Donald Trump is fading away. Republicans ought to celebrate.

Donald Trump is fading away. Republicans ought to celebrate.

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

March 16, 2021 at 4:31 a.m. GMT+9

Former president Donald Trump is driven past supporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 15. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Donald Trump is fading away, getting smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter. Before long he’ll be not a kingmaker but a sad old man, begging for attention few want to give him.

To many Republicans, this is surely disorienting, particularly how fast it has happened. They so wholeheartedly built their party’s political identity around him that it can be hard to imagine a future where he doesn’t matter much anymore.

But it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to the GOP.

Just a few months ago, it seemed that Trump would rule the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Even if he didn’t run for president again in 2024 (the idea was always improbable), just the threat that he might would restrain other potential candidates and keep his name on everyone’s lips. He’d continue to make and break careers, rewarding those who showed him sufficient loyalty and punishing those who displeased him.

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Then everything changed. First came Jan. 6 and the attack on the Capitol by violent Trump supporters, which led to his second impeachment. Two days after the riot, Twitter removed him from their platform, depriving him of the medium through which he had surely planned to maintain his hold on the attention of his supporters, and a critical conduit between himself and the news media.

Now, when Trump makes news, it’s only because he does something that makes him look small and pathetic, such as when he demanded the Republican Party not use his name or image in fundraising. If anyone’s going to cash in on his name, it’s him — or at least he hoped so. In the end, the party never stopped using him for fundraising. Meanwhile, scam PACs are emptying the pockets of gullible Trump supporters believing that they’re sending their money to him.

That shows that he still maintains affection within the party; after all, people are responding to those appeals by sending in their credit card numbers. But any smart Republican knows that Trumpism is a dead end.

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The most obvious reason, of course, is that Trump is a loser. He lost the popular vote twice — the first major party nominee since Adlai Stevenson to do so — and got beaten soundly in the electoral college in 2020 too. He left in disgrace, having mishandled the coronavirus pandemic so miserably that hundreds of thousands of Americans were dead and the economy was in shambles. Under his watch Republicans lost the White House, the House and the Senate. He spent his entire life trying to convince the world that he was a success, and his name will now forever be associated with failure.

Trumpism without Trump, furthermore, might be even worse. Nobody else in the party has anything like his crazed brand of charisma. While Republicans on the state and local levels may compete among themselves to see who’s the Trumpiest, it’s hard to imagine some second-rate Trump imitator becoming a nationally popular figure.

So who could possibly think that anything, or anyone, having much to do with Trump could bring Republicans back to power in 2024?

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At the presidential level, when in recent history a candidate took back the White House from the other party, it was almost always because they represented some kind of break not only with the opposition but with the ways their own party had failed in the recent past. That was true of Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan (though Joe Biden’s story is a little more complicated).

What kind of break can Republicans make with Trump’s failure? We don’t quite know yet, because he still has a grip on the party, even if it’s loosening. In all likelihood, it would have to be an unstated one: not a leader who publicly rejects Trump (such a person still probably couldn’t thrive inside the party), but one who represents something radically different.

So imagine that Trump continues his slide into irrelevance. He makes endorsements and attacks those who displease him, but the effect is less than overwhelming. Republicans don’t repudiate him, but outside of deep-red areas where he’s still hugely popular, they don’t go out of their way to praise him either. Other than the occasional indictment, he doesn’t make much news anymore.

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If that happens, a world of opportunity will open for the GOP. They can begin to have some actual policy debates to determine what their agenda ought to be for the future and whether they have anything more to offer voters than tax cuts for the wealthy. They might be able to back up a “populism” based mostly on whining about mean tech companies and Mr. Potato Head with some actual ideas that could be appealing to a wider population of voters.

They might even find some standard-bearers who build their reputations by inspiring people rather than stoking the most rancid grievances.

That could happen in a way that makes it possible to win back some of those who recoiled from Trump and reassemble a national majority. After all, voters have short memories. And Trump is drifting away without any Republican having to give him a push.

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