It Is Happening Again

Is Donald Trump serious about running for office again in 2024? Bill Kristol on the future political prospects of the former American president. “If he decides not to run for whatever reason, I’m not entirely confident that the Republican nominee is someone more committed to democracy, or less nativist and willing to play with racial fire, than he is.” Where There’s a Will Is Donald Trump serious about running for office again in 2024? Bill Kristol on the future political prospects of the former American president. “They are destroying our country. Our country will not survive this. Our country will not survive.” That was former U.S. President Donald Trump in a recent interview with the far-right One America News Network, railing against Democrats and advancing baseless claims about them stealing elections. Trump [retains enormous influence]( over the Republican Party, and he’s teasing another run for its presidential nomination in three years, but what are his actual intentions—and how able will he be to carry them out? Bill Kristol, a longtime conservative commentator and activist who broke with the Republican Party over Trump, is now the editor at large of the center-right U.S. publication The Bulwark. Kristol sees the former president as likely to run again—and the overwhelmingly favorite to win the Republican nomination—based on a few factors: Trump is way ahead in early primary polling, apparently healthy enough to campaign, and his party hasn’t repudiated him—even after his aggressive lying about last year’s election being stolen led to a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. In fact, Trump’s success in mainstreaming “election denial” on the American right is keeping a lot of focus on him, and Republican voters may be convinced that they need to avenge this fabricated injustice. Kristol allows that Trump could look like “yesterday’s man” in a few years, but he believes that the former president would hate to relinquish the spotlight—or the political movement he built. Kristol warns that Trump’s return may not even be the worst-case scenario for American democracy in 2024, as a different Republican nominee could ratchet up the party’s authoritarianism and nativism even more: “The conventional view is that, if it’s not Trump, we edge back to the center—but it’s not out of the question that, if it’s not Trump, we edge farther to the extreme.” ——— Graham Vyse: It may not be surprising that Donald Trump would leave his options open for 2024 and continue to call attention to himself, but how serious do you think he is about running again? Bill Kristol: We may be distracted by the fact that he’s so unusual—he won, he was an incumbent, and then he lost—but if you just step back and say, There’s a politician in good health who’s run a couple of times, is ahead in the polls within their party, and is in hailing distance in general-election polls, does that person not run for their party’s nomination? Occasionally they don’t, but pretty often they do. It’s the safer course to assume he’d like to run again, he’d like to be president again, and that—all things being equal, in terms of his health or any events in the next few years that might make it less likely he’d win—he will run. More from Bill Kristol at The Signal: “Trump put all his chips on the big lie about the election being stolen. It’s now become pervasive in the Republican Party. That’s an impressive—or depressing—showing of strength by Trump. It’s clever, because it’s about him—his victory being stolen. It’s about avenging an injustice done to him, and the best way really to avenge that, presumably, is to renominate and reelect him.” “You could have a sense among Republicans that Trump was a great guy to get us going down this path, but now we need Stalin, not Lenin; or Stalin, not Trotsky—now we need the more hard-headed, disciplined, quasi-fascist authoritarian to implement everything—but I still think that requires the original demagogue gracefully stepping aside or being incapacitated. It’s hard to repudiate that person.” “If you’re someone like Donald Trump, there’s still nothing like the White House and Air Force One and Marine guards saluting you. He can replicate that a little bit, as a wealthy celebrity at Mar-a-Lago, but it’s not the same from the perspective of his vanity and egomania.” ——— Say What What’s happening with the liberal commitment to free speech in the United States? Dan Savage on the risks and urgency of maintaining an open society. (Originally published 2021 | 06.10) The iconic American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” has been [reassessing its mission]( since the election of Donald Trump—as the organization tries to integrate its historical commitment to free speech, including for Nazis, with a new commitment to social justice. Tension over the limits of free expression meanwhile extends beyond the issue of state interference: Major social-media platforms have banished people, notably Trump himself, for offensive or dangerous political speech, while companies across industries have fired employees over social media posts from long ago. How significant is this shift in liberal sensibility? [Dan Savage]( is an American author, activist, and, [since 1991]( sex-advice columnist. Savage supports the right even to hateful speech—and the traditional role of the ACLU—but says he understands where his fellow progressives, who “feel like we don’t have the luxury anymore,” are coming from. He has, as he puts it, “been canceled a number of times by the left and the right,” for work that’s offended people. He sees “cancel culture” and left censoriousness as real—and at times “shocking”—phenomena; but he also suspects his fellow progressives may “regret the time we wasted on them, fighting among ourselves as the right continue to amass power.” ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a new, independent digital publication exploring vital questions in democratic life and the human world—and sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: We recently resolved a broken-link issue with our opt-out function. If you’ve received this in error, our apologies—you can immediately unsubscribe below. Thank you. © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. 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