of menace and absurdity.

Take, for example, Steve Bannon assuring Kari Lake recently that she’s the “frickin’ governor of Arizona.” One can’t help but laugh at populists again retreating into outlandish fantasy to cope with electoral defeat. But inasmuch as Bannon’s nonsense deepens right-wing distrust in democracy, one can’t help but shudder a bit too. 

The hallmark of dark comedy is finding humor in death. On Monday The Atlantic published a near-masterpiece of the genre, in which reporter McKay Coppins asked various Republican officials how the party might feasibly move past Trump and was told repeatedly: Don’t fear the Reaper. 

“I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait until this guy dies,’” former Rep. Peter Meijer told Coppins. Meijer stressed that he doesn’t share his colleagues’ death wish for Trump but noted that the sentiment is common enough in the upper tiers of Republican politics that he’s coined a phrase, “actuarial arbitrage,” to describe the party’s strategy for nominating someone else in 2024.

“Waiting around for someone to die isn’t really a ‘strategy,’” you might say, and you’d be correct. But compared to pitiful delusions like this one from Coppins’ piece, it looks like eight-dimensional chess.

When I asked Rob Portman about his party’s Trump problem, the recently retired Ohio senator confidently predicted that it would all sort itself out soon. The former president, he believed, would study the polling data, realize that other Republicans had a better shot at winning, and graciously bow out of 2024 contention.

“I think at the end of the day,” Portman told me, “he’s unlikely to want to put himself in that position when he could be more of a Republican senior statesman who talks about the policies that were enacted in his administration.”

Coppins claims he laughed in Portman’s face when he said that. I would have too. The idea that Trump might mature into a more responsible politician was implausible even during the most encouraging stage of his presidency, when he was nominating respected figures like James Mattis for cabinet positions. Six years, two impeachments, and one mob assault on the Capitol later, with Trump now deep into the “deranged hobo” phase of his political journey, it’s preposterous beyond words that anyone would suggest it. When Mick Mulvaney published The Most Embarrassing Op-Ed Ever, he at least could say that the insurrection hadn’t happened yet. What’s Portman’s excuse for wishcasting at this late date?

His excuse is that he lacks nerve. Like his more morbid colleagues in the party, he wants new leadership without having to risk anything personally or professionally to try to bring it about. As always, the only thing GOP leaders hate more than Trump is the thought of earning his wrath by moving against him. “Many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away,” Coppins writes. “And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.”

That’s a familiar critique, especially to Never Trumpers. I’m sure I’ve made it myself. If only Republican leaders weren’t so cowardly. If only they’d *do something* to push him out.

But let’s be real. What is it we’d have them do?

I can think of three ways that the party’s Trump 2024 problem might be solved with minimal political pain, and two are out of its hands.

One is, ahem, “actuarial arbitrage.”

The second is building a time machine, traveling back to February 2021, and convincing Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans to seize the opportunity to end Trump’s political career. Had they convicted him at his impeachment trial and disqualified him from holding future office, the party would have convulsed. But as the midterms approached and Ron DeSantis’ star rose, disgruntled Trump fans would have looked to the future and grudgingly returned to the fold in the name of owning the libs.

Had 10 more Republican senators had the guts to convict, we’d already be in the post-Trump era. Never forget it.

The third option is the one that is, technically, within the party’s power to deliver. That would involve the 2024 field clearing and uniting behind a single formidable challenger to Trump, presumably DeSantis. In this case, however, the GOP’s problem isn’t cowardice but hubris: Numerous longshot candidates, from Nikki Haley to Chris Sununu to Asa “Who?” Hutchinson, are already making noise about jumping in, their ambitions undeterred by their unlikelihood of winning.

And Trump is delighted. When Haley told him that she’s inclined to challenge him for the nomination, he encouraged her to follow through. “She called me and said she’d like to consider it. And I said you should do it,” he informed reporters this weekend. He knows who benefits if the “Anyone But Trump” vote ends up dividing among 10 candidates, say, instead of one.

Even if the field did clear for DeSantis, I don’t know that Trump’s defeat would involve “minimal” political pain. He would pull 40 percent of the vote at least. The campaign would be bitter, and would turn more bitter still as his chances of winning slipped away. But a decisive DeSantis victory is the least bad option for the party inasmuch as the margin would defuse some of the inevitable claims of cheating from Team Trump in the aftermath.

Lay all of that aside, though, and return to my question. What is it that we’d have the Rob Portmans in the party, the fatcat donors and professional Republican class, do to help defeat Trump? What supposedly effective strategy to rid the party of him are they leaving on the shelf out of fear?

“There is an old quote that has been attributed to Lee Atwater: ‘When your enemy is in the process of drowning, throw him a brick,’” said Terry Sullivan, Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign manager, to Coppins. “None of Donald Trump’s opponents ever have the balls to throw him the damn brick.” Okay, but which “brick,” exactly, are we waiting for someone to throw?

Rubio was reasonably hard on Trump in 2016, as I recall. There was an early phase where he turned into an insult comic, making jokes about the size of Trump’s hands, before he pivoted to dire warnings about trusting an unstable game-show host with the nuclear codes. He called him a “con artist” at the debates, quite justifiably. Then he lost his home state of Florida to Trump by nearly 20 points, flushing him out of the race.

Rubio threw him some bricks. Didn’t matter. So what bricks should the Republican establishment throw this time?

You want the donors to shower DeSantis with cash to help propel him past Trump? Well, good news: They’re already doing that. But I’m skeptical that ad buys will be decisive in a campaign against the most famous person in the world, especially once Trump starts squeezing his vast grassroots donor base for cash and cable news gives him another $2 billion in free airtime.

You want Portman and other elder party figures to endorse DeSantis? Many will before the campaign ends, I suspect—assuming DeSantis wants their endorsements. But he might not. Each time a vestige of the pre-Trump GOP gives their blessing to the governor, Trump will cite it as proof that DeSantis is the candidate of the Republican “swamp,” an establishmentarian wolf in populist sheep’s clothing. 

The problem with believing that party leaders aren’t doing enough to oppose him is that it assumes there’s something those leaders could do to meaningfully influence the sort of right-wing activists who vote in party primaries. What could, say, Mitch McConnell do to move populist votes toward Ron DeSantis? Short of endorsing Donald Trump, I mean.

If Mitt Romney and 50 other current and former Republican senators signed an open letter explaining why it would be economic madness to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, do we think that letter would make Republican voters less likely to support debt ceiling brinkmanship—or more?

It’s true that most Republican leaders are cowards, but obsessing about their cowardice obscures the party’s deeper problem: the moral and civic corruption of the Republican base. Trump isn’t viable in 2024 because Rob Portman can’t muster the courage to criticize him harshly. Trump is viable in 2024 because much of the American right watched him attempt a coup two years ago and decided, “More of that, please.”

There are Republican officials who threw Trump a brick when he was drowning, after all. You know their names: Cheney, Kinzinger, Meijer. Most are out of office now while Trump is favored for the Republican nomination. Given a choice of whom it would rather see drown, Trump or those who would hold him accountable, right-wing voters made their decision.

Republican leaders like Portman must look at that and think, not inexplicably, “Why bother?” If you’re going to risk personal and professional ruin for opposing Trump, you at least want the consolation of knowing that your sacrifice mattered. It won’t matter in a primary. If anything, it’s likely to backfire.

An electorate as degraded as the GOP’s won’t abandon Trump for a more reasonable candidate. It might abandon him for a less reasonable one.

That’s what Ron DeSantis’ courtship of anti-vaxxers is all about, of course.

You almost certainly can’t beat Trump in a Republican primary by running to his left. But what if you run to his right?

What makes DeSantis formidable is that he’s more populist than Trump in some respects but also more electable, which seems impossible at first blush. You can’t out-populist Trump, and even if you can, you’ll end up so far out on the right-wing fringe that you’ll be poisonous in a general election.

In theory. But somehow DeSantis has managed to do it. There’s no doubting his electability after a 19-point win in Florida in November, which explains why Democrats are already weighing in on Trump’s side in his squabbles with the governor. Yet there’s also no doubt that he’s more closely aligned with the base’s vaccine skepticism than Trump is.

And Trump knows it. Watch his comments about DeSantis and vaccination from this weekend. He’s vulnerable on this issue, enough so that he’s counterpunching before his rival is in the race.

DeSantis will attack Trump as a sellout on pandemic restrictions, a man who was led around on a leash on everything from lockdowns to vaccines by the evil Dr. Fauci. I don’t know if that’s enough to wreck Trump’s populist credibility with MAGA voters but I’m reasonably sure it stands a better chance than whatever Chris Sununu will have to say.

It may be that what finally ends the illiberal reign of our mad king was that he was too sensible about COVID vaccinations. Imagine.

It’s not just the vaccine, either. Charlie Sykes had an astute column on Sunday about DeSantis competing to show the base how harsh he’s willing to be in punishing the bad guys. In November Trump was heard babbling about quick trials and executions for drug dealers; last week DeSantis upped the ante by arguing that jury unanimity was too high a hurdle for death sentences and that capital punishment should be extended to child rapists. 

His strategy is consistent and transparent, being just normie enough for normie Republicans and just crazy enough for crazy populists to build a coalition that can outpoll Trump. And he’s doing a fine job of it so far.

The line between normies and crazies isn’t always so sharp. There’s a cohort of Republicans, I suspect, who sympathize with populism’s crazier beliefs but remain sufficiently in touch with the broader electorate to know that those beliefs will be a liability in a general election. It makes me wonder how they feel when they see stuff like this.

After the grand disappointment of the midterms, even some Trump fans are destined to have mixed feelings about him. Some may prefer Trump on the merits but opt for DeSantis in the belief that DeSantis stands a better chance to defeat Biden. Others may prefer DeSantis on the merits but need a rationale like “electability” to justify betraying the cult leader by voting for the governor.

However you slice it, the only way out of the GOP’s populist morass is through it, with a candidate capable of coopting a meaningful share of Trump’s own devotees. DeSantis is the lone top-tier option executing on a strategy to do so.

And as that becomes clear to Republican voters who want to turn the page, fears of anti-Trump voters splintering among a dozen candidates might abate. We remember the 2008 Democratic Party as a duel between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton but that race began with 10 candidates. (Including Joe Biden!) The field winnowed organically as Clinton and then Obama broke from the pack in polling, luring away voters from the also-rans as the two-person dynamic developed. The early polling suggests that the 2024 Republican primary will begin as a two-person race de facto, with the outcome dependent on DeSantis’ ability to simultaneously poach crazies from Trump and normies from the rest of the field.

The only fitting ending to a dark comedy as dark as this one, in which a would-be autocrat proves too “establishment” for a key bloc of anti-vax cranks, would be DeSantis winning the primary but losing the general election when a spiteful Trump convinces his diehard fans to boycott the race. Stay tuned!