[In a speech to CPAC that failed to make many front-page
headlines but should have, Trump vowed that, once reinstalled in
power, his mission would be “retribution” for all the wrongs that
he and his grievance-fuelled followers have suffered. ]
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2024 TRUMP IS EVEN SCARIER THAN 2020 TRUMP  
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Susan B. Glasser
March 9, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ In a speech to CPAC that failed to make many front-page
headlines but should have, Trump vowed that, once reinstalled in
power, his mission would be “retribution” for all the wrongs that
he and his grievance-fuelled followers have suffered. _

,

 

In politics, as in life, there is a tendency to overcomplicate things.
And the simple truth about the 2024 campaign is that, like the two
Presidential elections that preceded it, the race is all about Donald
Trump [[link removed]].

On the Republican side
[[link removed]],
no potential candidate has registered in the national polls as
anything close to a Trump-toppler, and that includes, so far, the much
touted governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis
[[link removed]].
I was reminded of this while listening to the conservative radio host
Hugh Hewitt interview the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie
the other day. Christie is considering running again for President as
a former Trump friend who’s seen the light, but it’s hardly clear
whether there is a path for him in the field. Hewitt summed up
[[link removed]] the
state of the Republican electorate as being divided into four
categories: Never Trump, Sometimes Trump, Always Trump, and Only
Trump. The Only Trump category constitutes a more or less immovable
twenty-five to thirty per cent of the Party, Hewitt said—which is
also the estimate he gave for the percentage of Republicans who will
never again vote for Trump. The Party, in other words, is stuck in a
Trump doom loop, and the primary will come down to a referendum one
way or the other on the former President.

Among Democrats, who are united at least in their loathing of the
ex-_potus_, the Trump factor hangs over the race in a different way.
Without him running again, it’s at least conceivable that Joe Biden
[[link removed]] might choose, at age
eighty
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not to seek reëlection. But with Trump as the Republican
front-runner, Biden has positioned himself as an indispensable
opponent: the one proven Trump-beater. Their fates are intertwined.
Once again, it’s all about Trump, Trump, Trump
[[link removed]].

That is why I urge you to disregard the conventional wisdom about the
former President being a spent force in Republican politics and pay
much closer attention to what Trump is actually doing and saying in
his campaign—a doomsday-laden frontal attack on American democracy
far darker and more threatening to the constitutional order than even
his previous two bids. Last weekend, in a speech
[[link removed]] to _cpac_ that
failed to make many front-page headlines but should have, Trump framed
his effort to return to the White House as an outright war and vowed
that, once reinstalled in power, his mission would be nothing less
than “retribution” for all the wrongs that he and his
grievance-fuelled followers have suffered. Speaking for more than an
hour and a half in front of a crowd that repeatedly cheered his
definition of the Presidency as a platform for personalized vengeance,
he spoke ominously of “enemies,” and promised to “totally
obliterate the ‘deep state,’ ” among other demons, once victory
was attained.

His call to arms was not merely the stuff of political symbolism.
Echoing the inflammatory language with which he summoned his
supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump urged them to
fight once again in explicitly end-time terms. “We have no
choice,” he said. “If we don’t do this, our country will be lost
forever.” In case the comparison was lost on anybody, he explicitly
extolled the “great, great patriots” unfairly sitting in jail,
recasting the rioters who breached America’s own Capitol building
as _maga_ martyrs. “This is the final battle,” he insisted.
“They know it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. This is
it. Either they win, or we win, and if they win we no longer have a
country.”

This chilling peroration by Trump followed his December call, in a
post on his Truth Social platform, for “termination
[[link removed]]”
of the Constitution, if that is what it would take to return him to
power. The two statements, taken together, sum up his campaign like no
other. Termination and retribution are the reckless pillars on which
Trump is running. Why not, finally, take him at his word?

The fact that you most likely did not watch Trump’s rant does not
make it any less dangerous. If anything, it might make it more so. The
former President—in narrowcasting to his passionate audience of
Always Trump and Only Trump Republican voters—is already a changed
political figure from a couple of years ago.

In the course of that campaign and the four years of rambling rallies
that preceded it, I logged hundreds of hours listening to Trump speak
to the cheering crowds that he craved. I watched many of them again
while co-writing “The Divider
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a history of Trump in the White House that was published last year.
And it is already clear that 2024 Trump is far different from 2020
Trump, more willing to pronounce extreme beliefs after having become
the first American President to seek to overturn an election—and
still emerging as his party’s front-runner two years later.

To reinforce just how much he meant the threats in
his _cpac_ speech, the Trump campaign later sent out a gritty meme
from it as a fund-raiser. It showed a black-and-white photograph
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Trump, glowering as he pointed at the viewer: “I am YOUR
retribution,” the caption said. Vengeance-minded in the best of
times, Trump is now outright promising a second term filled with
unchecked purges and payback.

Historical experience suggests that it would be foolish to disregard
this kind of statement by a man who commands such a large and
unyielding portion of the electorate. Would-be authoritarians like
Trump, given a chance to return to power, do not have a record of
moderating their views. Look at Israel right now, where the aggrieved
former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to win
reëlection and assemble the most far-right government coalition
[[link removed]] in
that nation’s history. Netanyahu, himself under indictment, has
proposed judicial reforms so sweeping that many consider them nothing
less than a “judicial coup
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that would end Israeli democracy as we know it.

Other rivals in the Republican race, of course, may yet find success
in challenging Trump. Many, like DeSantis, will probably emphasize
their credentials as culture warriors, attacking “woke” Democrats
and the like. Others, such as Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki
Haley
[[link removed]] and
the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, may come at him as more
traditional conservatives, criticizing his inward-looking “America
First” platform as isolationist weakness at a time when rivals like
China and Russia demand strength. But it’s an extraordinary fact
that Trump remains not only the dominant figure of the Republican
Party headed into 2024 but one who is still able to set the Party’s
agenda to a remarkable degree. Without Trump, it’s hard to imagine
any other Republicans carrying on about 2020, or about the so-called
heroes of January 6th. Most parties like to move on from elections
they lost.

But, because of Trump, today’s G.O.P. cannot. And his rivals, so
far, are proving to be a timid bunch, all too wary of poking Trump.
Faced with voters who overwhelmingly supported Trump’s election
lies, they kowtow or equivocate as he continues to untruthfully decry
the “Massive Fraud” of the 2020 election. This does not suggest a
party that is on the verge of abandoning its leader for a newer, less
controversial figure. And, besides, the more crowded the field
ultimately gets, the more the gumption—or lack thereof—of the
other candidates may not matter: in a divided party, the Only and
Always Trumpers have more than enough votes to prevail.

For Republicans, the strongest argument that’s been advanced against
a Trump redux is that of simple electability. The Party has lost the
popular vote in seven of the last eight Presidential elections, and
few believe that Trump, already a two-time popular-vote loser, is
likely to convince many general-election voters to change their minds
the third time out. In that same interview with Hewitt, Christie
argued that Trump simply could not win suburban women—and “a
Republican not winning suburban women can’t win the Presidency.”
Christie’s appeal to the pragmatism of G.O.P. voters may seem
eminently reasonable, but that hardly means his logic will prevail. It
should be noted that Christie was one of many who believed Trump would
not, and could not, win the Republican nomination in 2016—before
eagerly climbing on board Trump’s campaign.

The point is that we’ve been here before. Let’s not make the
mistake once again of failing to take Trump seriously. Or literally.
Today’s Republican Party is a lot closer to Forever Trump than it is
to Never Again Trump. The revenge play continues. ♦

_Sign up for our daily newsletter
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stories from The New Yorker._

_Susan B. Glasser
[[link removed]], a staff
writer, is the co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House,
2017-2021
[[link removed]].”
Her column on life in Washington appears weekly on
newyorker.com. Sign up
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stories by Susan B. Glasser in your in-box._

* Donald Trump
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* 2024 Elections
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* CPAC
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* Republican Party
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