Donald Trump will be an ex-president like no other because he is a political force like no other — at least since Theodore Roosevelt. Trump will not just be an ex-president. He will be the leader of a powerful movement, one that is very much alive and still very much in control of the Republican party.
Trump is not a man who accepts oblivion. Like TR, he rankles at the thought of retiring from the great game show. His businesses went bankrupt six times but he kept coming back. When The Apprentice ended, he turned to politics and won the White House. Even that wasn’t quite the overnight success that it seemed: he had contemplated running in 2000 and had talked about it even earlier. He knew what he wanted, and he dared the impossible to get it.
What will Ex-President Trump want next? Revenge — and a second term. If ambition is a hallmark of his personality, a deeply personal rivalry is a hallmark of his politics. Victory over Hillary Clinton was personal; so was dismantling Barack Obama’s legacy. Trump insisted that he had beaten Clinton in the popular vote too, or would have if not for fraud. He insisted that the crowds and online viewership for his inauguration outnumbered Obama’s. The rivalry he felt with Clinton and Obama pales next to what Joe Biden represents in Trump’s eyes: the man who unfairly denied him reelection; who will do to Trump’s legacy what Trump did to Obama’s; quite simply, the man who fired him and took his place.
Biden hardly fills a Trump-like space in the Democratic party — a party decades farther to the left today than its 78-year-old president. Trump, by contrast, has a party, and he almost certainly intends to use it. After the ludicrous but deadly pantomime coup at the Capitol last week, a pundit-class consensus says that Trump cannot possibly win again. But the pundit class is usually wrong about everything. If Trump wants the Republican nomination in 2024, who or what, exactly, will stop him from getting it?
It won’t be the DNC-MSM, that’s for sure:
For all political media’s frustrations with the Trump years, they’ve also been lucrative and a source of identity. Trump gave the Washington Post its slogan. Entire beats that did not exist prior to Trump have been incepted as a result of his presidency. The journalists who’ve covered this White House are the subjects of innumerable profiles reflecting on their enterprising work and the trauma these “beleaguered chroniclers” suffer as a result.
In a New York Times dispatch detailing the thinking within cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC, the lean years ahead in which viewers will “no longer need their nightly therapy sessions with Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon” is a frightening prospect. Equal and opposite forces are at work on Trump-friendly outfits. Fox News Channel has seen its ratings decline after the president declared war on the network for failing to uniformly advance his preferred narratives about election fraud. There is no shortage of less responsible competitors in the conservative cable news space willing to satisfy their audience’s demands for misinformation. So, what are these media ventures to do? The simplest, most commercially viable approach is not to let Trump go. And the president will almost certainly give these institutions every reason to do just that.
QED: NY Times Compares Trump Election Claims to Stalin, Hitler’s ‘Big Lie.’
And yet the Gray Lady’s obit for Trump will be nowhere near as glowing as the one they wrote for Stalin.