Win or lose (and if he loses, he will almost certainly fight like hell to deny it), the fact that Donald Trump made it to this juncture as an even bet to return to the presidency is a development of shocking novelty in American history.
When he finally left office four years ago, without ever conceding defeat, the consensus was that his political career was pretty much over after he incited the forces that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He was in the process of being impeached for an unprecedented second time, was facing enormous legal peril over the coup attempt, and had been branded as a failed one-term president. His tenure, marred by his mishandling of the pandemic that would kill over a million Americans, left no particular policy legacy other than the sort of tax-cut legislation Republicans had been promoting for generations and failed attempts to repeal Obamacare and gut the social safety net. His more authoritarian impulses were generally reined in by the courts, though his success (the product of luck as much as skill) in reshaping the Supreme Court represented a time bomb that would explode during his successor’s presidency.
What Trump did still have was a movement. MAGA, as it soon became known, gave him a firm beachhead in the Republican Party from which he could mount an unlikely comeback. There was without question a mass base for the right-wing populism he represented, focused mostly on fanning anti-immigrant and anti-globalization fears that augmented the GOP’s electoral reach while sacrificing ancient party principles.
After spending 2021 in relative obscurity, Trump moved to reassert his power over the GOP. The party was trying to move past him ahead of the midterm elections, which were widely expected to be a major GOP rout after Democrats put together the most fragile trifecta imaginable in 2020 and Joe Biden’s popularity began plummeting. Trump, though, began to meddle, foisting disastrous Senate candidates on his party (including Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania). As the election approached, the Supreme Court’s epochal reversal of Roe v. Wade, which Trump engineered with three of his justices, spurred an immediate backlash against the GOP. By the time his party underperformed expectations in November 2022, a lot of Republicans (mostly privately, but some publicly) were blaming Trump.
Eight days after the “red wave” failed to materialize, Trump became the first Republican to formally announce a presidential candidacy for 2024. The semi-disgraced 45th president, his reputation freshly bruised by the midterm losses of his handpicked candidates, did not look inevitable: He drew 12 primary opponents, including a senator, two governors, a former vice-president, a former senator, and three former governors. One rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, was coming off a historic landslide reelection that excited Republicans everywhere.
DeSantis immediately raised immense funds and developed a plausible post-Trump campaign message promising a return to traditional conservatism without abandoning Trump’s signature policy initiatives. He seemed to be the one who could defeat him. More than a few observers thought Republicans had and would seize upon an ideal opportunity to “get past” Trump and pivot to a more broadly appealing message while retaining the 45th president’s populist edge. For his part, Trump seemed to underline his unsavory characteristics by shifting blame for the midterm disappointments from himself to the anti-abortion movement while doubling down on his 2020-election denialism and vowing vengeance. To a lot of people in and beyond his party, he looked like yesterday’s news and a loser to boot.
But Trump proved his doubters wrong once again. He gained strength in popularity among Republican voters as he added the “lawfare” of Democratic-inspired or directed prosecutions to the “elite” perfidy that had “stolen” the 2020 election and impeached him twice. And, inevitably, Trump benefited from the contrasts all Republicans, even his rivals, were drawing between the pre-pandemic economic conditions supervised by the Trump administration and inflationary calamities brought on by Biden. His deeply branded “Make America Great Again” slogan came to represent not just the lost traditional culture of the 20th century but, more specifically, the pre-pandemic economy and society.
Trump, who didn’t participate in a single debate, crushed his Republican rivals, disposing of DeSantis in Iowa and Nikki Haley, the final symbol of resistance, on Super Tuesday. They both subsequently endorsed him, reflecting the complete makeover of the GOP into Trump’s party and, just as importantly, the abandonment of any party misgivings about the former president’s conduct in office or on January 6. While he was at it, the former president brought his very important Christian-conservative and anti-abortion constituencies to heel by securing their grudging consent to an abandonment (at least until after this election) of plans for a federally imposed national abortion ban.
Having already turned his legal problems into intra-party assets, Trump then dodged the real-world legal consequences by delaying sentencing for his one historic criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush-money case while at least temporarily avoiding trials for others. The Supreme Court he shaped gave him a big assist in confirming presidential immunity in ways that delayed and partially defanged his indictment over his conduct on January 6. He hasn’t entirely neutralized his manifest lawlessness as a general-election issue — see “enemies within” and John Kelly’s “fascist” warning — but he has largely confined it to varying partisan memories of (and amnesia about) January 6.
His Houdini-like escape skills reached their apex with the narrowly failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on July 14, just days before the convention nominating him for president for the third time began. If there was any doubt Trump was literally dodging bullets — with or without direct divine assistance — a second, if less advanced, assassination plot was foiled in Florida in September. These events lifted his personal favorability ratings even as he was beginning to descend into a savage series of general-election attacks on Kamala Harris, Democrats, transgender people, and all his various enemies.
By the end of the summer, Trump’s political resurrection was nearly complete. He had become the third politician to win three major-party presidential nominations, the other two being Franklin Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland (who, like Trump, lost the second time around). That accomplishment was all the more remarkable given what happened to his disgraced predecessors. Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached by the House, left office soon after his narrow acquittal by the Senate. Richard Nixon, who was on the brink of impeachment, had to resign to avoid that stigma. Trump has been impeached and acquitted twice but was roundly condemned by many of the Republican senators who voted against conviction the second time.
Trump entered the final stretch of the 2024 election dead even with Harris despite the Democrat’s own surge of popularity after replacing the struggling Biden as party nominee, following a terrible performance in a debate with Trump in June. Even more impressively, if Trump loses but challenges the results as he did four years ago, this time around he will have virtually the entire Republican Party willing to back his claims of a “rigged” election.
It’s when you back away from the specific timetable of Trump’s comeback, though, that his accomplishments since 2020 become most devilishly remarkable. In order to put himself in position to become the 47th president, Trump has managed to convince close to half the electorate that 2+2=5. All along, his 2024 candidacy has been based on convincing his base and many swing voters of a host of counterfactual descriptions of their own country. As violent-crime rates drop, he claims America is in the midst of a massive wave of violent lawlessness, mostly stemming from recent migrants. As border crossings drop, he continues to claim Biden and Harris have opened the borders avidly to promote illegal noncitizen voting, for which there is no evidence. As inflation cools, Trump has convinced an awful lot of Americans that Biden and Harris ruined a pre-COVID economy that was all but ideal. Scattered controversies over transgender medical treatments and transgender participation in women’s sports have been transformed by Trump’s campaign into a massive overturning of human nature and God’s laws. And most of all, the former president who presided over a failed insurrection four years ago seems to be planning another one even as Democrats argue with one another about the salience of ads pointing out Trump’s threat to democracy.
We don’t know at this moment if Trump’s comeback will succeed (either via an outright victory or some overtime gambit), and he may yet sabotage victory by ignoring his lion-taming advisers and going feral at the last moment (e.g., by enabling a comedian to insult Puerto Ricans, a key voting group, during his Madison Square Garden rally). Whether he wins or loses, America may suffer for years from the damage this man has done to confidence in the election system and the basic rule of law. But either because of or despite his demons, Donald Trump has firmly established himself as a unique figure in American political history and an incredibly irresistible force. If he does fail to return to the White House, his political career will probably end. But his party, and his country, may have been coarsened and corrupted for a very long time.
