Yesterday’s drama between the Mo Brooks campaign in Alabama and Donald Trump is an interesting one, which sees some of what we’ve been hearing behind the scenes spilling out into the open.
Trump pulled his endorsement from Brooks yesterday, who is currently running to become the U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama. Trump took aim, urging Brooks to stop praising Brooks and instead focus his attention on the future. Trump accused Brooks also of employing NeverTrump consultants, changing his message in a manner that caused him to plummet in polls.
Brooks returned fire hours later, accusing Trump of being “duped” by Mitch McConnell, who prefers a different candidate. It’s a public fight between someone who was running as very pro-Trump and Trump himself.
In Georgia, Trump’s preferred candidate for Governor, David Perdue, is unable to raise money and is not getting any real backing from Republicans outside of Trump’s immediate circle. Perdue is also having to shift his rhetoric away from the 2020 election accusations because they aren’t landing with voters.
The National Journal ran a piece last week pointing out that Trump’s preferred candidates in these two races are floundering, and it could be indicating that Trump’s influence is waning. Politico has a piece today with the same theme.
Trump is likely unaware of the extent to which he has diverted from the source of his appeal. Trump, who isn’t connected to any dominant power structures and can lie and cheat, but doesn’t engage in normal political B.S. Trump wants his own power structure. And, even if one accepts that in his self-delusion Trump really does believe the election was somehow rigged against him, he also says lots of other things that he self-evidently doesn’t believe.
There is little doubt that Trump genuinely believes that the United States has no interest in being at odds with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and no business getting enmeshed in the Ukraine conflict. But now that Russian atrocities in Ukraine make that view broadly unpopular, Trump does what any conventional politician would do — pretend that his view is something else, and ludicrously assert that as president he would be much more confrontational with Putin than the Biden administration, including threatening the launch of nuclear weapons.
Trump’s loud noise and fear-instilling of Republican politicians can make it difficult to spot the damage that is happening in his political foundation. My POLITICO colleagues Tara Palmeri and Alex Isenstadt have both done work highlighting some cracks in that foundation, as revealed by Trump’s clumsy efforts to play boss in his party.
Trump’s problem is, as of right now, not necessarily that he’s losing the GOP (though there are certainly a number of people in the GOP who wish to lose him). He is facing three issues right now.
The first is that he’s effectively de-platformed. He can’t change the news cycle with his tweets if he doesn’t have a Twitter account to do so from. He was unable to communicate with his followers on Twitter or Facebook and to the media who followed him too closely (no, conservative media). Because he’s essentially voiceless, he can’t command the attention of the American public nearly as well, and that’s doing a lot of harm to his ability to make an impact in politics.
The second issue is that he is focusing on the 2020 election and not how to re-litigate it. Both he and Democrats share the same problems. He wants to focus on the “stolen election” claims. Democrats would rather focus their attention on January 6, 2021. The American public, meanwhile, desperately wants to move on – especially given the current state of the economy. They don’t care about what happened during and after the presidential election. They want someone to fix the mess.
This leads us to Trump’s third problem, and it’s the same problem he had in 2020: Messaging.
Trump and the candidates who are pushing his vendetta agenda aren’t connecting with voters because they don’t have a message that fits what the voters care about right now. His messaging in 2020 was at best inconsistent.
The campaign’s lack of coherent messaging has been happening for weeks. I mentioned it two weeks ago and frankly little has changed about what he’s doing. He’s still chasing after every issue he can bring up and trying to chase outrages to stir up his base rather than stick to a general platform and push it as hard as he can against the built-in biases of the media and the Democrats.
But, with all the rejoicing that Trump’s enemies are taking part in and with every rise they can get out of him going out into the open for the world to see, the fact of the matter is that the election is not being held today. There are still four months until the election results. This should cause panic. There are four months before a complete lack of communication will cause serious harm.
The Trump team must restructure and fire certain people at this time. He needs a team that isn’t led by sycophants but professionals who helped him pull out the win in 2016. Whatever the campaign is doing right now, it’s not effective and some heads have to roll.
Very little has changed from then to now, and it’s forcing Trump to pick bad candidates, not meet Americans where they are right now, and continue to drift further away from them.
He was a leader in 2016 because he spoke out on issues important to Americans. Instead of defining the issues, he chased them. He was greatly affected by this, and the pandemic.
I suspect he isn’t running in 2024, given how 2022 is panning out. To have any impact, he must choose his successor and keep the focus on the important issues. He needs to be able to convince a candidate that he is the right person for him. 2020 grievances simply won’t do the job.
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