Is there another Republican who can keep the Trump coalition together in 2028? Asked that question this week, the president wouldn’t say. He allowed that “we have a great cabinet,” suggesting that he prefers to see a member of his administration succeed him. “But you never know,” he concluded. “You never really know until they get tested.”
That’s true, and the testing will have as much to do with political and economic circumstances as with the candidates’ personal gifts. Another way to ask the question: What sort of candidate is likely to appeal to GOP voters in ’28—an exponent of Mr. Trump’s dissident Republicanism, or someone from outside his orbit?
The first and most obvious thing to be said about Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again “movement” is that it isn’t a movement. MAGA, as I am not the first to observe, is Mr. Trump and nothing else. When he changes his mind or reverses course, as he often does, his enthusiasts do the same. That isn’t a movement. Nor is it a personality cult, as his detractors like to say. MAGA, as I read the acronym, is shorthand for the connection Mr. Trump has with a large segment of right-leaning voters. Their anxieties intensify and numbers grow when the progressive left gains cultural ascendancy.
A brief look at his electoral record is instructive. It isn’t remotely true, as liberal commentators tend to believe, that Mr. Trump is what conservative voters have always wanted: flamboyantly wealthy, aggressively impolitic, openly scornful of his enemies. In late 1999, he floated the idea of running for president as the nominee of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, but he withdrew in February 2000, his candidacy having made no impression. Eight years of Bill Clinton’s center-left triangulation made Mr. Trump the answer to a question nobody was asking.
In 2011 Mr. Trump made speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire and at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, but again voters showed little interest. He bowed out that May, his poll numbers negligible.
Not until 2015 did the Donald exhilarate Republicans. His fiery message resonated for one reason: Over the previous several years the progressive left had taken an imperious and at times revolutionary attitude.
In early 2014 President Obama announced that he would circumvent Congress, which he had earlier claimed he had no authority to do, and in effect write immigration law (“I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone”). The following year a 5-4 Supreme Court majority ruled that the definition of marriage that had obtained throughout human history violated the 14th Amendment. The administration illuminated the White House in rainbow colors. Late in Mr. Obama’s term, the Justice and Education Departments directed school districts to allow “transgender” males to play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ bathrooms.
In 2014 the city of Ferguson, Mo., exploded in riots after a police officer shot and killed an 18-year-old black man (the officer was later exonerated). In statements and speeches, Mr. Obama plainly took the side of rioters over police. Professional athletes, piling on, signaled what looked to many of their fans like disrespect for the police, as when NFL and NBA players wore T-shirts bearing the words “I can’t breathe,” a reference to a black New Yorker who died from injuries in police custody in 2014. Mr. Obama applauded one of those athletes, LeBron James, for his countercultural defiance. And in the summer and fall of 2016, as Mr. Trump ran his chaotic and seemingly doomed presidential campaign, NFL players began kneeling during the national anthem. Their timing was impeccable.
Mr. Trump’s insolent antiestablishmentarianism made sense to voters in 2016 in a way that it didn’t in 2020. The latter year was a sui generis event and not one about which generalizations are usually helpful. It’s safe to say, though, that what made Mr. Trump interesting in 2016—his pugnacity and unpredictability—made him unelectable in the year of Covid-19 lockdowns.
I wouldn’t say Mr. Trump’s pugnacity and unpredictability made him a hit in 2024 either—most voters didn’t want him back. But his irascible scorched-earth rhetoric again connected with a plurality of voters weary of Joe Biden’s incompetence and hard-left policymaking. From 2021 to last year’s election, the Democrats’ lawfare-empowered Javerts, in concert with the cultural left’s avant-garde—cancel mobs, “antiracist” ideologues, transgender activists, open-border militants, climate alarmists—enabled the greatest comeback in U.S. political history.
That Mr. Trump’s electoral success is a measure of the left’s insanity rather than of Republicans’ unprodded aggression has been obvious to many of us for years. It’s dawning on liberals. That, at any rate, is how I interpreted this week’s report in the New York Times about the Biden administration’s self-defeating refusal to do anything for three years about the southern border. The thrust of the piece, by Christopher Flavelle, is that Mr. Trump’s current crusade against illegal immigration is wholly attributable to Mr. Biden’s failure to address the problem at all.
I invite the Times to assign a similar report on attempts to destroy Mr. Trump by lawfare. And, while they’re at it, on Mr. Obama’s second-term radicalism.
All of which brings us back to the question of the 2028 GOP nominee. Let’s pretend the MAGA message is a coherent thing, which it isn’t. MAGA works when an emboldened Democratic left rides roughshod over ordinary Americans’ sensibilities and traditions. As was the case in 2016 and 2024—and is not the case now.
What may attract, emphasis on may, is competence, experience, a safe pair of hands. A record of achievement rather than wild culture-war fulminations.
