Barring some legal or health emergency, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee in 2024. His projected victory in New Hampshire over Nikki Haley almost certainly closes the window of possibility for Haley to even keep the contest competitive. She now faces a do-or-die last stand in her home state of South Carolina, where (still limited) polling suggests a very uphill battle.
There are lots of reasons we’ve ended up with Trump back in a position of party dominance.
Of course, Trump has looked like the de facto nominee for so long that political junkies and neophytes alike might be forgiven for viewing the aspirations of replacing him as the leader of the Republican Party as delusional.
But I’m not quite so sure. We know Trump was politically weakened by the disastrous performance of his handpicked candidates in the 2022 midterms. He was even losing in some head-to-head polling with Ron DeSantis at one point
In the end, there are lots of reasons why we’ve ended up with Trump back in a position of party dominance. The indictments that perversely enabled a kind of martyrdom irresistible to the GOP base and DeSantis’ utter lack of charisma and cringey, ham-fisted campaign both had a lot to do with it. But fundamentally, the reason Trump won is that you can’t beat something with nothing, and the non-Trump wing of the Republican Party still hasn’t come up with something to offer.
Trump’s most important ideological and rhetorical innovation in 2016 was to sense, in his weird, loose and lizard-brained way, that the old ideological consensus that had held the Republican Party together had fallen apart. He intuited that the three-legged stool of Reaganism — religious conservatives, national defense hawks and Milton Friedman-admiring free market zealots — was collapsing due to the twin disasters of the Iraq War and the financial crisis. All he had to do was deliver a final swift kick.
Trump made transactional appeals to the religious conservatives on…
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