Anointed?
It's Too Early to Declare Trump "Nominated" by the Republicans for 2024
Late in 2015, before even a single ballot had been cast in the 2016 primaries, a mainstream journalist "anointed" Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton as the two nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively with the assertion that the donor class had made its "decision" and that all of the money would be flowing to these two candidates. The writer proclaimed that "the 2016 primaries are over."
Donald Trump's ascendency to the Republican nomination and then to the presidency in 2016 was in many ways the electorate's direct rejection of that "presumption." In 2015 the Bush and Clinton families were the face of a budding American political dynastic class. If elected, Hillary Clinton would have been the second Clinton to serve as president in less than two decades, and Jeb Bush would have been the THIRD Bush to hold that office in succession (broken only by the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).
The electorate's antipathy wasn't just directed at the "face" of the Washington D.C. establishment, but was also a reaction against the solidification of the more invisible power held by the "1%" of population that makes so many of the country's political and economic decisions in pursuit of its own self-interests at the expense of their own.
We are making a similar mistake today in 2023 by assuming that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee before even a single ballot is cast in the first 2024 Republican primary. Except that there is something far more dangerous to Trump's presumed "anointment" by the same Republican establishment that his 2016 candidacy so directly repudiated: instead of a donor class that bankrolls its candidate for the purpose of maintaining its own economic power, that donor class is now shortsightedly trying to hang on for its dear life and desperately hoping that the political currents will somehow magically shift course by themselves as Trump's "transactional candidacy" now promises them economic benefit in exchange for liberty itself.
The Trump apparatus today is not talking about "draining the swamp" (a vague phrase which can mean very different things to various people - in fact, the Republican and Democratic donor classes ARE the "swamp" in its economic sense). Rather, the power structure around Trump has taken an explicit lurch towards authoritarianism which would ultimately be a long term existential danger not just to the economic interests of that donor class itself, but more vitally and immediately to the freedom of the broader American nation beginning with anybody who is not defined in some transactional way by Trump as "us." This should especially alarm the journalistic and media communities who are not only described as "not us," but explicitly as "the enemy."
Trump's donor class should be aware of what it is allowing to be created, and the journalistic community must be aware not only of what it is fighting, but of HOW it is fighting it. And jumping on Trump's own self-created prophecy that he is already the Republican nominee before a single ballot has been cast (or before Trump has let his candidacy be scrutinized in a single debate) is NOT the way to fight it.
Nobody should rule out the potential for a group of a few significant, principled donors to turn directly and publicly against Trump; or for Trump's more mainstream supporters to continue to move away from him the same way they instinctively reacted against a Bush-Clinton "dynasty." There may be a steady drain at the periphery of Trump's base as his followers discover that who Trump truly is and what he stands for doesn't actually align with their own self-interests and values.
When (and obviously IF) the Trump fever in the Republican Party actually breaks, that slow movement will become an avalanche which will make us wonder "why didn't we see it coming?"
If Trump's more mainstream MAGA supporters turn against him, their mixture of fury and resignation will not just be directed at Trump himself, but also in a less identifiable way towards the invisible donor class and the media complex which created and maintained him - much in the same way that base rejected the "dynastic face" of such power structures in 2016 largely because they thought they had been lied to. If Trump’s supporters decide that he (the "one voice" they thought they could trust and the "one voice" on whom they staked both their emotional hopes and intellectual positions) has lied to them, they may also reflexively decide that there is "no truth anywhere anymore" - which could open up a Pandora's Box of problems as difficult to fathom as Trump himself has been to navigate.
Adam Kinzinger has said, "In five or ten years there's not going to be a single person in America that will ever admit they were a Trump supporter."
It may not take that long.
But this is not something we can just hope for, it is something we must work towards.
Trump's supporters will not be able to see what the bulk of the Republican donors are doing and "wishing for" behind the scenes. But the skill and integrity with which the media handles Trump's candidacy will be in their eyeballs every moment of every day - and the level and quality of our public political discourse itself may well determine the fate of the nation.