Republicans' catch-22 in taking out Trump

In the eyes of former President Donald Trump, there is no greater insult than to be a "loser." To be a loser, for Trump, is to admit that not only have you failed, but that someone else — someone ostensibly better — has succeeded in your stead. To be Trump, conversely, is to be a winner, to be the best, the undefeatable antithesis of everything that makes losers lose. The fact that Trump has in actuality lost many, many times in his various personal and political efforts is so anathematic to his sense of self that he is compelled instead to explain away each instance as being part of a massive conspiracy against him: He didn't "lose" re-election in 2020, it was "stolen" away from him; he didn't "lose" to author E. Jean Carroll's defamation and assault lawsuit, it was a "rigged" trial. There is no defeat that Trump — and, accordingly, his millions of followers — can't spin as an injustice against him.

This presents something of a conundrum for the growing field of GOP presidential candidates hoping to challenge the former president and current front-runner for his party's nomination ahead of 2024: how do you launch what should be a particularly effective general election attack against Trump for being an electoral loser — in 2018, 2020, and 2022 — without risking significant blowback from his core supporters whose majority bloc of votes you need to win the GOP primary? To commit to one is to fundamentally hamstring yourself for the other, which is why the 2024 Republican primary is going to be characterized in part by so many candidates trying to find ways of calling Trump a loser, without actually saying so.

'First question at first debate'

With Trump renewing his claim that the 2020 election was "rigged" during his CNN Town Hall interview this month, his pervasive effort to re-adjudicate his previous electoral loss has become a de facto litmus test for the GOP field as a whole. "First question at first [Republican primary] debate: 'Raise your hand if you think Trump won the 2020 election,'" Republican consultant Alex Conant predicted to Politico.

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Speaking in Iowa this week, presumptive candidate Ron DeSantis came close to offering his stance on whether Trump was an albatross around the neck of his party, but stopped short of actively calling him a loser, saying instead that "When I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018 we lost the House [...] we lost the Senate in 2020, Biden becomes president, and has done a huge amount of damage."

"I think the party has developed a culture of losing," DeSantis, who regularly polls second behind Trump, added pointedly. "I think there's not accountability."

As Politico noted, the Florida governor has repeatedly refused, dodged, or simply complained when asked about Trump's election claims resulting in "a high-wire act in which DeSantis has to keep "Trump diehards happy enough to consider supporting him, while convincing Republicans who are desperate to move on from Trump that he will not perpetuate the ex-president's fixation on the past."

To succeed in the primary, DeSantis must "make the case that the GOP needs a winner without explicitly calling Trump a loser and acknowledging the election wasn't stolen," Sarasota Herald-Tribune's Zac Anderson concurred.

'Grievances' and 'promise'

It's not just DeSantis who is stuck in this catch-22 between attacking Trump on his electability and incurring the wrath of his party faithful, either. In a memo to campaign donors, former South Carolina governor and onetime U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley invoked Trump by name, while still addressing his 2020 complaints at an angle rather than head-on. "It's increasingly clear that Trump's candidacy is more consumed by the grievances of the past and the promise of more drama in the future, rather than a forward-looking vision for the American people," Haley's campaign wrote in the memo, obtained by Axios in early April.

There are practical concerns with labeling Trump a loser, even if his personal political record certainly opens him to that line of attack. "Despite underperforming with Trump-backed candidates in the 2022 midterms, Republicans do now control the U.S. House of Representatives," Axios noted, raising the prospect that even if a candidate were to push an electability argument against Trump, the former president is not wholly without a rebuttal, slim as it may be.

DeSantis, for one, is already making that argument: "When I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018 we lost the House ... we lost the Senate in 2020, Biden becomes president," DeSantis answered this week when asked to clarify if his "culture of losing" comments were aimed at Trump in particular. And here again is that attempt to thread a needle between describing a thing, and naming it outright. "The comments were accurate, but pay particular attention to his three-word assessment of the last presidential race," MSNBCs Steve Benen wrote. "DeSantis didn't say Biden was elected president; he preferred to say that Biden became president. It's a passive-voice phrase intended to avoid taking a position that would likely become politically problematic."

Even former Vice President Mike Pence, also reportedly in the early stages of launching his own 2024 campaign, has been particularly careful with his phrasing, even while making a more frontal attack on Trump's 2020 election record. "Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our [2020] election, and Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024," Pence told attendees at the 2022 Federalist Society Florida Chapters conference, where he pointedly called Trump "wrong" for suggesting that he, as vice president, could affect the outcome of the electoral process. By making that assertion, Pence "likely doomed whatever small chance he had at the presidency — at least in the near term," CNN claimed. But even Pence's language is hedged to frame the issue as one of procedural authority, and not — as Trump has repeatedly suggested — an overarching electoral conspiracy. There is still room for Pence to elide calling Trump an outright "loser" despite having virtually assured that "that he will never be the preferred candidate of the Trump base."

With a majority of Republican voters firmly in Trump's "stolen election" camp — and a majority of the public at large decidedly not — the question for the other GOP candidates is not whether they believe that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from a candidate with overwhelming electability. It's if they can make inroads with that majority bloc for the short term, without killing their chances to win a general election next November.