Waiting for a Deus Ex Machina End to the Trump Era

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Press them hard, and most Republican officials, seven of whom have MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies on their Twitter avatars privately admit that Donald Trump has been a problem. He has presided over three abysmal election cycles since taking office; he is more unstable than ever; and yet he was back on the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is angry and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his staunchest loyalists, almost everyone in the party agrees: Time to move on from Trump .

But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly moves into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. He might be sued to hell and be overwhelmed by his legal problems. Maybe hell broke loose early in the primaries, or just got bored with politics and walked away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He is old, how many years will he leave?

This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another Trump-dominated election cycle and uncertainty that he can actually lose the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will oust him. And they would rather not do it themselves.

There is a desire for a deus ex machina, said one GOP consultant, who, like others I interviewed, requested anonymity to identify the private conversations taking place within the party. Its like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.

The scenarios that Republicans find themselves fantasizing about range from the far-off to the morbid. In his recent book Thank You for Your Servitude, my colleague Mark Leibovich quotes a former Republican representative who bluntly summed up his party’s plan for dealing with Trump: Just waiting for him to die. As it turns out, this is not a common sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I’ve heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to removing Trump, however dire, may be to wait for his expiration.

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Their rationale is straightforward: The former president is 76 years old, overweight, looks like he’s been on the diet of a college freshman, and believes, contrary to all known science, that exercise is bad for you. Why risk alienating his supporters if nature is going to take over sooner or later? Peter Meijer, a former Republican representative who left office this month, calls this technique actuarial arbitrage.

You have a lot of people who just want to [Trumps] mortal death, Meijer told me. I want to be clear: I am not in that camp. But I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go on stage and wear a red hat, and then call me the next day and say, I can’t wait until this guy dies. And like, Good Lord. (Trump’s mother died at age 88 and his father at age 93, so this strategy isn’t exactly foolproof.)

Some Republicans are clinging to the hope that Trump may finally recover from his legal troubles. He is currently the subject of multiple criminal investigations, and his detractors dream of an indictment that could damage his campaign. But most people I spoke to seemed resigned to the possibility that an indictment would only strengthen him among the party’s base. Michael Cohen, who served for many years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast for atonement for that sin titled Mea Culpa, begrudgingly told me that his former boss can easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep state Democrats are here again campaign emails write themselves. Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising, Cohen told me.

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Others envision a coordinated donor revolt that has sidelined Trump for good. The GOP consultant told me about a private dinner in New York City he attended in the fall of 2021, when he saw a Republican billionaire give a passionate speech about the need to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. The man said he would devote a large amount of money to defeat the former president and urged his colleagues to join the cause. Others in the room including several prominent donors and a number of Republican senators responded enthusiastically that night. But when the consultant saw some of the same people a year later, their commitment was gone. Angry donors, he said, retreated to a cautious wait-and-see stance.

This plague of self-deception among party elites contains obvious echoes of Trump’s early rise to power. Heading into the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, a fractured field of no-nonsense candidates spent time and money attacking each other, convinced that the frontrunner would eventually fall. It is widely believed within the political class that such a ridiculous figure would never win a major party nomination, let alone the presidency. Of course, by the time many Trump doubters realized they were wrong, it was too late.

Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubios 2016 presidential campaign, told me that Trumps rivals failed to defeat him that year in large part because they were always convinced that his own demise was imminent.

There’s an old quote attributed to Lee Atwater: When your enemy is in the process of drowning, throw a brick at him, Sullivan told me. None of Donald Trump’s opponents have the ability to throw a damn brick at him. They just hope otherwise. Hope is not a winning strategy.

For conservatives looking to prevent a similar fiasco in 2024, the emerging field of GOP presidential prospects may seem like cause for celebration. After all, the healthiest way to rid their party of Trump is to simply defeat him. But a broad cast of challengers could just as easily split the anti-Trump electorate, as it did in 2016, and allow Trump to win the primaries with a majority of voters. It would also make the consolidation of an alternative more difficult for party leaders.

One current Republican representative told me that while most of his colleagues may be quietly hoping for a new nominee, few would be willing to endorse a non-Trump candidate early in the primary calendar to make a difference. . Instead they’ll keep their powder dry and see what those early states do. For all of Trumps supposedly diminished political power, he remains a strong favorite in primary polls, where he leads his nearest rival by about 15 points. And some of the other leading figures in the party—Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley—have shown the ability to confront Trump directly and appear stronger for it.

Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6 and lost his 2022 primary to a far-right Trump loyalist, linked Republican leaders to the current anxiety about confronting Trump in the absence of ideological roots of the parties. The GOP’s defense of long-held conservative ideals in favor of an ad hoc cult of personality has left Republicans without a clear post-Trump identity. Combine that with what Meijer calls the general cowardice of political figures writ large, and you have a party in paralysis: No capacity [to say]Alright, let’s wipe the slate clean and figure out what we stand for and build from there.

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Even if another Republican manages to win the nomination, there is no guarantee that Trump, who is not known for his grace in defeat, will lose. Last month, Trump caused a bit of a panic in GOP circles when he shared an article on Truth Social suggesting he might run an independent spoiler campaign if his party refuses to back him in 2024. Republicans said with whom I spoke such a schism would be political. disaster for their party. No one has any idea how to stop it.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s longest-running delusion persists that Trump will transform into a completely different person.

When I asked Rob Portman about his party’s problems with Trump, the recently retired Ohio senator confidently predicted that it would all be fixed soon. The former president, he believes, will study the polling data, realize that other Republicans are better at winning, and gracefully bow out of the 2024 contention.

I think at the end of the day, Portman told me, he probably didn’t want to put himself in that position when he could be little more than a Republican senior statesman talking about the policies implemented in his administration. .

I let out an involuntary laugh.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part, Portman conceded.

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