The race that Trump cannot disappear behind
For much of 2023, Donald Trump’s political campaign has been defined by the criminal charges he faces in four jurisdictions. Republicans responded, the former president went to trial, and television coverage was often wall-to-wall.
The cycle of events created a sense of flux for a leading Republican candidate seeking another term and who in fact spoke publicly quite rarely compared to his previous campaigns. That impression softened him, frankly, of himself and limited the wounds he had inflicted on himself by giving relatively few interviews and holding relatively few meetings.
But now that Trump has moved closer to being the Republican candidate, such a buffer is harder to maintain. There is hardly a primary race for him to disappear behind. And as the race shifts to a new phase, he is creating hurdles that his allies are eager to avoid.
Take his recent comments about voting by mail and early voting.
“If you vote by mail, you automatically have fraud,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week. When Ingraham pointed out that voting by mail exists in Florida, a state where Trump lives and which he won, he pressed again. “That’s right, that’s right. If you have it, you are dealing with fraud,” he said.
It’s a message he delivered again Thursday evening in Nashville to an audience of Christian broadcasters. Voting by mail is rife with fraud, he pointed out.
“We don’t have Election Day anymore, we have election periods, some of which last 45 days,” Trump said ominously. “And what they do during those 45 days is very bad. A lot of bad things happen.”
That is completely consistent with his repeated false claims that he lost the 2020 election due to widespread fraud, despite the fact that dozens of judges have ruled against his position and his claims have never been substantiated.
But it runs counter to efforts by both Trump and his aides about a year ago to soften his attacks on mail-in voting. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in March 2023, Trump said it was time to “change our thinking” about early and mail-in voting, a reflection that the party needed to start collecting these types of votes to win.
That’s a message that people like the almost certainly outgoing Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel have been embracing for months. That includes Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, whom he has endorsed as the next co-chair of the national party.
At this year’s CPAC, Lara Trump said this week that embracing early voting is a necessity for Republicans.
“The truth is, if we want to compete with Democrats, we can’t wait until Election Day,” she said. “If we want to compete and win, we must embrace early voting. The days of waiting to vote until Election Day are over.”
A more famous Trump resurfaces
Since Trump was indicted, he doesn’t seem interested in living up to that message. His attacks on mail-in voting have alarmed top Republicans since mid-2020, when the coronavirus pandemic led to changes in what several states allowed for absentee ballots and voting by mail.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said at the time that he had tried to warn Trump that he was harming himself with his attacks.
‘Do you know who is most afraid of Covid? Seniors. And if they don’t vote, period, we’re screwed,” McCarthy told Axios, recalling a conversation he had with Trump.
There have been other reminders of a less disciplined Trump along the way. When he declared that he wanted to work to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it surprised his advisers, especially given the law’s popularity and his own disastrous attempts to repeal the health care law earlier. Democrats immediately highlighted the statement.
Then there’s the matter of Trump on his way to becoming the de facto Republican candidate, and his political world is expanding in the process.
On Friday, a Trump ally announced a new super PAC that will be supported by the former president’s friend – Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire and former CEO of Marvel Entertainment. Advertisements will air during the general election. Trump has blessed the new group, even though it is not clear how it will function alongside the existing super PAC that has supported him for months.
So far, Trump’s campaign has been professionalized and disciplined, controlling what it can and generally doing its best to limit the things it cannot.
But the reality of the new phase of the race means that an often out-of-control candidate will be more visible and take more responsibility behind the scenes.
How did Haley’s South Carolina become Trump Country? Ask the Tea Party.
When Nikki Haley ran for governor of South Carolina in 2010, one of her first campaign stops was Claude and Sunny O’Donovan’s living room in Aiken, SC.
Claude O’Donovan, 85, co-founder of a local Tea Party group, had invited Haley and other candidates to present their case to conservative activists of Aiken County, a heavily Republican enclave.
“We fell in love with her,” he said. “She was a dynamite girl.”
A digital photo frame in the O’Donovans’ home still shows a photo of Haley at the meeting. But tomorrow, when Haley faces Donald J. Trump in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, both O’Donovans plan to vote for Trump.
“I think he has the values of the Tea Party,” says Sunny O’Donovan, 84. “It was for the people, and I see Trump as something for the people.”
Recent polls shows Trump leading Haley by 36 points in South Carolina. A decisive loss would put the Republican nomination further out of reach and provide a painful coda to her political career in her home state. A Trump victory in South Carolina would also write the final chapter of one of the most important political stories of the past decade: the story of how Trump entered politics amid a transformative grassroots movement and then incorporated that movement into his own.
In the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Tea Party movement turned outrage over bank bailouts and right-wing hostility toward the new president and his policies into a wave of mid-term victories. The party went on to win Republican majorities in Congress and statehouses across the country and spawn a new generation of political stars, including Haley.
Years later, initially skeptical Tea Partiers embraced Trump, who as candidate and president advanced a souped-up version of the movement’s antipathy toward immigrants, fear of a changing country and anti-establishment fervor.
“The kind of people who were Tea Party in 2010 will be part of the MAGA movement in 2024,” said Scott Huffmon, professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., and director of the Winthrop Poll. “We owe it all to the Tea Party.”
Today, few of the original Tea Party organizations remain. But their former dominance, and their dissolution in Trump’s camp, goes a long way toward explaining how South Carolina abandoned its once-favorite daughter for a former New York Democrat.
Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for Haley’s campaign, defended the former governor’s credentials. “Just like when she ran for governor, Nikki is the outsider, the conservative candidate,” she said in a statement.
But even some once-devoted supporters have moved on.
“Yes, he’s the crazy uncle of Thanksgiving,” Jane Page Thompson, co-founder of Claude O’Donovan’s Tea Party group, said of Trump. ‘But now America needs the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving – not the snowflake niece.
—Charles Homans
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