In Arizona, last week, Republican voters chose a woman called Kari Lake to be their nominee for Governor. Ms Lake is a former TV newsreader, and life-long Democrat, who donated large sums of money to Barack Obama. Her conversion to conservative politics came quite recently, and like all converts, her zeal is beyond measure.
Ms Lake has spent recent months talking almost exclusively about the 2020 election. Joe Biden, she claims, did not really get 81 million votes. The election was “corrupt”. The voting machines, she has suggested, might have been rigged. She promised Republican voters that if she is elected, she will fully investigate the 2020 election, and also, ensure that there is no more election fraud in Arizona. She won, of course, “the total and complete endorsement” of Donald Trump. After she won her primary last week (ironically, taking the lead due to a big dump of votes in the middle of the night) she claimed she had “smashed the McCain machine” – referring to former Senator John McCain, who represented Arizona as a moderate Republican for decades, and died almost five years ago.
As might be expected, polls show her trailing her Democratic opponent by somewhere between seven, and ten, per cent. Even in what is shaping up to be a banner year for Republicans, candidates like Kari Lake are giving Democrats a better than fighting chance, right across the country. When you can convincingly say “it’s me or the lunatic”, you’ll win almost all of the time. Unless you’re Hillary Clinton.
Almost all of this is due to the continued influence of the aforementioned Donald Trump, whose home was raided by the FBI yesterday. We know the script, now: Good right wingers like me are supposed to be outraged. How dare they raid a political opponent, we are supposed to say. This is evidence of persecution of Trump! We’re supposed to exclaim. This is unprecedented!
But it is of course neither unprecedented, nor particularly unusual. Bill Clinton was subjected to years of investigations during his Presidency, quite rightly. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of corruption, last year, years after leaving office. In Ireland, Charles Haughey was a frequent visitor to the courts in his retirement. Quite often, you’ll find that people outraged about the Trump raid also wanted to put Tony Blair on trial for war crimes. If the authorities suspect Trump of a crime, then they should treat him as they would anyone else. There is no evidence at all that this is not the case: There is only reflexive partisan outrage. But there’s a usual story with Trump supporters, that plays out everytime he does, or is involved in, something objectionable: First, they’ll insist that he didn’t really say, or do, anything wrong. And then, if it turns out he did do the thing they denied that he did, the story will switch to “and he was right!“.
And so, now, this will be the story, again, in the midterm campaign: Donald Trump’s exhausting, relentless war with reality. Republican candidates across America forced not to talk about inflation, but to answer questions about whether the last election was stolen: If they answer “yes”, they sound like crazies to normal people. If they answer “no”, they earn a demented press release denouncing them as fake Republicans from the man in Mar a Lago.
The Republicans have an enormous Trump problem beyond November, as well: Consider two outcomes for the next election, in 2024.
The first outcome is that he runs for the nomination, and wins it. In that circumstance, his inherent ill-discipline and unprofessionalism will triumph over all. The election won’t be about inflation, or the economy, or Joe Biden’s record: it will be about Trump insisting that he really won the last election. Every debate and interview will be Trump being asked whether he will accept the results THIS time, and him saying that he’ll “have to see, because the last election was so, so unfair”. He will make it the litmus test for his primary opponents, too: Are they willing to stand on a debate stage beside him and say that he is, in fact, the rightful President, who was robbed of the last election? Nobody will escape this nonsense.
But of course, every election Trump has ever lost has been in some way unfair, to hear him tell it: When he lost the Iowa caucus in 2016, he accused Ted Cruz of stealing it, and suggested there had been fraud. There was no fraud. He then went on to accuse Ted Cruz’s father of murdering President Kennedy. That was untrue, too, but for some reason Trump supporters tend to ignore his most blatant fibs when considering whether the one about the last election might be a fib too.
Which is why the second outcome is just as bad: He runs for the nomination, and doesn’t win, and somebody like Ron DeSantis beats him.
In those circumstances, Trump will just insist that he really won, and that the election was stolen, and that Republicans should stay at home. And he won’t care if that means a second term for Democrats: He never has, and he never will.
In the past, it has been customary for defeated Presidents to conduct themselves with some basic dignity. Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and didn’t sulk. Neither did the elder Bush, when Bill Clinton unseated him. Trump’s behaviour since leaving office has been unprecedented in modern American history, and almost every single thing he has done has been damaging to the cause of his own party.
And so, as it is, America is headed towards another autumn of absurdity. Candidates like Lake will lose, and claim it was stolen. Trump endorsed bad candidates may cost Republicans the Senate, but again, they’ll just claim it was stolen. Trump will parade around the country, presenting himself as the victim of bullying. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic who should know better will lap it up. And Democrats and Progressives, if they know what is good for them, will work hard to keep him on the stage for as long as possible.
There are lessons here, for those who want to see them. The problem is that very few people on the right do want to see them.