There were many alarming moments in former President Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier this week, but the most distressing for conservatives was that Trump still is not ready to admit he lost the 2020 election and has no new plan to win in 2024.
Sounding delusional and frequently dishonest, Trump seemed completely distracted from the actual, forward-looking job facing the next president.
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His obsession with conclusively debunked claims that he won in 2020, now relying on a ludicrously slipshod documentary, will do nothing to appeal to the large majority of the public who acknowledge the reality that he lost. The more he displays his denial about the past as his main selling point, the less he demonstrates any reason to vote for him — any focus, strategy, or policy to improve daily life and end governmental rot in the next four years and beyond.
Trump failed to provide even a semi-credible answer about why voters should trust his claim that he only hires “the best people.” Perhaps the most brutal part of the interview occurred when Baier provided a montage of all the astonishingly nasty things Trump has said about so many of the same people he once assured us were the smartest appointments any president has ever made.
Many of the people Trump attacked, such as former Attorney General William Barr, could have been strong allies in defeating the deep state and draining the swamp. Now, though, nobody of their quality will consider working for Trump in a second term, which likely would be filled with the sort of third-raters who populated the final, incompetent days of his previous administration.
Trump is incapable of being a team player. There is a lot a president can do on his own, but presidents can do more when their parties control Congress. Instead of helping build a governing coalition, Trump has spent more money attacking fellow Republicans than he has in helping them defeat Democrats. One can’t build a winning coalition by permanently estranging large swaths of people on one’s own side.
Finally, much has been made of how Trump essentially acknowledged that he chose to ignore a Justice Department subpoena, that he mixed top-secret documents involving nuclear weapons and hypothetical war plans in boxes with “personal things … [such as] golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes,” and that he possessed absolutely no power to declassify papers once he left the White House (undercutting an already spurious line of defense he had used).
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At some point, even Trump’s most avid supporters will tire of him forever playing the victim while insisting that rules and laws shouldn’t apply to him. When those laws protect the nation’s most sensitive military secrets, of the sort Trump himself in 2016 repeatedly said he would never forgive anyone for endangering, voters should wonder if protecting them from foreign threats, rather than assuaging his own ego, is at the top of his priority list.
President Joe Biden is a historically weak president, but that doesn’t mean every Republican can beat him. Voters want a new candidate with a fresh vision both to beat Biden and to win majorities in the House and Senate. Trump proved again this week that he simply is not that man.
