Humpty Dumpty?A little more than a month before the Iowa caucuses, a Republican political operative was sitting in a Washington bar ticking through the dynamics of his party’s presidential primary.
A veteran of campaigns across more than two decades of election cycles, he weighed the strengths of the winnowing list of Republican contenders and the potential risks of nominating a former president staring down four indictments and dozens of criminal charges.
He didn’t hedge in his conclusion.
“One thing that hasn’t changed: This is Trump’s party,” the operative said. But he wanted to make clear that didn’t mean a second term for Donald Trump would replicate the first.
“Everything around him has changed,” he said of the former president. “To his benefit.”
Six months later, Trump is indeed the presumptive Republican nominee.
He’s also now a convicted felon….
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Taken together, the aftermath of Trump’s conviction has provided the clearest window into just how much the environment around him has shifted.
Trump’s first term was defined in large part by the political guardrails he crashed into, the institutional norms he breached and the veteran lawmakers and advisers he lashed out against.
Each now stands diminished, reshaped to his advantage – or eliminated entirely.
Trump and his allies have every intention of taking advantage of this new reality should he win a second term.
His policy goals, which in the past have appeared aspirational at best and amorphous real-time thought bubbles at worst, are neither insignificant nor theoretical.
The chaos of Trump’s first term paired with the familiar, if escalating, inflammatory and dark rhetoric of his rallies, can have the effect of obscuring an agenda that is in many cases quite clear.
It underscores just how much his rematch with Joe Biden isn’t analogous to the 2020 campaign.
Nor is it a repeat of the 2016 race, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
This time is different….
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He’s currently at the height of his power within the Republican Party at a moment when his once-fringe or unorthodox policy preferences are dominant.
He’s running against an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent who, despite a legislative record with little precedent in the past half-century, continues to grasp for ways to confront an apathetic electorate amid a profoundly traumatic and disruptive period that has included the pandemic, the largest European conflict since World War II and a war in Gaza.
The Republican political operative from the Washington bar always planned to support his party’s nominee and made clear earlier this month that he was all in for Trump.
His view of what that meant for the 2024 campaign and potentially beyond, though, wasn’t subtle.
“We’re playing with live ammo right now,” he said…..
image…NBC News