Is Trump still toxic to most Americans?

“Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian president announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast majority of young Democrats would prefer someone younger stood in his place. But everybody knows the reason Biden is staggering on. It’s because his Republican opponent in 2024 will in all likelihood be the man he beat in 2020: Donald J. Trump, arguably the most divisive leader in American history. 

Even if Trump doesn’t win the Republican nomination, Biden’s advisors seem to be betting the White House that Trumpism, the movement which still dominates the Republican Party, will still be sufficiently off-putting to the electorate to guarantee their man another four years in power — assuming Mother Nature and Father Time don’t have other plans.

That’s why, in his campaign launch video, Biden talked about the “MAGA extremists” who want to undermine democracy and the freedom to have an abortion or marry someone of your own sex. A sinister montage showed an image of Trump shaking hands with his rival for the Republican nomination, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis. 

Perhaps American voters are even more allergic than the French to bourgeois insults

The Democrats’ 2024 plan is clear, then. Team Biden wants to turn Trump into an American Marine Le Pen. They want to make the Christian nationalists of the American right play a similar role to the far-right in France — a voter rump that is too strong to die but still toxic to the majority. 

Americans don’t have to like Biden — the French don’t like Emmanuel Macron. Independents and swing voters are never going to side in sufficient number with the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton called them.

The problem with such thinking is that it didn’t work for Clinton in 2016. Moreover, had it not been for a massive expansion of mail-in voting because of the pandemic in 2020, it would have failed again in 2020. Perhaps American voters are even more allergic than the French to bourgeois insults.

On the other hand, Trumpism does appear to have failed at the nationwide ballot three times in a row. In 2018, the Republicans, under Trump, lost forty-one seats and the House of Representatives. In 2020, the Democrats won back the presidency, held the House and tied up the Senate. And in 2022, despite lots of talk of an anti-Biden “red wave,” the Republicans only narrowly won the House and the conspicuous failure of various high-profile Trumpy candidates meant they lost Senate and gubernatorial seats.

The conclusion, shared by many Republican strategists, is that “Trump fatigue” is real. That’s where DeSantis comes in. He’s seen as right-wing enough to carry lots of Trump voters, yet has the multifaceted advantage of not being Donald Trump. He may be far behind in the polls at this very early stage in the race, but he still hasn’t declared.

The argument for DeSantis is that as Republicans face up to the reality of another bruising round at the ballot with The Donald on their ticket, they will find him increasingly attractive. Indeed, the very latest polls show Trump’s lead shrinking a little, as the popularity bump he enjoyed following his ridiculously unfair criminal indictment in New York last month fades.

Still, a lot has to go right for DeSantis in the coming months for any of that to come true. His candidacy could melt upon contact with reality. The wider public will soon learn that he is in fact quite a dull public speaker. He may be a canny culture warrior, who knows how to wind up the liberal media, but he can never match Trump on that score. He’ll also have to do something no Republican has done since 2016: win a slanging match with Donald Trump.

The Trump campaign responded to the latest polls by sending out a vicious email this week attacking DeSantis’s record as governor. “Florida continues to tumble into complete and total delinquency and destruction,” read the statement, deploying that Trumpian hyperbole which no other campaigns equal. “On DeSantis’s watch, Florida has become one of the least affordable states to live in the country.” Is that true? Nobody seems to care. A Trump group also put out a stupendously weird — and therefore funny — ad attacking the Florida governor for eating pudding with his fingers: “Someone get this man a spoon!”

As nominee, Trump could have other advantages over DeSantis. He wouldn’t need to win over his own fan base, which means he can be more flexible — if not exactly subtle — on traditional culture war matters when needed. On abortion, for instance, Trump recently incurred the wrath of some pro-life groups after he said that the issue should be decided by the states. That’s probably because he can see that in the midterms, and in the election in Chicago and Wisconsin this month, the Republican-led challenge to legal abortion has brought out huge numbers of women and young Democratic voters.

DeSantis, meanwhile, just signed a ban on abortions in Florida after six weeks. He may be a more sincere Christian than Trump, which should help him win over devout Catholics and Evangelicals in a Republican nomination race. Then again, the same voters would have to accept that, as president, Trump elevated three anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court, which led to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The politics of abortion scramble everything. It’s an oddity that Biden, the first Catholic president since JFK, will fight for reelection as a fervent supporter of abortion rights up to birth because he feels he must.

Americans know by now that while Biden likes to pose as an old-fashioned moderate, he’s really on the woke side of history. With the old man’s sometimes vague support, his administration has backed Critical Race Theory in schools, pursued debt forgiveness programs that would discriminate against white people, and blocked restrictions on transgender athletes competing in schools, among other policies.

That’s all extremely unpopular in America, yet radicalism marches on. After four years of Trump and two of Biden, sensible Americans are crying out for an alternative. It doesn’t look as if they’ll get one. That’s democracy, folks, as Biden would say.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.