Critics across the spectrum have been saying for years that Donald Trump will destroy American democracy and overturn the Constitution if he is elected to another term as president. The Atlantic devoted its most recent issue to a series of essays listing the threats Trump poses to the constitutional order. David Frum, in one of those essays, wrote that “a second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.” Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert, claimed recently in The Washington Post that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” The former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has been saying the same thing for three years, and recently published a book that argues Republican voters bear a heavy responsibility for elevating Trump as a leader. These are but a few voices in a growing chorus warning voters about the risks of supporting Trump.
But the critics have a problem: no one seems to be listening. The polls show that Trump is still the overwhelming favorite among Republican voters for their party’s presidential nomination and that he is currently beating Biden in a prospective head-to-head matchup. Those voters are not buying the claim that the sky is falling. But that should not come as a surprise. This line of attack has rarely worked before and is unlikely to work now as a tactic to keep Trump from winning the 2024 election.
Why? Because Democrats have used this tactic so many times in the past that voters are now desensitized to it: Barry Goldwater, it was said in 1964, was going to blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust; Richard Nixon was an extremist who exploited racial divisions; Ronald Reagan represented the second coming of Hitler; George W. Bush was a warmonger and perhaps even a war criminal; Mitt Romney was the personification of evil because he may have teased a fellow student while in prep school. No wonder many Republican voters consider the attacks on Trump amusing and wholly detached from reality. You can only cry wolf so many times.
In addition, many of those voters remember Trump’s presidency and generally think well of his performance in office. He worked to secure the southern border, fostered U.S. energy production, kept the country out of foreign conflicts, and presided over a growing economy and booming stock market. He did not establish a dictatorship or try to overturn the Constitution. On the other side, his adversaries in Washington, D.C., cooked up phony charges against him based upon opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign. They claimed he was a Russian stooge—a thoroughly false charge that damaged not only Trump but also the nation as a whole. Many of the critics who are now saying he will be a dictator are the same people who were mouthing those bogus allegations just a couple of years ago. Are they surprised that few voters believe them today?
They also forget that President Biden is now the incumbent and must therefore campaign on his own accomplishments. After all, a presidential election is usually a referendum on the incumbent’s record in office—and Biden’s record is weak. He created a chaotic situation at the southern border by reversing Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy and by inviting migrants from around the world to travel to the border to request asylum in America. His spending programs ignited a round of inflation of the kind not seen in more than four decades; his electric-vehicle initiative is an embarrassing failure. And while Trump kept the peace, Biden is trying to manage a new war in Europe and an expanding conflict in the Middle East. Trump’s critics may not care about Biden’s record, but millions of voters do.
Those critics might also bear in mind a longstanding Wall Street saying: “Don’t fight the tape.” This means that when stocks are going up or down there is little point in pounding the table and declaring the market must be wrong. In that vein, Trump’s critics appear to be “pounding the table,” declaring that the voters are wrong, implying that they must be dumb or obtuse and that Trump is manipulating them. Some have complained that Trump’s voters may not be good Christians. These critics insist that they are defending democracy at the same time as they are writing off millions of voters as incapable of exercising the voting franchise, or as dangers to the republic. It is not a wise strategy to insult voters in the same breath as one is trying to appeal to them, which may be one reason why Trump’s supporters are tuning them out.
“It takes a horse to beat a horse,” a wise man once said, and in a presidential contest it takes a good candidate to beat another one. That is a lesson that Trump’s critics, most of them securely ensconced in Washington, D.C., and out of touch with the voters they decry, seem to have forgotten. Let them denounce Trump as loudly and often as they wish: they will make little headway until they can make a positive case for Biden—or for another candidate who can take his place.
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Source: newcriterion.com
