Trump and the 2024 Election

Everything that’s happened on the campaign trail so far

Today The GoodbarBlog kicks off its coverage of the 2024 election. Any opinions reflected in the following piece are not my own. They are my dog’s, a politically astute and rabble-rousing Morkie (she’s more Maltese than Yorkie, which might explain the rabble-rousing). Any issues with the piece should be taken up with said Morkie, whose small size belies a ferocious temper. Contact her at your own risk.

Iowa is good for three things—farming, writing, and politics. Three weeks ago, Iowa was also good for Donald Trump.

The 2024 Iowa caucus was the coldest in history. A keen wind cut through the air like a switchblade and temperatures dropped to 40 degrees below zero. Undaunted, voters trekked out through snow and ice and possible peril to deliver Trump a record-breaking victory. Former President Trump finished with 51% of the vote, and there was a jaw-dropping 30-point margin between Trump and the second-place candidate. Trump won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties.

Chris Christie had dropped out a few days before the Iowa caucus. He delivered a speech by turns elegiac and wistful to a crowd of supporters. The former New Jersey Governor appeared penitent and spoke bitterly of his time supporting Trump. Christie’s speech was rich in wisdom, and it offered listeners many obvious but often neglected truths. One such truth was that “personal ambition is a necessary element for any political candidate.” This is a fact. Politicians are ambitious people, and while ambition is not by any means a bad quality, it is a dangerous and quietly insidious one. As Christie put it, “Ambition can’t be what makes you decide how to do things as a public figure.”

Of his time working for Trump, Christie said, “I let the ambition get ahead and in control of the decision-making.” The speech marked Christie’s final act of contrition for supporting Trump, and he finished with announcing the suspension of his campaign, and the promise that he will in no way “enable Donald Trump to ever be President of the United States again, and that’s more important than [his] own personal ambition.”

Christie has become something of an itinerant prophet, stumbling from town hall to town hall, dispensing truth to quiet and ashen crowds, and like all prophets, Christie is ignored and shunned.

Ambition is fundamental to politics. The two are inseparable and at times indistinguishable. Politics is an expression of ambition. It provides a venerable outlet for ambitious men and ambitious women. And it’s only when politics is viewed in the context of ambition that it begins to make sense.

And if a regular politician is inherently ambitious, how much more so a presidential candidate? Biden, Trump, Haley—all three are exceedingly ambitious individuals.

Again, ambition is not a bad quality, but when left unchecked, when given license to do as it pleases, ambition is poisonous. It becomes a liability.

Ambition helps to explain why Trump and Biden, two largely unpopular politicians, are both running for president.

Five candidates went into Iowa, two came out. The icy night claimed the candidacies of Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson (yes, he was still in it at this point), and a couple of days later, Ron DeSantis.

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis duked it out for second place, which in many ways was the night’s real drama, so certain and unassailable seemed Trump’s first-place finish. DeSantis just managed to defeat Haley with 21% of the vote to her 19%, but Haley at least won a county in Iowa (albeit by a single vote), a consolation prize that DeSantis, despite visiting every county in the state, was unable to enjoy.

Days after a lackluster Iowa performance, one that he spent tens of millions of dollars to achieve, DeSantis dropped out of the election and endorsed Trump. After recognizing that he has his disagreements with Trump, DeSantis said, “Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden. That is clear. I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge. He has my endorsement.”

DeSantis also made sure to lash out at Nikki Haley, with whom he has sparred ruthlessly these past few months. As a parting shot to Haley, DeSantis said that we “can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”

Once DeSantis dropped out, Trump stopped attacking the Florida governor and emphasizing his dreadful poll numbers. Trump quit making statements like, “you can’t vote for DeSanctimonius, but he’s only at 4% or 5%. What the hell happened to him, by the way? Man, did he go down. Ron DeSanctimonius, did he go down like a rock? I don’t even want to talk about him because I don’t want to waste it.” Once DeSantis dropped out, the vituperation, the back-biting, and the name-calling all stopped.

Now Trump talks about DeSantis in a much softer and kinder tone. At a rally in New Hampshire, Trump said, “Before we begin, I’d like to take time to congratulate Ron DeSantis (Trump now enunciating the last name very carefully and correctly), and of course a really terrific person who I’d had gotten to know his wife, Casey, for having run a great campaign for president.” The former president’s words were now drained of venom.

With DeSantis no longer running and no longer a threat, even a minor and weak one, Trump could act magnanimous and show forbearance (kind of) and make charitable remarks about the DeSantis campaign. The final conciliatory act came last week at a rally in Nevada, at which Trump said, “Remember, we have Ron DeSantis. Now, you know I’ve terminated that other name, right? They asked me, they said, ‘What about the sanctimonious?’ I said, ‘No, I put that into retirement, that name.’”

After dominating his opponent completely, sucking all hope and strength and optimism from their campaign, Trump condescends to give the opponent back their name. It’s not so much a gesture of goodwill as it is a small act of mercy to a defeated opponent. It’s letting a conspirator escape with his life, but depriving him of wealth and home.

And it’s easy to confer gifts when one has emerged victorious, a fact that Trump himself has even pointed out. Upon receiving Vivek Ramaswamy’s nomination, Trump appeared with Vivek at a New Hampshire rally and mused, “I love [Vivek]. I didn’t love him when he was running, but I like him now. It’s amazing the way you can like somebody when you win, right? But Vivek is great. He’s really great.”

Trump trounced the competition in Iowa, and perhaps it was because he won so easily that he offered kind words to his competition on the night of his victory: “I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki…I think they both actually did very well… I also want to congratulate Vivek because he did a hell of a job…They are very smart people, very capable people.”

Nikki Haley was defiant after Iowa. Despite her third-place finish, Haley said, “Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.” She lumped Trump and Biden together and said that “they have more in common than you think.” Both men “put our country trillions of dollars deeper in debt.” Both men lack “vision for our country’s future.” And both men are unpopular. In a Trump-Biden rematch, Haley observed, the election is going to be a “toss-up.” But if Haley faces Biden, she pointed out, the Republicans “win in a landslide.”

Haley left for New Hampshire, hopeful and desperate and relentlessly uttering the results of a poll that found that 70% of Americans don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch. Many pundits saw the New Hampshire primary as Haley’s last chance to stop Trump. She needed to win New Hampshire to have a path toward the nomination.

This is not an election about the strengths of the candidate. It is an election about the weakness, flaws, and foibles of the opponent. It is about the opponent’s cognitive decline or their unfit temperament or their undemocratic tendencies.

That the election is not about the quality of the candidate was clear when Biden spoke before an audience in Columbia, South Carolina, last Saturday. Biden thanked the state and said, “You’re the reason I’m president. You’re the reason Kamala Harris is a historic vice president.” These remarks elicited some applause, not much. Biden continued and said, “And you are the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a loser.” The whole audience erupted in applause this time around.

This is an election about the past, a competition divorced from the present—a confusing, topsy-turvy time rife with Iran-sponsored attacks and high food prices and wars and polarization. It’s no wonder then that the candidates hope to divert the voter’s attention away from the disquieting now.

Biden seeks to accomplish this by bringing the old band back together. Obama is appearing with Biden in campaign videos. Obama and Clinton plan on speaking with Biden at a fundraising event later this year. With the help of Obama and Clinton, two former presidents who remain very popular among Democrats, the Biden team hopes to shore up support in their own party. And the return of Obama and Clinton conjures up images and feelings of a pleasanter and more stable time. Obama and Clinton create a whiff of nostalgia, an irresistible and warm scent that tugs at the heart-strings and draws our attention to the tranquil past. It’s all about the glory days—when gas was cheap, music was good, NAFTA was hip, and Joe Biden was America’s charming if maladroit VP.

Of course, nostalgia underpins Trump’s campaign, too. For Trump, the past is a pliant object that can be shaped and molded to suit one’s present purposes. Trump realizes how evocative and potent the past is, and he uses the past as a blank space onto which he can project his vision of a better and stronger America. It’s to drum up romantic and patriotic feelings for the country’s past that Trump ends his rallies with variations on this statement:

“We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the ocean, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, won two World Wars, defeated fascism and communism and made America the single greatest nation in the history of the world.”

Trump’s talk of the past isn’t limited to the distant and romantic past. He speaks of the very near past—the time four years ago when he was president. When Trump discusses his administration, he emphasizes the lower inflation, lower taxes, lower interest rates, and lower gas prices. It’s a smart strategy because, prior to the pandemic, people held generally favorable views of the economy under Trump for the very simple reason that the economy was good under Trump.

There was also less international turmoil—fewer wars, something for which Trump has taken credit, saying again and again that there would be no war in Ukraine, no Gaza situation, no attacks by Iran-backed proxies if he had been re-elected. Again, Trump is wise to pursue this line, and, to a certain extent, he’s justified in saying so. His maximum-pressure campaign against Iran was successful and much more effective than Biden’s current policy toward Iran. And he helped normalize relations between Israel and other countries in the Middle East, a landmark achievement in foreign policy.

In New Hampshire two weeks ago, Trump turned up the heat on Nikki Haley. He said that Haley was in league with “RINOs, Never Trumpers, Americans for no prosperity.” Trump said that those backing Haley are “pro-amnesty, they’re pro-China, they’re pro-open-borders, they’re pro-war, pro-deep-state, and they’re actually effectively pro-Biden.” Trump aimed to depict Haley as a hawk, saying that she is backed by the “military-industrial complex.” He claimed that she has “never seen a war she doesn’t like because they know she’s a globalist fool.”

This no-holds barred approach taken by Trump is nothing new. He always aims below the belt. He is always mean and cruel. He wanted Haley to drop out after Iowa and was frustrated when she refused to do so. Naturally, his attacks grew petty and reminiscent of the schoolyard. He referred to Haley as “bird-brain,” and he said that she “opposed” his border wall. He also repeated his rationale for appointing Nikki Haley to the United Nations: 

“Nikki Haley is a disaster. She worked for me for a long time. I mean, I know her very well. I actually put her there for a different reason. I shouldn’t say this, but you had a lieutenant governor named Henry McMaster who was fantastic. I figured if I took her out of South Carolina governorship, put her someplace, any place. I put her someplace. Then Henry McMaster, who was my friend and who’s turned out to be a great governor in South Carolina, Henry McMaster would become the governor. So I moved her to the United Nations. And honestly, she was not a good negotiator. She was not a good negotiator. Now she likes to talk about when she negotiated with China… I negotiated with China. I did all of it.”

It’s an interesting piece of sophistry, an explanation so singular and strange that it astonishes. In Trump’s version of events, he kicked Nikki Haley upstairs because he wanted to free up the South Carolina governorship for his friend, Henry McMaster. Why would he appoint Haley to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations? Surely there is some other obscure and out-of-the-way post with less importance to which he could have appointed Haley? But to kick her upstairs to the United Nations? To tap her for a position that demands diplomatic finesse and intelligence? Trump’s explanation is lazy and contradictory, and it doesn’t hold water.

At another rally, the former president confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi:

“By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th. Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, did you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything? Deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard soldiers, whatever they want. They turned it down.”

Haley has centered her campaign around Trump and Biden’s advanced age. She seeks to conflate Trump and Biden, to drill it into voters’ minds that Trump, 77 (he turns 78 in June), and Biden, 81, are too old to be president of the United States. She believes that both men, on account of their advanced age, show evidence of cognitive decline.

So Haley seized on Trump’s gaffe and tried to exploit it the next day:

“Last night something happened that has happened multiple times. [Trump] was on a temper tantrum about me, which is fine. He does that often. But he went on and talked about how I kept the police from going into the Capitol on January 6th, went on and repeated that I didn’t do anything to secure the Capitol. Let’s be clear, I wasn’t in the Capitol on January 6th. I wasn’t in office on January 6th. He mentioned it three times. He got confused…Don’t put our country at risk like this.”

She proceeded to counter Trump’s claims about her position on the border wall, saying, “everything he has said has been false…He says I’m not for the border. That’s a lie. I passed the toughest immigration law in the country.”

Haley also parried Trump’s comments on her supposed hawkishness. She said that we needed to build up our military because “strong militaries don’t start wars. Strong militaries prevent wars.” Haley’s husband, Maj. Michael Haley, is in the South Carolina Army National Guard and currently deployed to Africa. This is a fact that Haley has emphasized throughout her campaign, and one that she has come to lean upon with Trump’s insistence on her desire for war. “I’m not a warmonger. You are not the wife of a combat veteran and be someone who wants war. We are the opposite. We don’t want war. But I’ll say this, if you’ve got to lie to win, you don’t deserve to win.”

For the New Hampshire primary, Haley went on the offensive, bucking her reluctance to attack the GOP-frontrunner too directly. In Iowa, Haley had criticized Trump’s widening of the deficit. She had upbraided the former president for putting the country $8 trillion deeper in debt in just four years. Her attacks were somewhat defanged and largely limited to fiscal issues.

Two weeks ago, in New Hampshire, her tone changed, her criticism grew more pointed, her thrusts more direct and barbed. She spoke about how “chaos follows [Trump].”

She inveighed against Trump for his “bromance” with Putin. She inveighed against Trump for his relationship with Kim Jong-Un, mentioning how difficult it was for the mother of Otto Warmbier—an American college student who was imprisoned and tortured in North Korea, and who died in a hospital six days after being returned to the U.S.—to hear President Trump gush about “writing love letters to the man that tortured her son.”

Haley needs to take the gloves off fully, she needs to go blow for blow with Trump, if she intends to face him in the ring. These were jabs, and it’s going to take more than jabs to defeat Trump. Haley, though, has indicated that she plans as much and will start to be harsher about Trump’s record. On CNBC last week, she explained that this was part of her strategy, that she purposefully didn’t go after Trump hard early on because there were “14 people in the race.” Now that she and Trump are the last candidates standing, she intends to kick her criticisms up a notch.

And Haley will need skin as tough as Teflon. Trump is a brutal opponent. He uses all types of invective to bludgeon a rival into submission. He fights and fights until he draws blood. And it’s only going to get worse.

Politics is a rotten business. The days of decorum are long-gone. Fringe-supporters are rabid and wild and engage in all sorts of unscrupulous behavior. Haley recently revealed that on two separate occasions an unknown person called the police to lie about a crime occurring at her home, with the goal of having the police send a SWAT team to her house. It’s a dirty and dangerous prank known as “Swatting.” A SWAT team wasn’t sent in either instance, but a large number of officers were dispatched to the scene. And Haley wasn’t home either time the officers descended on her house en masse, with guns-drawn. But her elderly parents, whom Haley cares for and who live with Haley and her family, were home. They were understandably shaken.

Is Haley cut out for this? Can she stomach such meanness? Is anyone cut out for it? Could anyone stomach it?

Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire was inevitable. Haley and her team hoped to do the impossible, and for a bit Trump’s lead shrunk enough that a Haley victory seemed possible, if not probable—she had the fervent endorsement of the state’s popular governor, Chris Sununu, and more importantly, she had the Judge-Judy vote, an endorsement I hadn’t even previously considered but now hold to be the highest of honors.

But Trump won, and Trump won because it feels like he was predetermined to win, and this whole election cycle appears to be governed by fate and nothing else. With more than 300,000 people coming out to vote—a record for the New Hampshire primary—Trump finished with 54.3% of the vote and Haley with 43.2%.

Biden also won, despite declining to participate in the primary and not appearing on the ballot. His supporters conducted a well-organized write-in campaign. Biden handily defeated other Democratic hopefuls like Congressman Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson.

The first official Democratic Primary occurred this past Saturday in South Carolina. Again, Biden cruised to an easy victory with 96% of the vote. Phillips and Williamson were left to carve up the remaining 4% of votes. Biden’s win was announced shortly after the final vote was cast.

Trump’s victory speech in New Hampshire was different from his speech in Iowa. Gone were the blandishments and compliments. There was no more praise for his opponents, no more calling the other candidates “smart” or “capable.” There were no impassioned calls for the country to “come together whether it’s Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative.”

No, Trump was incensed, furious. Haley’s decision to stay in the race had upset Trump. And Haley had received more votes than he had expected, a fact that made him extremely displeased.

The beginning of his victory speech was normal enough, even if it occasionally burned with angry words—“I don’t get too angry. I get even.”

Failed Republican nominees flanked Trump on stage. Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott and Doug Burgum have formed a court of flunkies and sycophants, and the three former candidates are in a competition to see who can abase themselves more, who can lay themselves that much more prostrate before the feet of Donald Trump. At this point, Vivek’s face is buried so far up Trump’s rectum that he can probably smell the former president’s most-recently consumed Big Mac.

Tim Scott, a popular South Carolina senator and former GOP presidential candidate, is now doing crowd-work for the Trump campaign. He has fallen far.

“If you want four more years of Donald Trump, let me hear you scream,” Scott yelled at the crowd. And then he shouted, “Is this Donald Trump country? Oh, yeah? I can’t hear you? I can’t hear you?”

Scott owes his political career to Nikki Haley, who first appointed him to the senate to fill a vacancy when she was governor in 2013. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash if he had informed Haley of his decision to endorse Trump prior to going public, Scott said he had texted her. Nikki Haley has since revealed this to be a lie, and so it’s fitting that Tim Scott has been reduced to the role of bar mitzvah-DJ for the Trump campaign. He deserves it.

During his victory speech in New Hampshire, Trump remarked on how much of a betrayal Scott’s endorsement was to Nikki Haley. Trump observed, “I mean, did you ever think that she actually appointed you, Tim? And think of it, appointed and you’re the senator of her state [and you] endorsed me. You must really hate her.”

This was a strange and malicious comment, and Scott attempted to save face by rushing to the microphone and saying, “I just love you.”

Loyalty in Washington does not run deep.

Trump has Vivek on a leash. During Trump’s victory speech, he trotted Vivek out and had Vivek utter a few conspiratorial remarks regarding Nikki Haley. Trump told the crowd that “Vivek has to [talk about Haley] in one minute or less.” Then Trump ordered him, “Vivek, one minute or less. Go do it, Vivek.”

“Go do it”—Trump’s words were peremptory. They were curt. And they eloquently captured how complete Trump’s grip on the GOP is.

Vivek was only too happy to comply, and he made his brisk and brash and bizarre comments about how a vote for Nikki Haley amounted to cutting your “social security to fork over more money to Ukraine so some kleptocrat can buy a bigger house.”

Vivek attributed Nikki Haley’s continued presence in the race to “the ugly underbelly of American politics where the mega-donors are trying to do one thing when we the people say another.”

Vivek then called Haley a “puppet” for the “Reid Hoffmans and the ugly Democratic George Soros juniors.”

I think the difference between Trump and Vivek lies in how much they believe the stuff Trump says. I don’t think Trump always believes what Trump says, something that he even suggested at a rally last week. Citing some unnamed source that allegedly said his border was so strong that no terrorists were coming through, Trump said, “In 2019, remember they said [we] had no terrorists. They do these checks. I don’t know. None sounds like something Trump would say, to be honest.”

Trump, I think, is too smart to believe everything he says. Trump says what he says because he wants to win at all costs. Vivek, on the other hand, has the bulging eyes and the fiery tongue and the sweaty forehead of a fanatic, of a person who has an unshakeable faith in the word of Trump. And I think Vivek’s role within the Trump team could be just to say all the paranoid and deranged shit that Trump finds too paranoid and deranged to say. Vivek’s recent ravings about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl being fixed seem to confirm his new position as resident-lunatic within the Trump campaign.

Toward the end of Trump’s victory speech in New Hampshire, the festive atmosphere disappeared. The bonhomie vanished. Trump, despite the win, was noticeably upset. He had Nikki Haley on the brain, or bird-brain on the brain if you prefer.

There was a record-scratch moment, a moment when it seemed like the crowd collectively held its breath and the cheer stopped and people paused between sips of champagne, their cups hovering just below their lips.

“I find in life,” Trump said, brooding over the microphone; “you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t.” Trump paused and bristled, his teeth clenched and the air crackling. Then he continued, “And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing, we won?”

Nikki Haley had gotten under Trump’s skin.

Over at Nikki Haley’s HQ, where they watched the primary results trickle in on CNN and not Fox, the team tried to remain sanguine. After losing the primary, Haley publicly congratulated Trump on his win and said that he had “earned it.” She announced that she was determined to stay in the race. She closed with this comment:

“With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate. We lost the House. We lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020 and we lost in 2022. The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump. They know Trump is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat.”

Nikki Haley is correct. Biden is one of the most beatable candidates in recent history. Despite a growing optimism about the direction of the economy, Biden’s approval rating remains stubbornly low—37% according to a recent NBC poll (the worst approval rating since Bush’s second term).

And an increasing number of Americans don’t find him cognitively fit for the presidency. Many voters, especially young voters, disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Gaza situation.

And yet, a Trump win is far from guaranteed because the former president remains so disliked by a majority of Americans. But Trump is still extremely popular among his base, and barring something unforeseen, Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.

There is a yawning gulf between what Trump supporters want and what the rest of the country wants. There is a yawning gulf between what Biden supporters want and what the rest of the country wants. And it doesn’t matter that a majority of Americans disapprove of a Trump-Biden rematch, it seems like a rematch has been decreed by whomever guides this ship, whomever spins the wheel of fortune. Biden versus Trump 2024 approaches inexorably. This election cycle has made us all political Calvinists.

Now Haley has her sights set on her home-state of South Carolina, where the Republicans will hold a primary on February 24th, and where Haley will dig in and make her last stand. Haley has been on a media blitz, appearing on everything from CNN’s State of the Union to Saturday Night Live, trying to pitch herself to general voters. She has said that she doesn’t need to win South Carolina to remain in the race, that she just needs to perform better than she did in New Hampshire and show momentum. But losing South Carolina would almost certainly spell the end of Haley’s campaign. Her presidential hopes hinge on the Palmetto State. 

And according to the latest poll, she is going to get smoked.

Three weeks ago, when Trump won in Iowa, he was joined on stage by North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. The governor had briefly run for the GOP nomination. He was at a couple of debates but soon dropped out and endorsed Trump.

On stage in Iowa, with a thronging crowd of supporters before him, hanging on his every word, Trump grew profound. And, yes, Trump is capable of being profound.

It’s true that sometimes when Trump talks, he sounds like a gum-chewing teenager, which was certainly the case at his rally in Nevada last week. Here is how he described a tense exchange he had with Putin over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine: “I said, ‘Vladimir, don’t [invade Ukraine] because here’s what’s going to happen.’ And he said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘Way, way, way.’”

But Trump is capable of being profound, too, and in Iowa, the state that he had lost in 2016 to Ted Cruz and now won with 51% of the vote, all but confirming that he has remade the Republican party in his image, the urge to be profound struck Donald Trump. He looked at Doug Burgum and mused on Burgum’s failure as a GOP nominee:

“[Doug Burgum is] so solid and so good that he didn’t catch on. Sometimes being a little controversial is good. He’s so perfect…He was outstanding but the traction is never easy, right? You need controversy for traction sometimes, and this guy is the most solid guy. There is no controversy whatsoever.”

To say Trump is a master politician is to risk drawing the ire of certain democrats who grudge Trump every good quality, and it risks drawing the ire of certain Republicans for whom Trump is supposed to be the political outsider, the anti-politician. But Trump is a politician now, one well versed in politics’ byzantine ways, one thoroughly comfortable with the ins and outs of the very system he decries.

Nikki Haley was right when, last week on Meet the Press, she said that Trump “has become a political insider.”

Trump is a master politician, and his statement that you “need controversy for traction” is the closest he has come to defining his political strategy. After winning Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump was back in New York. Not for pleasure. For a trial.

In 2024, a politician needs to be more than ambitious. A politician needs to be controversial, too.