Donald Trump Is Looking Like a Shell of Himself

Low energy!

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Nobody took Donald Trump seriously when he announced he was running for president in 2016. He was a sideshow, a bit, a reality star mounting a vanity campaign. Even after he won, the prevailing wisdom was that he never really wanted to be president; he just ran because he though it would boost his flagging TV ratings and give him a chance to be on TV more. All of this was probably true. But he won, handing napalm to a smoldering movement in conservative politics that drew vehement support across class, state, and even party lines with a relatively simple pitch: I’m an asshole, but I’m YOUR asshole… and this is who we’re going to bully.

That campaign, that strategy, as we saw, it had the juice. It had the mojo. It had the animus and excitement and energy to go the distance, and when the Democrats ran a floundering, aging, stilted, and deeply unlikeable Hillary Clinton, it wiped the floor with her. But after four years of chaos and a pandemic and the resulting economic recession, Trump was pushed out, despite his best efforts to hold power through illegitimate means.

What we saw last night, though… boy, I don’t know. It doesn’t look like Donald Trump has the juice.

In a hour-long address, likely planned to follow a “red wave” sweeping both houses of Congress but in reality following a shambolic Republican defeat that likely improved the Democrats’ majority in the Senate and captured the barest of margins in the House, Trump announced that he would be running for president again in 2024. You can see the specific moment here:

He sounds exhausted!! Is this thing on??? Even the crowd is halfhearted. This is like a reunion tour for a classic rock band that has been doing heroin since 1965. This is The Who playing at the Savemart Center in Fresno in 2015 with only two original members of the band, trying to recapture the magic of the Acid Era. To boomers, maybe (sorry dad) it’s a callback to glory. To everyone else it’s all a bit sad.

And Trump’s campaign is already the same! Ivanka — Trump’s only potential political successor with a functioning brain — wants nothing to do with it. Ben Garrison has stopped making Trump look buff in his cartoons. The National Review came out with a decisive “No,” (which will inevitably turn into a “yes” if Trump polls like one point above 50 percent in Florida, but still). Even the major broadcast networks — who once couldn’t get enough out of the big man from The Apprentice — largely took a pass on Trump’s announcement last night.

Yes, you could say we’ve been here before: everyone treated him like a joke in 2016 until it was too late. But what stands out to me is that in 2016, Trump started something, blasting through party insiders and forcing them to fall in line. But then he lost, and kept losing, and his handpicked candidates fell far short of the mark in an election cycle that the party infrastructure was relying on to deliver them a triumvirate in 2024 and lock down the country for years to come. The Trump train is still running, but rather than get on board, everyone is reaching their stop.

Part of this is due to the surging popularity of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has blazed a trail with a cheap Trump imitation and a slightly richer understanding of actual governance. But if we’re talking juice, I don’t know if DeSantis has it, either. He doesn’t have the face time or the pedigree or the sheer entertainer’s swag of top-form Trump. Instead, what we’ll get is a beta-Trump impersonator versus a decaying shell of the real thing. In a head-to-head primary — the GOP’s selection process is winner-take-all — I’m not sure who comes out on top. It may very well be that Trump wins again: Since 2020, almost every projection, pundit, and perspective on the ground has suggested that the party nomination is his to lose. But right now, it doesn’t look like the triumphant resurgence of the MAGA movement. It looks like the last gasp of a washed-out despot trying for one last Waterloo.

The risk, if we’re following that particular Napoleonic analogy, is if the Democrats’ Wellington fumbles the bag. I think a coherent Biden with a manageable economy beats Trump in 2024. I also think there is absolutely zero guarantee that those conditions will be met. Anything could happen, but it’s pretty clear what comes next: the writhing mass of flesh and hate that is the GOP tears itself apart until it congeals into the form of one man. We’ll have to deal with the monster when it arises, but all we can hope for is that turmoil will be as painful as possible for everyone involved, and that whatever comes out looks just as low energy and dejected as the candidate we saw on stage last night.