Wednesday’s drama between the Mo Brooks campaign in Alabama and Donald Trump is an interesting one, which sees some of what we’ve been hearing behind the scenes spilling out into the open.
On Wednesday, Trump rescinded his endorsement of Brooks, who is currently running for U.S. Senate in Alabama. Trump took aim at Brooks urging Republicans to move on from the 2020 stolen election and focus on winning future elections. Trump also accused Brooks of hiring NeverTrump consultants and changing his messaging in a way that made him plummet in the polls.
Brooks returned fire hours later, accusing Trump of being “duped” by Mitch McConnell, who prefers a different candidate. It’s a public fight between someone who was running as very pro-Trump and Trump himself.
In Georgia, Trump’s preferred candidate for Governor, David Perdue, is unable to raise money and is not getting any real backing from Republicans outside of Trump’s immediate circle. Perdue is also having to shift his rhetoric away from the 2020 election accusations because they aren’t landing with voters.
The National Journal ran a piece last week pointing out that Trump’s preferred candidates in these two races are floundering, and it could be indicating that Trump’s influence is waning. Today at Politico, another piece with a similar theme.
One suspects that Trump himself does not realize how far he has drifted from the original source of his appeal as someone who is not connected to a reigning power structure and may lie and even cheat but does not traffic in the usual political B.S. Now Trump is trying to create his own power structure. And, even if one accepts that in his self-delusion Trump really does believe the election was somehow rigged against him, he also says lots of other things that he self-evidently doesn’t believe.
There is little doubt that Trump genuinely believes that the United States has no interest in being at odds with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and no business getting enmeshed in the Ukraine conflict. But now that Russian atrocities in Ukraine make that view broadly unpopular, Trump does what any conventional politician would do — pretend that his view is something else, and ludicrously assert that as president he would be much more confrontational with Putin than the Biden administration, including threatening the launch of nuclear weapons.
Trump makes so much noise, and instills so much fear in Republican politicians, that it can be hard to see the deterioration that is taking place in his political foundation. My POLITICO colleagues Tara Palmeri and Alex Isenstadt have both done work highlighting some cracks in that foundation, as revealed by Trump’s clumsy efforts to play boss in his party.
Trump’s problem is, as of right now, not necessarily that he’s losing the GOP (though there are certainly a number of people in the GOP who wish to lose him). He has, essentially, three problems right now.
The first is that he’s effectively de-platformed. He can’t change the news cycle with his tweets if he doesn’t have a Twitter account to do so from. His expulsion from Twitter and Facebook did a lot of damage to his ability to message to his followers and the media that followed him a little too obsessively (no, not conservative media). Because he’s essentially voiceless, he can’t command the attention of the American public nearly as well, and that’s doing a lot of harm to his ability to make an impact in politics.
His second problem is his focus on re-litigating the 2020 election. He and the Democrats have the same problem here. He wants to focus on the “stolen election” claims. The Democrats want to focus on January 6, 2021. The American public, meanwhile, desperately wants to move on – especially given the current state of the economy. They don’t care about what happened during and after the presidential election. They just want someone who can fix the current mess.
This leads us to Trump’s third problem, and it’s the same problem he had in 2020: Messaging.
Trump and the candidates who are pushing his vendetta agenda aren’t connecting with voters because they don’t have a message that fits what the voters care about right now. In 2020, his messaging was erratic at best.
The campaign’s lack of coherent messaging has been happening for weeks. I mentioned it two weeks ago and frankly little has changed about what he’s doing. He’s still chasing after every issue he can bring up and trying to chase outrages to stir up his base rather than stick to a general platform and push it as hard as he can against the built-in biases of the media and the Democrats.
But, with all the rejoicing that Trump’s enemies are taking part in and with every rise they can get out of him going out into the open for the world to see, the fact of the matter is that the election is not being held today. We still have four months before the poll numbers should be creating a major panic. Four months until a lack of messaging will really hurt him.
At this moment, the Trump team needs to fire some people and restructure. He needs a team that isn’t led by sycophants but professionals who helped him pull out the win in 2016. Whatever the campaign is doing right now, it’s not effective and some heads have to roll.
Very little has changed from then to now, and it’s forcing Trump to pick bad candidates, not meet Americans where they are right now, and continue to drift further away from them.
In 2016, his strength was talking about issues that mattered to Americans, as well as providing a strong counter to what Hillary Clinton was offering. In 2020, he was chasing issues rather than defining them. That, coupled with the pandemic, hurt him immensely.
I suspect he isn’t running in 2024, given how 2022 is panning out. If he wants to have any sort of impact, it has to be in terms of choosing his successor and focusing on the key issues of the moment. He has to push a candidate to his side correctly. 2020 grievances simply won’t do the job.