Even Losing May Not Stop Trump’s Campaign of Vengeance

Barely more than a week ago, it seemed as though the Washington political class and their big-money counterparts in New York had all but written off Kamala Harris, on the basis of what, exactly, I was never sure, given the essentially unmoving polls and the absence of any notable events that might have changed large numbers of minds. Nate Silver’s prediction model had Donald Trump with a lead from mid-October through the end of the month; on October 24th, the Democratic super PAC Future Forward privately projected that Harris’s probability of winning was down to just thirty-seven per cent, according to the Washington Post, before it claimed to see a late shift in her direction in recent days. The point is: forget the noise. Amid all this, it seems best to heed the adage of Jim Messina, the Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reëlection campaign: “Don’t pay attention to Washington conventional wisdom, Wall Street conventional wisdom, or Nate Silver.”

This is especially the case given the stakes—2024 is nothing like a repeat of Obama versus Mitt Romney. America would be lucky to have that kind of sane choice. Instead, it is Trump’s possible return to the White House that looms when the polls open on Tuesday morning. In such a situation, it strikes me as almost irresponsible to succumb to the undeniably positive rumblings that have tentatively begun to emerge from Trump’s opponents, no matter how seductive or psychologically soothing we may find the photos of empty seats at the ex-President’s latest campaign rallies. (The lead headline on the Drudge Report as I’m writing this: “Last Days of the Don?”) In truth, we are all survivors of 2016; the shock of Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton casts a long shadow over any predictions today about a woman on the brink of winning the American Presidency.

At a minimum, it just seems like a poor strategy of self-care, with so many indicators of a dead-heat race, to read too much certainty into the increasing number of political observers predicting that—the margin of error and Silver be damned—Harris is on track for a historic victory. If that is, in fact, what happens, great—let’s make sure to give those predictors due credit. I’m thinking of you, James Carville, Matthew Dowd, Paul Glastris, Mark McKinnon, and all those #BlueWave tweeters who got on the bandwagon before the past twenty-four hours. If Harris wins Iowa, the legend of Ann Selzer will justifiably be burnished by the decision to publish, on Saturday night, a shocking and unexpected poll for the Des Moines Register giving Harris a three-point lead in the state, which Trump has won twice by large margins. In the meantime, it’s probably best to consider the survey a highly pleasant outlier rather than proof that the senior women of the Midwest are about to deal a crippling blow to Trump’s frat-party-from-hell of a campaign.

Republicans, with their congenitally overconfident candidate and an entire political operation premised on telling the Republican electorate that Trump’s defeat is literally impossible, have a different problem. How do you prepare your team for a loss that, in a dead heat, has a real chance of happening? (Whether the G.O.P., the party of literal election denialism for the past four years, is willing to acknowledge such a defeat is another matter entirely—one that may well consume the seventy-six days between now and the January 20th Inauguration of a new President, but that is not a today problem.) For months, Trump has said variations of “Harris cannot win. It is impossible.” So, it was treated as news on Monday morning when Axios obtained an internal memo from one of the Trump campaign’s managers, Susie Wiles, using phrases like “should we be victorious” and “God willing,” which seemed to leave open the possibility of a Trump loss. And then there was the ambiguous statement from the candidate himself, who, when asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about the possibility of not winning, claimed that he had a “substantial lead,” but also replied, “I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right?”

All of which is to say—we still don’t really know what is going to happen. But what we do know is that these are the final hours that Trump will spend as a Presidential candidate, assuming—big asterisk here—that he keeps his word not to run again. Flying across the country, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, from Georgia to Michigan and back again, Trump has ended his campaign career with such erratic behavior and alarming statements that they should not be overlooked and subsumed by the understandable obsession with trying to figure out what’s going to happen on Tuesday.

The temptation is, with the election so close, simply to forget about whatever he’s threatening and just hope that he loses. But I say losing is not enough; 2020 and Trump’s unequivocal defeat by Joe Biden did not spell the end of his political career. We cannot assume that it would this time, either.

Because Trump, even if he loses, will have proved once again that he holds an entire political party in his thrall. He will have proved that tens of millions of Americans will follow him even past the point of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. He will have proved that the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged—and yes, I am including his previous two campaigns—was not enough to stop nearly half the country from supporting him. Even in a best-case scenario of Trump accepting defeat—I will not fantasize about him gracefully conceding, which seems to be a fantastical outcome from a man who still believes he was robbed of proper accolades for his cameo in “Home Alone 2”—there remains the matter of his various pending criminal cases; what more evidence could we need to believe that Trump is prepared to do anything, up to and including torching the American political system, to avoid incarceration?

So take note: as Trump travelled the nation in his final push asking to be the only convicted felon in history to serve as President, he called Democrats “demonic” and repeatedly threatened to go after the “enemies within” and mused openly about inflicting violence on those enemies, whether Liz Cheney or members of the “fake news,” who, as he put it in a particularly vituperative rally speech in Pennsylvania on Sunday morning, might well come into the line of fire if someone were to go after him. “I don’t mind,” Trump said, of a would-be assassin taking a shot at the press. In just the past few days, he has promised a new Administration that will be “nasty.” He has vowed to “protect the women of our country . . . whether the women like it or not.” He has attacked Harris in vile personal terms and apparently agreed to unleash the science-denialism of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the entire U.S. health system. Tired Trump is often the most revealing version of Trump, and so perhaps it’s no mistake that at that Pennsylvania rally, Trump finally admitted publicly what he had privately told some of his advisers four years ago—that he did not willingly depart the White House after his 2020 defeat. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said.

Trump’s 2024 campaign of vengeance was born out of that moment. No matter what anyone says, it is not over yet. ♦