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In 2016, Trump’s standing with his party was so precarious that his campaign had to actively plan to ensure convention delegates would not go behind his back to steal the nomination, and even such stalwart reactionaries as Ted Cruz refused to endorse him onstage. In 2020, scores of Republican officials, including several Trump appointees, publicly refused to endorse his reelection.
As Trump runs again, Republicans have succumbed to a strange fatalism about their own potential to send a signal of Trump’s unacceptability to wavering Republicans. Trump-administration officials wringing their hands about whether to publicize their concerns about their former boss have decided to “mute themselves, disagree on whether to go public with their fears about a restoration, or just not work in the coordinated, strategic, and relentless fashion that’s needed to get through to voters,” reported Politico’s Jonathan Martin recently.
Romney rationalized that it wouldn’t matter anyway. “If virtually all the GOP governors and senators were to say they would not support Trump, even in the general, I don’t think his poll numbers would be harmed, at all,” he told Martin. “They might even get better. I think the MAGA base dislikes our elected elites as much as or more than they dislike Democrats.” But the target of influence wouldn’t be “the MAGA base” — it would be the traditional Republicans who, like Romney, peeled away from the party in 2020.
Politico noted that Wall Street has clung to a hope that somehow it may nudge Trump aside for a more normal Republican, but in the overwhelmingly likely event of its failure, “many in the financial-services world expect GOP donors to fall in line behind Trump, even if they were repelled by his denial of the 2020 election results and alleged criminal activity.”
On the intellectual right, opposition to Trump has shrunk entirely to concerns about his electability and practical capacity to advance the conservative agenda. Any moral qualms about Trump’s lust for power have disappeared.
Even former Trump attorney general Bill Barr, who has described his ex-boss as dangerous and childlike, has put as much emphasis on Trump’s ineffectiveness as his “toxic persona,” writing in the Free Press, “While I think it is critical the Biden administration be beaten at the polls, Trump is not the answer. He is not capable of winning the decisive victory Republicans need to advance conservative principles.”
And what exactly are those principles? There was a time when one could draw a sharp distinction between movement conservatism, which was focused on policy goals like tax cuts and banning abortion, and Trump, who cared only about power. At first, the movement and the man worked together instrumentally. Now, they seem to share first principles. Even conservative intellectuals have come to see power itself as the ultimate end, convincing themselves that the Democratic Party embodies a terrifying cultural revolution. Lance Morrow wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal embodying this assumption with the astonishingly revealing headline “Trump vs. the Woke: Let the People Decide” — as if the alternative to Trump were not the decidedly un-woke Biden but instead the left-wing protesters who mostly hate him. Conservatives have talked themselves out of joining an anti-Trump center-left coalition by defining it out of existence, imagining that the only alternative to Trump is Students for Justice in Palestine.
Among what used to be the anti-Trump right, it has become a settled fact that those who warned about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions have been proved wrong. The Journal famously published a column by Mick Mulvaney in November 2020 headlined “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” Rather than be chastened by the extremely predictable failure of that prediction, it continues to invoke Trump’s first term as if this were actually correct. A recent Journal editorial sneered that Chris Christie’s “warnings that Mr. Trump is a threat to the republic won’t persuade GOP voters who remember Democrats saying the same in 2016.”
The Journal editorial page was obviously never going to support a Democratic presidential candidate. But the Republican elite’s attitude toward Trump filters into the political bloodstream. The reason a small but crucial sliver of voters in places like Phoenix and Atlanta abandoned its Republican voting habits to reluctantly cast a ballot for Biden is that it had absorbed the idea that traditional Republicans couldn’t abide Trump.
The collapse of the Republican primary into a Trump coronation, with Trump’s main opponents all pledging to back him in November and seemingly leaving the door wide open to serve as his running mate, likewise confirms the expiration of any serious reservations within the party over his fitness to serve. Where the notion that Trump is a bad person who shouldn’t be president was once declared boldly by the party’s leaders, it is now muttered by its oddballs. The once-revoked permission structure to support him has quietly returned.
One surprising aspect of Biden’s presidency is that while the partisan elements of his domestic agenda fell well short of liberal hopes, the bipartisan elements have exceeded all expectations. Biden successfully negotiated deals with Republicans on infrastructure, scientific research, critical domestic manufacturing, veterans benefits, and modest gun control. Yet he is facing the serious possibility that he will lose reelection because of a spoiler candidacy by the self-styled bipartisan movement No Labels.
The corny premise of No Labels is that partisanship is destroying America and that solutions can be found by listening respectfully to one another and compromising on common ground. To whatever extent you find this theory persuasive, it’s impossible to deny Biden has done more to make it a reality than any president in decades.
No Labels explains that its campaign to put a centrist candidate on the ballot is needed because “we see our two major political parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics rather than what’s best for our country. We hear reason and persuasion — the pillars of our democracy since its founding — being replaced by anger and intimidation.” This indictment might apply to one of the two major candidates but not to both of them.
The organization’s remedy is even more curious. It calls for a “common sense” platform of negotiating prescription-drug prices, stricter enforcement of immigration laws combined with higher legal immigration and amnesty for Dreamers who came to this country as children, universal background checks for gun purchases and closing the gun-show loophole, an all-of-the-above approach to energy, funding for localities to hire and train police, permitting reform, and strong support for NATO and other allies. What about abortion? The “common sense” solution No Labels embraces (“Abortion is too important and complicated an issue to say it’s common sense to pass a law — nationally or in the states — that draws a clear line at a certain stage of pregnancy”) is a gentle way of saying “pro-choice.”
Literally every item on this list is supported or has already been accomplished by Biden. When you consider this fact, the group’s refusal to endorse him is baffling, and it becomes obvious that No Labels’ approval of a presidential candidate would come mostly at Biden’s expense. Any scenario in which he wins the election would involve the race polarizing around Trump, which in turn would require Biden to pull together liberals and moderates. Running a candidate who promises moderation, compromise, and decency — let alone a platform that could be swiped from Biden’s own campaign page — can serve only to divide the anti-Trump coalition.
Joe Lieberman, the founding chairman of No Labels and a former Democratic senator who lost a 2006 primary to Ned Lamont over his staunch support for Bush’s leadership in the Iraq War, has led the group’s public messaging. Lieberman, who was Gore’s running mate in 2000, has repeatedly insisted that No Labels will not run a spoiler candidacy and has promised it has strict guardrails to ensure any campaign it backs does not help reelect Trump. The way this fail-safe system works, Lieberman has explained, is that the group will stand down unless “the polling is clear that we won’t be a spoiler.”
A highly relevant fact here is that No Labels relies on polling by Mark Penn, who happens to be the husband of the group’s chief executive, Nancy Jacobson. Penn is a former Democratic pollster who was a prominent adviser to Bill Clinton and then the lead strategist for Hillary Clinton’s Senate candidacy in 2000 and presidential campaign in 2008. That campaign was a career-incinerating humiliation for Penn. Clinton entered the race as the favorite, only to find herself overtaken by upstart Barack Obama. Penn notoriously insisted Obama was unelectable and pushed Clinton to attack him as culturally foreign. (“I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” he wrote in one memo.)
Clinton did not hire Penn for her next campaign eight years later. After she lost in 2016, Penn took an increasingly reactionary turn, writing op-eds with headlines like “The Dishonesty of the Deep State” and even meeting with Trump in the Oval Office to advise him on how to beat back impeachment. His polls frequently test novel questions that tend to support his narrative — most recently, they have purported to find shocking levels of antisemitism among young voters — and his survey methods have drawn criticism from other pollsters. So when Lieberman swears up and down his group won’t help reelect Trump but bases that conclusion on Penn’s say-so, his assurances should not be taken at face value.
Lieberman and Penn have in common an alienation from the Democratic Party that has ideological and professional dimensions. Both men came tantalizingly close to the apogee of professional success — Lieberman as vice-presidential nominee who fell short of winning by a few hundred votes in Florida and Penn as Svengali to the party’s heir apparent. After very nearly reaching the mountaintop, both found themselves shunted aside.
So when Penn and Lieberman dismiss the Democratic Party as “dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics” while calling for policies eerily similar to those advocated by its current leadership, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are transposing their own career humiliations onto the national debate.
One paradox of American politics is that it is very difficult to rise to the top within the party system but that destabilizing the system from the outside through a spoiler candidacy is almost trivially easy. In a closely balanced electorate, a third party can decide the outcome by pulling even a tiny number of votes away from one of the other parties, and the amount of money and fame required to receive a potentially decisive number of votes is low enough that anybody even slightly famous can do it. Stein is not exactly a giant of the left.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who by virtue of his family name is a giant of a sort, has a similarly antagonistic relationship to the two-party system as No Labels and Stein, though polling has shown he appears to be drawing more support from Trump’s coalition than Biden’s. Still, his presence in the race, running on a platform that is a bizarre mix of anti-vaxx conspiracizing and pox-on-both-houses populism, is a testament to the degree that certain voters are prioritizing issues that have little to do with the real and present dangers of Trump’s return.
A number of third-tier figures may be tempted to disrupt the election if they can’t see beyond their personal frustrations to grasp the larger stakes. One notable dynamic of this moment is how many political elites, both major and minor, are too wrapped up in their own microdramas to understand the enormity of the decision facing the country. A combination of unresolved grudges against the likes of Lamont, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and other esoteric targets appears to be an important reason the U.S. is poised to hand leadership of the free world to an authoritarian criminal.
But the spoiler candidates and their supporters are not the only people suffering from this particular brand of myopia. It is, at least for now, endemic.
Three years ago, Biden promised a return to something like political normalcy. As president, he would try to represent all Americans, not just those who voted for him; he would deliver speeches with coherent sentences rather than ranting off the cuff for hours; he would not routinely be described by his own appointees as deranged or slaver publicly over dictators who had flattered him or paid him through his business.
That promise worked. The lesson of the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm was “Normal beats crazy.” The Trumpiest candidates who seemed to be trying to replicate Trump’s unnerving style — Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker — lost a series of elections. The pattern appeared to reveal something comforting and sustainable about the character of the electorate.
And whatever his shortcomings, Biden has delivered normalcy. He has visited heavily Republican areas and both promised and delivered aid without extortive demands, supported American allies against attacks by American enemies, and produced the soft landing economists had deemed unlikely a year ago.
But now the political passion is all on the side of extremism. Normalcy feels spent, enervating, and this has encouraged former members of the anti-Trump coalition to gravitate toward other concerns that animate them. An important number of Americans who once found Trump intolerable have either forgotten how awful he is or have some strange craving for his return.
Biden is often described as lacking energy. But it is not the president who is exhausted; it is us.
