The 2028 presidential campaign can’t come soon enough.
Just think: fresh faces, furrowed by fewer lines. Fresh ideas, not of the authoritarian, willfully divisive kind (we can hope). Fresh blood, and without triggering Hitlerian talk of “poisoning” our nation.
A new contest, not a rematch of two unpopular geriatric retreads. First, however, we have to get through 2024. Spoiler alert: We will, successfully.
January, the cruelest month (apologies, T.S. Eliot), has made clear that this year will be as bad politically as the pessimists project, both in the presidential race and in Congress. Tuesday’s results from New Hampshire confirmed that the Republican primary is all but over: A sliver of voters in states representing 1.4 percent of the U.S. population have decided that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee against President Joe Biden.
So much for the conventional wisdom three years ago this month, after then-President Trump’s deadly machinations to stay in power, that Republicans were finally breaking free of him. Four criminal indictments and 91 felony counts later, Trump’s incessant yammering about victimhood has rallied his followers.
Republican officeholders are falling in line to endorse a man they privately loathe. Paul Ryan — former House speaker, vice presidential candidate and standard-bearer of Republicans’ future — lamented the “pickle” his party is in: “Fear (of Trump) is so palpable.”
Meanwhile, the chaos that follows Trump — in Nikki Haley’s oft-repeated words — infects the House, (mis)managed as it is by Republicans who take their cues from him. The House is yet again at odds with the Senate over the annual budget, immigration, and aid to Ukraine and Israel. And House extremists are threatening to repeat last year’s first-in-history ouster of the speaker, which paralyzed Congress for weeks.
And yet, for all the grim news ahead about our politics and governance, I remain optimistic that, come November, American voters will not restore to the nation’s highest office an indecent, ignorant and antidemocratic narcissist, whether he’s a convicted felon or not.
Right now, polls can be used to argue for Trump’s or Biden’s election. Both men will see highs and lows before November, and the outcome will no doubt be close in decisive battleground states. But early surveys suggest Biden has the edge with swing voters; last month, a New York Times poll gave him a 50 percent to 38 percent lead among independents.
Despite the Republican bias in the Electoral College, which disproportionately favors the many rural, less-populated and red states over big and blue states like California and New York, I believe enough Americans will reject a wannabe dictator with an agenda to match. “It’s nice to have a strongman running your country,” Trump allowed at a rally in New Hampshire, after raving yet again about a dictator he wants to emulate.
We’ll be hearing a lot of such antidemocratic malarkey, and worse, for the next nine-plus months. If such talk doesn’t scare most voters once they’re tuned in, I’m confident it will at least turn off enough of them to give Mr. Thumbs-up a thumbs-down.
Depressingly, two-thirds of Iowans who voted in the Republican caucuses bought Trump’s Big Lie that Biden didn’t win election legitimately; about half of New Hampshire’s Republican primary voters agreed. Yet most of us live in the real world, the one in which Trump’s own attorney general and Homeland Security officials proclaimed the election fair.
Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire were evidence that a sizable minority of Republicans and independents are dedicated to Trump’s defeat, along with Democrats. It’s such data that leaves me cautiously confident: If Trump continues all year to whine, lie and thus solidify his place as U.S. history’s sorest Loser, most voters will help him finish the job come November. Again.
And then both parties can start elevating a new generation of leaders. Better late than never.
Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.
