As much as anything, this week was the real start of the 2024 campaign, and the preview it offered suggested how much the next year will be dominated by variations on the tiresome theme of Trump, Trump, and Trump again. Even the former President’s absence from the first Republican debate, on Wednesday, did little to distract from the story line of the poll-dominating “elephant not in the room,” as the Fox News anchor Bret Baier put it. But, if the subject is by now a familiar one, the plot has taken a notable twist, summed up in the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded in Atlanta late on Thursday evening.
In a highly public display manufactured for maximum prime-time impact by the world’s most famous criminal defendant, Trump flew into the city on his private jet ahead of a Friday deadline for his surrender, then motorcaded to the Fulton County Jail, where he was arrested, fingerprinted, and had his mug shot taken, before being released on a pre-negotiated two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. There was no real news in this, of course, since he was indicted earlier this month. But that did not stop the breathless hours of coverage—the scenes of his plane slowly rolling down the tarmac, the extensive motorcade ride through Atlanta, his self-reported and highly suspect description of himself as six feet three and two hundred and fifteen pounds. The big reveal of the evening was his photo, in which he wore a navy suit and red tie. He glared straight into the camera for his big moment; the trademark Trump glower—eyebrows raised, vaguely menacing, closer to a scowl than a smile—is one he has cultivated for years. In the White House, his aides called it, simply, the Stare. He stands charged with illegally seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in Georgia and nationally. If the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has her way, he will go on trial as soon as October 23rd, alongside a rogue’s gallery of eighteen co-defendants in a scheme that Willis has likened to a criminal racketeering conspiracy.
The unprecedented photo of a former American President treated like a common criminal, which Willis seemed intent on orchestrating—“Unless somebody tells me differently,” Fulton County’s sheriff had said earlier this week, “we are following our normal practices”—will go down in history, and not, it is safe to say, in a good way. Look at the mug shots of the Watergate conspirators: there is a grainy satisfaction in contemplating those black-and-white figures today, knowing how their stories ended up. Yet, for now, Trump sees only political gain—and, quite possibly, the spectre of a historic self-pardon—in that snarly snapshot from the Fulton County Jail. And why, after all, shouldn’t he? The four indictments this year have been good for his poll numbers with the Republican base, good for his fund-raising, and good for his favored political move of presenting himself as a perpetual victim who must seek vengeance against his persecutors.
Even the big event whose timing he did not orchestrate this week tended to reinforce his preferred narrative of inevitable victory over a largely quiescent field of Republican also-rans. Trump’s absence at the debate, on Wednesday, afforded the eight G.O.P. candidates who made it to the stage a chance to argue over policy matters—such as support for the war in Ukraine and deficit reduction—without his oxygen-sucking presence. Only ten minutes of questions in two long hours were actually about Trump and the ongoing challenge to American democracy that he presents. But it did not matter. The takeaway from the first debate of 2024 was not all that different from the takeaway from the first debate of the 2016 election cycle: the Republican Party is the Party of Trump, whether he’s onstage or not.
The essential moment came at the top of the second hour, when the Fox News anchors finally, belatedly, uttered the T-word, asking which Republican candidates would endorse the ex-President as their nominee even in the increasingly likely scenario that he becomes a convicted felon. The responses that followed unrolled as a sort of democracy car crash: first the young entrepreneur and aspiring Trump clone Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up, high, followed quickly by Nikki Haley’s, Tim Scott’s, and Doug Burgum’s. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor once touted as a possible Trump-killer until his leaden personality and clumsy campaigning sent him sinking in the polls, did himself no favors by looking to see what the other candidates were doing, then raising his hand as well.
Next to go was Mike Pence, the former Vice-President whose candidacy has veered between sanctimonious reminders of how he stood up to Trump, on January 6, 2021, and almost inexplicable acts of sycophancy toward him. A few minutes later, Pence would demand, in that deep baritone of his, that the other candidates weigh in on his January 6th choice to rebuff Trump and certify his 2020 election defeat. “I think the American people deserve to know whether everyone on this stage agrees that I kept my oath to the Constitution that day,” he said. Did he think the audience would forget that he had just pledged to vote for Trump again, criminal convictions be damned? Pence has long since perfected the ability to abase himself in public without seeming the least bit ashamed.
In the end, six out of eight candidates confirmed what we already knew: they would back Trump as the nominee, essentially, no matter what. The two exceptions were Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie. “Someone has to stop normalizing this conduct,” Christie said, of Trump, prompting audible boos from the audience. Baier and his co-anchor, Martha MacCallum, didn’t even bother to ask which felony—out of the ninety-one counts, in four separate criminal indictments that he is currently facing—Trump might be convicted of. That was not the point of their hypothetical, which instead served to remind America that even Republicans ostensibly running against the ex-President are very likely to end up voting for him.
Watching these hopelessly outmatched candidates, I kept thinking back to one of the great lines from last summer’s January 6th hearings in the House of Representatives. Trump’s former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, described how, after the 2020 election, he and others had been part of “Team Normal,” those who tried and failed to convince Trump that he had really lost the election, only to find themselves pushed aside in favor of Team Crazy, whose members, led by Rudy Giuliani, aided and abetted Trump’s lies about the “rigged election.” The Republican debate stage in Milwaukee this week was filled with candidates who came from what passes for Team Normal in today’s G.O.P., figures such as Trump’s former Vice-President, Pence; Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Haley; and Trump’s former friend and adviser Christie.
All three of them built their careers as governors in the pre-Trump Republican Party: Pence and Haley in the reliably red states of Indiana and South Carolina, respectively; Christie in Democratic New Jersey, a point he emphasized—to little avail—in his debate-stage pitch for Republicans to go for a candidate who knows how to win a competitive race in unfriendly territory. But, just like Stepien and the rest of Team Normal, they all eventually sold out to Trump. In this, they represent the very considerable part of the Republican Party that knew supporting Trump was a disaster back in 2016 and, yet, when it came time for the general election and divvying up the spoils of power that followed his unlikely victory, they did it anyway.
If this were a different time, a viewer of Wednesday’s debate might have concluded that it was not a bad night for Team Normal. Haley and Christie delivered several of the more memorable zingers while making impassioned cases for decidedly normal causes, such as supporting Ukraine, a free country aligned with the U.S., over Vladimir Putin’s murderous dictatorship, as Haley put it, or choosing to protect the Constitution over terminating it, as Christie put it. Both took especial glee in going after Ramaswamy, a Trump for the millennial set so automatic in his Trumpier-than-thou responses to any question that Christie lampooned him as a sort of ChatGPT version of a Republican candidate. It was a good dig but also perhaps unintentionally revealing: ChatGPT might very well come up with a Trumpist candidate who sounds a lot like this one.
Besides, the polls these days about the Republican race for 2024 are clear: Team Normal is a sideshow, and a highly compromised one at that. There should be little doubt that most of those who now claim to have moved on from Trump, such as Haley and Pence, will nonetheless raise their hands and vote for him again if they have to. For Republicans, for now, there is, once again, only Team Trump. ♦
