My fellow Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen (also a fellow fellow at AEI) writes that Trump has in recent years made five mistakes that undercut his 2024 chances. I think Thiessen is wrong about three and possibly even four of them.
The common factor is that Thiessen radically underrates the political advantage Trump has gained by continuing to pretend that he won the 2020 election in a landslide. He persuaded a lot of Republicans to believe that myth and persuaded others that it was somehow rude to question it. He has thus avoided being seen as a loser and also avoided the usual party-wide debate about the reasons for his loss — a debate that would have focused on his missteps and unpopularity. He has also retained his position as the leader of the party in a way that a recognized loser would not have done, thus allowing him to run in the primaries as a quasi-incumbent who can fling charges of disloyalty at anyone who does not support him once more.
Continuing to contest an election he lost was obviously a mistake in a constitutional, moral, and civic sense, but it is also the reason he is so far ahead of his rivals for the nomination.
Consider Thiessen’s list of mistakes in that light. He says Trump should have “presided over a smooth transition” after exhausting his legal appeals — a course that would have confirmed that he lost. He says Trump should have helped Republicans hold two Georgia Senate seats in January 2021 instead of sabotaging those races — which would have kept the Senate under Republican control but reinforced that something about him, rather than any anti-Republican bias in Georgia’s election system, cost him the presidential race there.
Thiessen says Trump should have spent more time in the last two years talking about Biden’s failures rather than about the supposedly stolen election — but that would have reminded people that as pathetic as Biden can be, Trump lost to him. And he says that Trump should not have boosted for the 2022 elections candidates who went along with his mythology about 2020. This one strikes me as a borderline case, but here, too, Trump’s conduct may have been helpful in strengthening the taboo about telling the truth about 2020.
To the extent Thiessen is arguing that all of these decisions make Trump a weaker general-election candidate for 2024, I agree with him. But on a purely Machiavellian analysis, I think they helped him in the primaries by more than enough to be worth it to Trump.