Is Trump's Nomination Now Inevitable?

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It's nice to see you too. Last we were in this room was the midterm election night.

That's right, that was almost a year ago.

Definitely not a year ago.

Six months, I think actually someone is helpfully telling me that it was only six months ago.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Well, let's go back to that moment, I mean, the last time you were on the show, right after the midterm elections, I distinctly remember you saying that. While the result of that midterm election was a clear rejection of Donald Trump by general election voters, that didn't mean that Trumpism was over. And the question that you posed heading into the next election, the 2024 presidential cycle, was? What's the Republican Party going to do with a disappointing set of results? And with the person who ushered in those disappointing results? Donald Trump?

Yeah, I mean, I look back at that night and there was that feeling that Donald Trump had been diminished by the electorate. You had congressional leaders and conservative media asking an open question about whether Donald Trump was still the kind of leader of the party. Because the Republican results were so far from their expectations, I think there was a natural political question to say, Is this thing over? Is this the time then, when folks turn the page on Trump?

Right, and there's one person in particular. I remember very clearly in that moment that people are starting to look to as somebody who could take advantage of this weaker Trump.

Yeah, totally, we're talking Ron DESANTIS, Right, we are.

We are.

I mean, Yeah, I mean. Governor Ron DeSantis, because he had a good midterms night, was hoisted into the position of Donald Trump alternative almost immediately. And for a Republican party where some folks have been looking for a way to turn the page for a long time, he really embodied a lot of those hopes.

Right, and, of course, things have changed a tremendous amount since then. So let's understand instead how we got to this moment where things seem kind of flipped on their head from that place. You just described. So tell us where you start your reporting and why?

Well, we were thinking about how to kind of untangle this question. Where are the places in the Republican party that the leadership and the decision makers would be wrestling with? Both the reality of Trump's power and the reality of his drag on the party's ability to win. And what emerged for us was the RNC Winter meeting in January in Dana Point, California. This is a gathering of Republican insiders, the folks who actually make the decisions about how to set up the primary process.

The embers are still smoldering.

The embers are still smoldering. And what we found when we got there was a universal recognition of the party's disappointing results. No one was in confusion that the Red Wave was promised, that the conditions were there and that they failed to seize on them.

Right, so when you arrive, this is a party that knows it's losing. And in theory, this is going to be the place. This RNC meeting where party officials start to scheme about how they're going to win again and whether that requires ditching Donald Trump.

Exactly, it was the unspoken elephant in every room that Donald Trump was part of the reason that Republicans had had such losses. And for different spaces of the party, they were having much different reactions to that information.

Can you just say your name and where you are from?

John Fredericks I am the godzilla of truth in America. You can follow me at JF Radio Show.

The first person I meet at that winter meeting was a man named John Fredericks. He's a big, kind of Trump embodied radio host in Virginia, and he was hosting a forum at that RNC event. That was meant to really put pressure on the Republican insider saying, Hey, the kind of Trump base is still here. And I think, really importantly, we are not embarrassed by those results. When we went to them, they had a clear explanation for why Republicans didn't do as well as they.

Did, which is what?

If you want to blame Trump, don't vote for him in the upcoming primaries, that's your choice. You can do that if you think he's the reason, right, I happen to not think he is. But she is the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

They thought the establishment side of Republicans. I'm talking the party apparatus, the RNC, including its chair, Ronna McDaniel, and the kind of Senate coffers of money that come out of D.

She's the chairman of the RNC, she's done nothing on ballot harvesting, she hasn't done anything in any of the critical areas.

People like Carrie Lake or Hershel Walker or Blake Masters would have all done better if the Republican Party had united around them.

It's just one big ring of consultants paying each other for this, that TV ads, etc. and so they're all making money.

And other than that, you have party leadership calling them bad candidates publicly, and, more importantly, not giving them the data and money that could have been at their disposal. And so they really blamed the mechanics of the Republican Party for not adequately rallying around the Trump candidates. And that was the reason this group said they lost.

So, to the degree that Fredericks is a proxy for the Trump base, the base is not seeing Trump or the issues he cared about. Like election denialism. As what costs the party these midterm elections, it's the Republican Party that's responsible for that.

Absolutely, it is an argument that is very convenient for them because it does not require them to blame Trump or require them to blame the messages that those candidates gave. But it allows them to continue a proxy war that's been happening in the Republican Party for a long time, where the Trump base really sees its role as overtaking the Republican establishment. And they were really clearly expressing that.

We're trying to take over the Republican Party because what it represents right now is the Mitt Romney elites, right? We go to the infield of NASCAR and grill hot dogs, and Mitt Romney goes to the box of the owner of the jets, right? That's the disconnect. And eventually, we're going to take over the Republican Party as a vehicle, right, as a vehicle for our movement.

When I talked to Fredericks, he said that Donald Trump had gotten so many people involved in the party. On a base level that the top levels of Republican leadership needed to defer to them. But didn't. And that they were the ones living in the past and not really dealing with the reality. Which is that Trumpism is the party and therefore requires being supported as the party's dominant message. That's what they felt was the disconnect that led to the midterms. Losses was a Republican establishment that was not willing to go all in on Trump, not that Trump and those messages had caused the losses. But there's another really important thing that Fredericks told me at that event people have changed.

The movement has eclipsed all of its current leaders.

That's what you got.

It's eclipsed them all. This is not defined anymore by its leaders. That's the most important thing to realize, and the movement itself is becoming the IT.

And that's because the Trump base, as he says, sees itself as bigger and more distinct from Donald Trump as a campaign and candidate than they did before. And I think this is an important point to understand is that for a long time, we've kind of thought of this as a clear causational relationship. That Donald Trump and his campaign says a message, and that millions of these voters follow that kind of robotically respond, robotically respond to that message. That he is dictating the political priorities of this space. But when I talked to Fredericks at the RNC event, he said that a couple of things have changed. One is that there have been some policy breaks between the Trump base and Donald Trump. As a candidate, one of the things that came up at the RNC was that Donald Trump embraced the vaccines.

Trump was too progressive on vaccines and Covid, Yes.

Too pro-vaccine.

Not everyone's understanding of the situation.

And among that group, Donald Trump was too pro-vaccine and too pro-Covid mandates while in office. And so I think, if you want to think of it as like a kind of Frankenstein figure, the vaccine is a moment where they realize they get sentience. You know, that they realize that there's something maybe different than the person who made them. That's one break from him as a kind of political figure, the other break that was really important was. They were mentioning the speaker fight in the House and how when Kevin McCarthy was seeking to get the gavel for the Republican majority in the House. Remember, Donald Trump endorsed him early, but it was a GOP base led by Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Fox. Figures like Tucker Carlson at the time, who really went over the recommendation of Trump to maintain distance from McCarthy and get more concessions out of them. And when I was asking them about this, they said that this was another moment that became clear to them that they are acting in their own America. First priorities.

And it seems like what you're describing is a moment where, and this is very intriguing. To Trump's grassroots base, this movement he's created, he is starting to seem a little bit like the establishment, right?

Yes, absolutely, I think this is again really critical nuance of Trump this version versus Trump previous versions. He's not been president for four years. There's a lot of relationships that are mixed in with the GOP leadership and establishment. These are all these little instances that created a distance between Donald Trump's grassroots base and Donald Trump as a candidate and political figure.

Okay, so at this moment, we have the grassroots, unchastened by the midterm results, emboldened even by them not blaming Trump for them. But we also have this group of voters saying we're kind of bigger than Trump and potentially being open to an alternative like DESantis. So what's the significance of this when it comes to understanding how the party is going to handle Donald Trump going forward?

Right? An important thing to remember about the type of people who go to the RNC Winter meeting. The delegates that represent the Republican Party is that they're thinking about what's best for the GOP at large. And when you talk to these people, they say they have this really difficult task to navigate. Which is the reality that 30 to 35 of the party is unshakably with Donald Trump. And they also have the reality that that is a not enough people to win a general election, that is not enough people to win a general election.

STAN Hey Henry Barber. nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. I'm thinking about a man we talked to whose name is Henry Barber.

The son of Governor Haley Barber.

The nephew of Governor Haley Barber.

It's a big family.

Big family.

Oddly enough, I ended up becoming an RNC member in 05, so a pretty long time since the middle of the George W. administration.

That's so many different versions of the Republican party. How have you kind of maintained RNC credibility throughout all of those changes?

Well, we have all kinds of incredible members on the RNC. I'm more of a political hack. I'm real driven by one goal for the RNC, and that's winning elections. It's the only statistic that matters.

And he was someone who was really seen as a trusted figure about how does the party win elections going forward? And when we posed this question to him, saying, How do you deal with the reality that the Trump base might be losing you elections? He says very clearly that being anti-Trump is a non-starter for Republicans.

Anybody who has a plan and the foundation of it is anti-Trump has got not a clue because that is a path to losing. I know we need Donald Trump to be part of this, part of our success.

He's recognizing the reality that Donald Trump has so changed the issues that most Republican voters prioritize that. There's no version of winning, particularly in a primary and even in a general election. That doesn't energize and activate that core base of people. But at the same time, that same group of people has caused the party to drift away from the of issues that motivate swing voters, that motivate the people in the middle who really rejected them in the last midterm elections.

So I think if you look at the 22 cycle, I think there's a lesson for the 24 cycle. Our candidates who were focused on the future, who were focused on public policy, did much, much better in the 22 cycle than the candidates who were stuck in the past. And particularly those who were just talking about 2020..

What Barbara is saying is that somehow the Republicans need to square that circle, need to energize and activate the base. While at the same time, making sure that they aren't pushed in directions that pull them further away from swing voters and cause them to lose to win, Barbara says, you need both, not either, or.

So I want to have that Reagan-esque leader who we nominate in 2024, who brings us together, who independents flock to, who moderate Democrats go. I'm voting for that guy because I want the opportunity that this guy or gal are offering.

If that leader comes through the primary, they will fall in line.

Yeah, and the reality is, look at 2016.

So, rather than trying to find a way forward after these midterm losses without Trump, rather than putting their fingers on the scale, maybe a little bit signaling it's time for someone new, someone like Desantis. The party's message in January is We want Trump and Trump supporters to come with us on this forward-looking journey, and we want everyone else as well. The question, of course, is, how on earth do you do that? because the components of that are very contradictory, absolutely.

It was all vibes and no specifics.

But instead, we're still left with this really intriguing situation that I want you to resolve for us. Which is that this grassroots base, it's still got a kind of wary relationship to Trump himself, which you described earlier. Suddenly, this grassroots base is feeling like they don't need to do exactly what Trump says. So how does that factor into this moment?

When we were talking to Trump supporters, even at the RNC, while they weren't publicly expressing any problems with Trump. And were blaming the kind of Republican establishment for the losses, they were privately telling us that they do believe that. The version of Donald Trump that came out of the 2020 race and came into the 2022 midterms was much more focused on his own personal grievances and settling the score of his own election loss. Rather than what I think they would often refer to, in shorthand, as kind of 2016 version of Donald Trump, which was certainly grievance driven, but representing a kind of larger community.

Right, he was aggrieved on behalf of them.

He was aggrieved on behalf of the little guy, right? And whatever you think, that is not just him, right.

That's like a table full of hats.

Let's go Brandon. Trump won, and we really see this, like explicitly in early March when we go to CPAC America, Florida.

Don't New York my Florida.

The Conservative Political Action Conference, the big grassroots gathering of right wing activists that happens outside of Washington, D.

What are your guys names?

Amanda, Jeannie, Sylvia. When we got there and talked to voters, they were expressing similar things to what we heard at the RNC winter meeting.

100 percent he needs to, we all know, yes. Focus more on, like, what he's going to do in the future and how he's going to make the country great again.

That they were looking to see if Donald Trump had moved past his personal grievances. What do you hope he talks about?

The economy.

And when we were asking, what did they want? That was really clear at the conference to close the border.

I mean, and then also to get rid of this whole Russia and Ukraine war, that's just dumb. This would have never happened under him.

A clear expression that the country is being wrested by liberal elites.

There's only two genders, and I don't like the drag shows they're bringing their kids to. That's not right.

That's being threatened by progressive social movements like Black Lives Matter or the growth of trans rights.

Well, I think it's disgusting, actually, and it's hurting our kids and they're the future.

And so all of those became very clearly identifiable priorities for this group that they were seeking the candidate to reflect. And so when you got to Trump's speech, which was the last thing to happen at that conference? The question I had going into the speech is, would this be a candidate that reflects those priorities? Would this be a candidate that understands that? There is a gap, a weakness, a distance between him and the base he's so associated with, and would he reflect what they were asking him to do, which was close that gap? Thank you very much and I'm thrilled to be back at CPAC with thousands of great and true.

American patriots, and that's what you are.

And I think when we heard that speech.

For seven years, you and I have been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it.

It was a box-checking, one-by-one of those priorities.

I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilization.

You heard Donald Trump go through the type of cultural grievances they were concerned about.

We will teach our values and promote our history and our traditions to our children. We will, in other words, be proud of our country again.

Make clear he was the champion of their expression of America first.

We'll be stopping the slide into costly and never-ending wars. We're going to stop it. Can't keep spending.

And when you hear those things in the context of the conference, I think it has a different resonance.

In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution, I am your retribution.

Let's take the I am your retribution line that got such national attention from that speech. In isolation, you hear a candidate promising to use the powers of the federal government to attack their opponents. But when you're in that context, you hear a little more than that. You hear him saying that those grievances you reflect. I understand and I will prioritize when given power. So it's not just a scattershot expression from him.

Thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much.

So when we think about the journey we've been on, that starts at the RNC. With the grassroots saying that they have some concerns about Trump, they have some low level wariness. This is a big milestone moment in that journey, because Trump is saying back to them, I've heard you, I've heard your wariness, I've heard some of your concerns, and he's saying, My grievances are your grievances.

It's that time of year again, Jim. The poll that gets it all started. And this bond between candidate and base is most clearly expressed in the straw poll that comes out of CPAC. This is a kind of tradition that happens at this conference, where they informally ask the attendees who they would want their presidential nominee to be. And Trump was always the favorite to win this straw poll, but this year, the numbers kind of speak for themselves.

We'll be right back.

I'm Susan Lee, I'm a researcher and fact checker with the Daily. What I do is make sure details in our episodes are accurate. I also spend a lot of time reviewing pretty much anything a guest on the show says. Let's say they're describing the color of someone's sweater.

As I said, we just talked about this idea that the Trump base 30 35 of the Republican electorate has now been re-solidified behind Trump. And that seems very much at odds with the idea that has now become conventional wisdom that Trump is looking more or less inevitable to be re-nominated as a Republican presidential candidate. Because that actually leaves a huge percentage of the Republican electorate still up for grabs.

Yeah, and I think it's because we have to understand these numbers in a more specific way. When you have 30 to 35 of the Trump base, of course, that leaves 65, maybe 70 of people who are. We will categorize in that construction as anti-Trump. When you look under the hood, that 65 70 dislikes Trump for very different reasons. They can include moderates who think that he is a kind of scary political figure from an ideological perspective.

In your reporting, how have you seen this challenge of a Republican candidate trying to cobble together these disparate elements of the anti-Trump coalition? How have you kind of seen that play out?

I think this is where Ron DESantis is a really helpful figure to look at because he is someone who has done the most explicit appeals to all sides of the Republican Party. We have maintained law and order, we have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. He has tried to appeal to the MAGA base. Florida is where Woke goes to die.

I can't speak to that.

The problem is that's much easier said in the abstract than in the specifics. When you look at things like, for example, should a Republican nominee be supportive of more aid to Ukraine? That's something that really splits those group of people, and you saw this really challenge. Ron DESantis. He put out a statement saying he did not feel Ukraine should be a strategic priority.

Right, because someone like Ron DeSantis, it looks so easy. On paper, get 36 percent of the Republican base, but you're saying that's so much harder to do in reality, because of an issue like Ukraine. Which looks like it might get you x percent, but then it pisses off Y percent. So maybe actually that just canceled itself out.

Right, exactly.

But what about DESAntis anti-Woke campaign? It's kind of the signature of the DESAntis emerging candidacy. And that really did look like a very savvy place to focus. Yeah, it's not Ukraine.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the reason why Ron DESantis is not one of the also-rans in this race. Because he has found an issue that gets a lot of Republicans on board, and because he has distinguished himself from the other candidates as being someone who will follow through on said priority. And so, when Ron DESantis lands on his anti-wokeness campaign, he is speaking the language of this Republican party. They are seeking a candidate that speaks in grievance, that speaks in retribution, that's willing to use the federal government to prioritize those goals. And what DESantis campaign does is place himself in that language.

It's kind of an echo, yeah.

It's the language of the party, but it's become the language of the party because Donald Trump has Varsely made it so. So, if you're a voter whose biggest priority is grievance, right is the way to make that most true in your next Republican nominee? Voting for the guy who's going to attack Disney or is the biggest sense of retribution bringing Donald Trump back, right?

Because, ultimately, Trumpism and desantisism, if you want to call it that, can co-exist. Well, they're just two slightly different forms of cultural conservatism and grievance. But they're not so different that a Trump-based grassroots person is going to look over at DESantis and say, Yeah, I need to ditch Trump for that.

Right, exactly.

And so do some Republicans see. The flaw of Desantis is that he's just trying to defeat Trump by running on the issues that Trump himself brought to the fore.

Yeah, and this is what you have seen in reporting coming from, you know, Desantis, donors and other people who have kind of made the argument that he has lost his kind of electability argument. To say that I would win and Trump would lose, because he's playing in Donald Trump's sandbox.

Okay, but what about a candidate running for the Republican voters that don't like Trumpism, and that, as a result, is a candidate not playing in Trump's sandbox? Are you saying that cultural grievances now run so deep within the Republican party that there isn't a lane for that kind of candidate? Who wants to focus on issues like the economy and diplomacy, not trans rights?

That's exactly what I'm saying, I'm saying literally. Not enough Republicans exist who prioritize those type of issues for someone to run exclusively in that lane and win the nomination. The party has changed in such a way that the type of people you would need to make that candidate to nominate. They've become independents, some of them have become Democrats, they've left the party.

You want it banned?

I want it banned. There is no universe where that happens. Even if he loses, he can lose. And whoever that is, if it's Ron DeSantis or someone else, would have to bring Trumpism along.

But I said, don't? We have to consider the possibility that Trumpism might have to go on without Trump because of the legal situation that he now finds himself in? We haven't talked about it that much in this episode. But he's been indicted in New York over the hush money payment investigation. We know that the district attorney in Georgia is talking about potentially indicting Trump by the end of the summer. There's a possibility Trump goes to jail in either of these cases. So how does that factor into all of this?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we definitely need to think about that possibility because it's the largest live ball that's still left in the race. To your point, we have the very real possibility that Donald Trump could be criminally convicted as these indictments roll down. And at the same time, it's really created a political problem for the race, for the other candidates who are not named Donald Trump. There was this kind of assumption, I think, before the race started. That the legal problems that Trump faced would do the work for them, would cause him to lose support among Republicans, would make him too bloody and bruised to be a viable presidential candidate.

So Desantis position here is really interesting. He might be running against Trump directly, and he's also positioning himself for the possibility of running in place of Trump. In which case, he has to be respectful of Trump, respectful enough so that he can stand there and operate as his political heir.

It's a legitimately difficult tightrope, I mean, we should not underplay that. And when you talk to Trump supporters, you see why. You'll ask them about Ron DESantis and they will say largely positive things about him, that he's kind of their number two. If we can think, kind of rank-choice voting style. But they will also say that if someone becomes anti-Trump, or if Ron DESantis positions himself as someone who's making what they would believe is kind of like liberal arguments against Trump, that would make him an enemy, not an ally, in the kind of overall war of Trump politics.

Well, Esteb, thank you very much.

Thank you.

You can hear all of Esteb's reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign on The Times podcast. The Run-up. We'll be right back.