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CNN
—
Donald Trump left the White House as a loser.
But now President Joe Biden is the only one who can stop his predecessor from returning in what is the most astonishing political comeback in history.
Just three years after Trump sneaked out of Washington in disgrace — days after a mob he told to “fight like hell” ransacked the U.S. Capitol — and four criminal trials looming ahead. Despite what he faces, Trump has already been planning a counterattack for years. Republican primaries.
President Trump got on a roll on Super Tuesday. He won Republican primaries in Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Maine, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and California. With every big state calling in his favor, the former president is closer than ever to a general election battle with the 2020 winner, with polls showing he has at least a chance of winning. has been done.
If I were to adapt the title of his book, it would be “Art of the Comeback.”
As the results rolled in, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump took aim at each other, setting the stage for what is sure to be a violent confrontation in November that is sure to tear even deeper rifts in national politics.
“We’re going to win this election, because there’s no other choice,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort, enjoying the sweetest election night since defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Because there isn’t.” He spoke with the Stars and Stripes in the background. It evoked a dramatic rendition of the presidency he hopes to regain.
President Trump invoked his first term in the White House as if it were a golden age of economics, adding, “If we lose this election, we won’t have a country.” That last line was a chilling echo of his searing speech in Washington on January 6, 2021, before the most brazen attack on democracy in modern American history.
Reacting to Trump’s Super Tuesday victory, Biden immediately stepped up his attacks on the former president in the general election and foreshadowed a central debate in his campaign for a second term.
Biden, who has sought to mask his vulnerability on issues such as immigration and the economy, has warned that Americans face an existential dilemma.
“Tonight’s results force Americans to make a clear choice: Will we continue to move forward, or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us into the chaos, division, and darkness that has defined his presidency?” Biden said in a statement.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress will be in jeopardy. He is driven by frustration and grief, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people.” He is determined to destroy our democracy and will do or say anything to get to power.”
The former president still lacks the required number of delegates to become the Republican nominee. It will probably break through the magic number of 1,215 next week. But his victory on Tuesday already erased any hypothetical path to the nomination for his last Republican rival, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
His run in this year’s primaries highlighted his utter dominance in the Republican Party. It underscored the indifference, at least among the activist voters who decide the Republican nomination, to the kind of scandal and embarrassment that can ruin a political career.
Hundreds of thousands of Republican voters are not ready to sign on to a pledge of “vengeance” against President Trump’s enemies, which paints a bleak picture of a nation paralyzed by crime, invaded by immigrants, and heading toward World War III. do not have.
Given Biden’s rock-bottom approval ratings and growing public doubts about whether the oldest president in history is fit to serve a second term, which ends at age 86, Democrats are looking forward to a rematch with Trump. I am deeply concerned. Despite this, many voters still feel deeply anxious. A strong economic recovery has led to record employment growth, outpacing other developed countries. Still, soaring grocery prices and high rents are a reminder that many are still waiting for a return to pre-pandemic normalcy, which Biden promised in 2020.
But in the midst of Trump’s ascendancy, there was enough data to suggest that he still carries the responsibility that drove him from the White House four years ago. His biggest weakness still lurks: his personality and extremism are alienating more moderate suburban voters. The fate of the 2024 election may depend on whether Republican primary voters who chose Ms. Haley in these areas overcome their resentment and vote for Mr. Trump in November.
Biden’s campaign has long argued that the president’s poll numbers are low because he is not yet seen as an alternative to Trump. Now that the results of the 2024 general election are known, time for excuses is quickly running out.
“Tonight, the campaign begins,” Mitch Landrieu, Biden’s national campaign co-chair, told CNN on Tuesday night. He said, “In the past, people didn’t think it was going to be Biden versus Trump, but here we are, and we’re ready.”
Some politicians have come back victorious even when their careers are in tatters. Richard Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election and the California gubernatorial election two years later. He vowed that there would be no more chance for people to kick his ass as his political retirement beckoned. However, he returned in 1968 and was elected president.
Bill Clinton, mired in personal scandal during the 1992 presidential primaries, became the “comeback kid” in New Hampshire on his way to the White House. And on Super Tuesday four years ago, Biden lost a disastrous early state election, only to turn around a few weeks ago by defeating Bernie Sanders in South Carolina. He solidified his position as the Democratic Party’s nominee.
But Trump faced more headwinds than any previous candidate. Among them: two impeachments, 91 criminal charges, four criminal trials, a devastating pending $450 million civil court judgment, and a legacy tarnished by chaotic leadership during a pandemic. It is included. But none of that stopped his meteoric rise toward the Republican nomination. Indeed, his manipulation of the indictment, including his attempts to steal the 2020 election, emboldened his supporters as he branded himself a persecuted dissident.
One-term presidents almost always end after being removed from the White House. But Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination means he has a chance to emulate the ultimate upset in American politics, former President Grover Cleveland’s victory over incumbent President Benjamin Harrison. In 1892, Cleveland became (so far) the only commander-in-chief to win nonconsecutive second terms.
One reason Trump didn’t seem like a loser to his supporters was that he convinced grassroots Republican voters that he hadn’t actually lost the 2020 election. Even if they did. Early exit polls on Tuesday showed that about six in 10 North Carolina Republican primary voters believed Biden’s victory over Trump four years ago was illegitimate. Ta. About half of Virginia’s Republican primary voters think the same way, echoing the sentiment of Trump supporters across the country, reflecting the former president’s unparalleled ability to create alternate realities.
The bond between Trump and his most loyal supporters has never broken. Their champion moment outside his early events in frigid Iowa and New Hampshire in January, where long lines of supporters lined up throughout the day, shivering with “Make America Great Again” memorabilia. His unstinting love for him was revealed.
Mr. Trump’s path to the Republican nomination is all the more remarkable given how much his political star has waned. His interference in the 2022 midterm elections was largely disastrous, as he strongly supported candidates in battleground states who subscribed to his election denialism, often costing his party seats it might have won. I sacrificed it. Democratic control of the Senate and a small House Republican majority that fell short of Red Wave expectations were widely blamed for the failure of his strategy. When people started submitting President Trump’s early presidential announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago later that year, it seemed like the former president had lost political power and 2024 would be a race too far. .
The key to President Trump’s lasting comeback may turn out to be an extraordinary moment inside Atlanta’s infamous prison last August. Trump turned himself in after his fourth criminal indictment, becoming the first former president to undergo the humiliation of providing a photo of himself.
However, inmate number P01135809 was undeterred by embarrassment. He used his misfortunes as a weapon, claiming that he was being persecuted by his successor government to ensure that he could not secure a political return. President Trump’s fundraising has skyrocketed. His Republican true believers accepted his story of political martyrdom. And the Republicans, President Trump’s potential rivals in 2024, quickly found their running room cut out.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to support President Trump’s attempt to destroy the Constitution on January 6, quickly decided that the modern Republican Party had no room to stand up for democracy. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had a theory that after the turmoil of the Trump era, what Republican voters wanted was the same kind of extremism as “Make America Great Again,” minus the chaos. Not again. And Haley’s campaign, the last to survive, is most remembered for disproving the long-held myth that anti-Trump forces within the party quickly emerge when a former president faces a one-on-one opponent. right. overwhelm him.
Trump defeated them all. And now he’s running against Biden.
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