How much longer will Trump remain politcally relevant?
Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON — Seldom has a public figure in this country who is not the sitting president so commanded the constant attention and headlines that Donald Trump continues to enjoy.
Not since another Republican rogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950s, has a political figure captured the imagination and loyalty of so many voters that he cannot be ignored as just another pompous loudmouth and liar.
Vice President Spiro Agnew and Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, both Republicans, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Mayors Richard Daley of Chicago and Frank Hague of Jersey City, and Texas Gov. John Connolly, all Democrats, ruled their political roosts and attracted a great deal of controversy nationally, but they all eventually met their maker without having damaged American politics as much as Trump has.
For openers, the reality-TV star has reduced the once honorably conservative Grand Old Party to an empty shell, full of fawning sycophants, that desperately needs a trustworthy redeemer, not yet in sight.
The rest of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan seems determined to bet all its chips on the threatened Trump comeback bid in 2024. In the process, Republicans have decided on a course of all-out demonizing of President Joe Biden, as he currently experiences a sharp slide in the polls.
The Biden administration’s missteps in withdrawing American military and diplomatic forces from Afghanistan have already taken a sharp toll. It now leaves the new president below 50 percent approval, after a positive public response to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his very ambitious Build Back Better agenda of economic recovery.
The defeated former president now appears ready for a re-run against Biden three years from now, in another referendum between the two of them. Trump again would play on his personal strength and the contention that the 2020 election was stolen from him, based his transparently false and contrived accusations of state local election officials “rigging” the outcome against him.
“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24,” Trump asserted in a bizarre statement released Wednesday. “It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.” He also told Republican donors: “It was a dying party, I’ll be honest. Now we have a very lively party.”
The peril of such a possible 2024 repetition has engendered urgent Democratic pressure on Biden to accentuate the most positive elements of his $3.5 trillion legislative package. It includes physical and manpower infrastructure repair across the country, along with expansion of the Affordable Care Act, adding to other aspects of the nation’s social safety net, and massive efforts to cope with climate change.
Biden has now begun to travel more broadly among heavily working-class and young constituencies to emphasize the politically critical nature of retaining and if possible expanding the narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in next year’s midterm congressional elections. His entire agenda will be at stake then, and likely his reelection in 2024 should he seek it, as he has indicated is his intention, as the nation’s oldest chief executive, now at age 78.
Donald Trump is now 75 years old, and is considered obese by normal standards. But he has proved he is physically able and eager to continue his remarkable hold on the Republican Party through massive campaign rallies in critical states, keeping him competitive in the election college that could determine the outcome in 2024.
So his ability and determination to retain the public spotlight that continues to shine on him with the cooperation of the news media, and particularly television, assures the Trump show will go on as long there is a huge audience for it.
Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.