Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., on April 27.BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters
The question of the hour in Republican circles is the one that is seldom spoken but impossible to ignore: Can Donald Trump now be stopped from winning the party’s presidential nomination?
Yes, if you listen to the Never-Trump wing of the party, the swiftly diminishing establishment element of the GOP, the slice of American political life that, since the Second World War, served up such figures as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and, and as this strand of Republicanism went into 21st-century eclipse, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.
No, if you listen to the MAGA wing of the party, which produces most of the noise but only comprises slightly more than a third of the GOP. Many of these Americans are new to voting, new to political activism, and new to the Republican Party. Their forebears largely were Democrats, with their great grandparents thrilling to the dulcet New Deal tones of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside talks, their grandparents inspired by the New Frontier rhetoric of John F. Kennedy, and their parents marching to the Southern-fried rhythms of Bill Clinton.
Maybe, if you listen to the political scientists who study electoral maps and can argue the case either way; the commentators who thirst for the sizzle of pork tenderloin during a contested set of Iowa caucuses and the glimpse of the frosty White Mountains during a hard-fought New Hampshire primary; and the slowly growing group of Republican White House candidates who are desperate to assure that Mr. Trump doesn’t wrap up the nomination before they have a chance to polish their stump speeches.
The notion of Mr. Trump merely gliding to his third Republican nomination was inconceivable a mere six weeks ago. His campaign was a shambles, his message was muddled, his future uncertain. But of all the remarkable stunts of the magus of MAGA, none may be more remarkable than this: He is perhaps the only person in American history actually to profit from being indicted and to have his prospects soar as the legal cases against him multiply and the charges he faced metastasize. Indeed, the ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday showed him with a seven-point lead over Joe Biden.
Earlier this year Mr. Trump was facing a formidable challenge from Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, the designated-hitter of those who wanted to move on from the man they blamed for the Republicans’ failures in the 2020 presidential contest and midterm congressional elections of 2018 and 2020. Today Mr. Trump has the support of 58 per cent of Republicans, according to the CBS News/YouGov poll released last week while Mr. DeSantis has the backing of just 22 per cent.
As Mr. Trump prepares for his CNN town hall meeting Wednesday in New Hampshire – where the St. Anselm College Survey Center poll taken just before his indictment put the former president’s support at 42 per cent, with Mr. DeSantis at 29 per cent – his rivals are wondering whether what in late winter they considered the inconceivable and the intolerable has become the inevitable.
The loudest voice in the effort to render the inevitability argument inoperative is former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a onetime Trump supporter. “This is about letting the American people decide who’s best prepared to be president,” he said on CBS last week.
The inevitability imperative has a rich history in American politics. There was a point in the 1972 presidential race when senator Edmund Muskie of Maine seemed to be the unassailable front-runner; he dropped out of the race in late April of that year, defeated by senator George McGovern of South Dakota. There was a moment in the 2008 campaign when the candidacy of former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton was considered the inevitable Democratic nominee and the campaign of former mayor Rudolph Giuliani was regarded as the inevitable Republican nominee; instead, senators Barack Obama and John McCain moved to the general election as the parties’ finalists.
In an appearance in Henniker, N.H., last week, Mr. Christie said, “What you need to decide is: Are we just going to put this race on autopilot, ‘he’s ahead, let him win, let’s see what happens, how bad can it be?’”
That was an echo of the plaint of senator John Glenn of Ohio, the Project Mercury astronaut who was considered a strong challenger to former vice-president Walter Mondale in the 1984 Democratic presidential race.
“If we go before the people of this country and I lose on that basis, then I’ll accept that defeat and be very proud that I went down with colours flying,” I heard Mr. Glenn say in the Martin J. Flanagan Community Center in Somersworth, N.H., all those years ago. “But if I go down because the bosses and the barons were out there telling people how to vote, and we didn’t get our message across, that will be a crime for the country.”
In the four decades since Mr. Mondale managed to prevail in that race only to be defeated by Ronald Reagan in the November election, the “bosses” of the big-city political machines and the “barons” of the once-mighty labour unions have all but vanished, replaced by cable windbags and social-media screechers.
Some front-runners do win their party nomination and then win the presidency, and the most recent four to do so were Republicans: Mr. Eisenhower (1952), Mr. Nixon (1968), Mr. Reagan (1980), and George H. W. Bush (2000). Even so, the best wisdom at this point in a presidential campaign that already has had several stunning turning points comes from the distinguished American political philosopher Lawrence P. Berra.
“It ain’t over,” said Yogi Berra, the baseball catcher and manager known as the peerless master of the malaprop, “until it’s over.”