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The big stories about money and politics in the race for the White House
There is no such thing as a US presidential election. If Bill Clinton had lost to Bob Dole in 1996, or George W Bush had lost to John Kerry at the turn of the millennium, there is no reason to believe that we would be living in a very different world. So when I suggest that November 5, 2024, is a pivotal moment in history, don’t mumble, “journalists say this all the time.”
What is the particular significance of this election? If Donald Trump loses, there is an underrated chance that America and its politics will stabilize for a generation. “Stabilization” does not mean “becoming Luxembourg.” Polarization will persist. But the accepted wisdom that Trumpism will outlast Trump—that he is merely the face and voice of deeper social forces that will shake the republic for decades—is more shaky than it was four years ago.
The lesson of 2024 so far is that American populism will find Trump extremely difficult to replace. In January, Ron DeSantis, who combined the core of Trump’s platform with executive ability, withdrew from the Republican primary, having failed so badly that he could not even articulate his case for 2028. In July, JD Vance was crowned not just vice presidential candidate but heir apparent to the Maga movement. Nothing since has suggested he can do that. Vivek Ramaswamy is another who may wonder whether the peak summer of his public life is over.
Others who will try in the coming years (perhaps Tucker Carlson) will run into the same problem, which is that Trump has a political superpower that is almost unique. I count three.
The most obvious is star quality. In any given country, one or two, and sometimes none, politicians in each generation have it. Forced to stand on their own, without the distracting presence of a charismatic leader, the far-right agenda becomes too sharp. Then there is what we might call emotional sunk costs. For voters who committed to Trump around 2016 and paid the price for it among friends, relatives, or social media sparring partners, abandoning him is a personal failure. A new leader, no matter how faithful to his ideas, cannot simply inherit that support, hence the “he’s not my real dad” feeling that arises whenever someone tries to succeed him.
Trump’s final and most counterintuitive advantage is his perceived incompetence. Some Republicans tell themselves he is too lazy and chaotic to do irreparable harm. (And, as of January 6, 2021, that was half the case.) A politician who combines Trump’s views with operational control would lose as much support as he would win, would scare as much as he impress.
Notice the connecting theme here: the near-unrelatedness of ideas. The shocking thing about Trump is that he can never “shoot someone” on the streets without losing his supporters. Plenty of agitators of the past could have claimed that. If Trump represents anything novel, it is that he can take almost any stance on almost any issue—immigration being a possible exception—without losing them. (Who among his anti-vaccination fans cares that he has recommended getting a Covid-19 vaccine?) The dictatorship of the 1930s, always the wrong lens through which to analyze Trump, is About something: communism, revanchism, etc. The Trump phenomenon is much less dogmatic and also less likely to transfer to another leader.
One cannot raise the prospect of post-Trump stability in polite company without sounding unintellectual. Western elites are not Marxists, if that means wishing to end capitalism, but Marxists in the sense that their view of what makes the world go round tends to downplay the importance of the individual. Larger forces are assumed to be in charge. A culture where it is normal to speak of the “wrong side of history” or the “arc of history” implicitly believes that events are already half-written.
Was Trump’s rise to power a personal feat or historically determined by decades of deindustrialization, porous borders, and other provocations that were grounds for electoral rebellion? “Both,” there is no doubt: it takes a remarkable individual to exploit structural trends. The surge of populism in other democracies suggests that something profound is at work. Ultimately, however, especially in a presidential system, the individual is the catalyst, and American populists have no individual in sight.
Many Trump-hating conservatives don’t want to vote for Kamala Harris. Instead of selling them a woman who is, it’s true, now laughably over-scrutinized, Democrats should argue that the prize is not just four years of reprieve for the republic, but perhaps much longer. Another Trump may be inevitable. But voters can force history to find one.
