The Thrill Is Just About Gone

Tuesday, May 3, was a good day in the Trump amen corner. JD Vance, a first-time Republican candidate for the United States Senate, won a GOP primary victory in Ohio. Vance won with about 32 percent of the vote, topping his closest challenger, Josh Mandel, by about 8 points, and reversing a downward slide in his support.

Vance, an entrepreneur and author (Hillbilly Elegy), was seen as a long shot for the Senate seat until Trump applied the shock paddles to Vance’s floundering campaign with a full-throated endorsement on April 9. Vance’s victory in Ohio was immediately held up as validation of the Trumpian America First ethos, the strength of the Trump brand, and the man himself as a viable 2024 prospect.

It may have been all of that, but it was also another kind of validation: The midterm election season is just beginning, and whispers of 2024 are only now beginning seriously, but few other events like Vance’s victory, and Donald Trump’s role in that win, could suggest more clearly that Trump’s best place in the 2024 campaign may well be from the outside looking in.

It’s early days, and 2024 is still a ways off, but the 45th president* could decide right now that a multitude of exogenous shocks (the real threat of criminal prosecution, a relentless New York State AG probe, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s role in it) and evolving personal benefits might make not running for a second term as irresistible as running for the first term was in 2015.

The shocks speak for themselves, or they eventually will; for Trump, they’re the low-hanging fruit of reasons not to run. The intrinsic benefits derived from not running deserve more of a look.

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Trump, returned to status as a private citizen, earns more now than when he was in the White House. His buccaneer business aspect has full rein now, in a way it could never have inside the White House. He can devote greater attention to various projects, including the hapless Truth Social media venture, which has struggled from its inception — none of which prevented investors from dropping $430 million into the project, enriching Trump’s personal bottom line to $3 billion, according to Forbes.

Who in his right mind walks away from bringing home bacon like that? Sitting out 2024 lets Trump maintain momentum attending to his first love, and make up for lost ground (his net worth was estimated at $4.5 billion when he ran in 2016) at a time when (legal problems dead ahead) he needs income more than ever.

As the outcome in the Ohio senatorial primary shows, the ex-P*OTUS is starting to use his position within the party, picking his spots as the midterm season unfolds. Vance once was solidly in the never-Trump camp, but eventually came around to Trump’s way of conservative thinking. He was rewarded with Trump’s endorsement and, as of Tuesday night, a tidy victory over a gane rival for the Senate primary.

As surely as Vance benefited from Trump’s senior status in the party, Trump is in a position to gain from the inescapable pop-cultural equation: Outrageousness + Time = Respectability. That capital-R emeritus status often arrives with relatively little effort, bestowed largely by virtue of survival, by not dying before presumably summary judgments are made. “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” Hollis Mulwray told Jake Gittes in Chinatown. And American political history has proof enough of that. Consider the case of Richard Nixon.

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In 1974 Nixon was in abject disgrace after his resignation from the presidency over the Watergate scandal, and he entered a relatively quiet period of reflection and absence from the public scene. Then, he started his public rehabilitation, a slow but steady climb back to the light.

Nixon was interviewed by David Frost in 1977, in a series of revealing conversations ultimately viewed by between 45 million and 50 million people. In 1978 he published his memoirs; in 1979 he met with Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaopeng, at a Carter White House state dinner.

He traveled the world throughout the 1980’s, visiting the Middle East and the Soviet Union, burnishing his bona fides as global observer; he wrote op-eds, analysis pieces, and his memoirs (among several other books); he stayed in the arena becoming an elder statesman by default. Nixon came full circle, ultimately shedding the Watergate taint to become, in a Gallup poll from the early 80’s, one of the most admired men in the world. And he didn’t need to fight his way back into the White House to do it.

Trump may not have the perspicacity for any of this, but he is sharp enough to see the value of winning without a fight, and to recognize something valuable in people who see something valuable in him. That was likely one of the mutual motivations shared by Trump and Nixon, who were pen pals in the 1980’s, when Nixon’s star was re-rising — that of one former president perfecting the kind of image rehab that his later, beleaguered counterpart could learn a lot from right now.

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And then there’s another X factor that could play into Trump’s future calculus: Trump may just be enjoying himself and the recapture of his private lifestyle too much to walk away again.

If he were to run and win in 2024, Trump would be about 78 years and six months old on Inauguration Day, and fated to spend the next four of his golden years with one arm tied behind his back, fixated on the public’s business — its needs and desires — at the expense of his own.

More likely he’ll realize how satisfying and comparatively pain-free the role of kingmaker (or queenmaker) can be. In a role not unlike the one he created for himself in The Apprentice, his NBC reality series for 14 seasons, Trump gets to select the candidates he supports for the House and Senate, transmitting his preference to rank-and-file Trump loyalists at the candidates’ rallies. He generally maintains his public profile, and reinforces his position in the GOP food chain without the burden and expense of his own campaign. He occupies, in short, much the same life he’s been living since Jan. 20, 2021. On his own terms, on his own timetable, answerable to no one else.

Donald Trump’s shown it even if he hasn’t yet uttered the words: He’s probably done. For him, the thrill of the presidency, the frisson of the title and its powers, are mostly behind him. At this stage of his life, one suspects that, in what could be a rare brush with wisdom (or just an admission of mortality), Trump is privately starting to face the future. The biggest favor he could do for the GOP, the greatest gift he could bestow on the party he purports to lead, is not to run.

That would force the GOP to face the future too.