Trump Vows To Fight On As He Lost Reelection Bid

The question of what happens to the Republican Party after the Trump presidency is not one that will be resolved by think tanks, symposiums or tidy theories.

Rather, it will be hashed out by the men and women who vie with each other to lead the party in the next presidential election. It will be a complicated dance in which they struggle with the power of a disfigured media environment that creates terrible incentives, and reckon with how they navigated the Trump years. Meanwhile, Trump’s closer-than-expected loss may give him a larger role in shaping his party going forward than future presidents tend to get, especially if he can convince Republican voters that he won the election — which he did not — and that the presidency was stolen from him, which it wasn’t.

But it’s an oversimplification to say voters will also play a role. Only a small number will. The most devoted and intense Republican partisans who vote reliably in primary elections will be the tail that wags the dog.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Oct. 30, 2020
President Trump speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Oct. 30.
Ideas, of course, will have a role, but they will collide with the messy realities of how individual politicians believe they can use those ideas to separate themselves from the others, while drawing as much support from the different voting blocs within the Republican Party.

The biggest new idea, of course, will be the economic populism that has provided Trump with much of his lifeblood, peeling off former Democrats from industrial states where automation and globalization have decimated jobs and communities. White conservative evangelicals will remain a powerful constituency, as will pro-business suburban voters.

Trump will still be a presence, though it’s hard to know how much and in what way. Does he want to run for president again in 2024, at age 78? Joe Biden did it at 77 and won, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that would prevent Trump from running for two nonconsecutive terms. So maybe.

“I would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people who are likely to run in 2024. He doesn’t like losing,” said Mick Mulvaney, the former White House chief of staff to Trump.

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