For almost a decade, the country has been just one simple trick away from relegating Donald Trump to obscurity.
Most recently, Trump-skeptical Republicans wrung their hands that a too-large field of challengers in the 2024 presidential primary was preventing GOP voters from coalescing around a good alternative candidate. If a consensus anti-Trump candidate emerged, the hope went, the party could finally buck him.
So much for that. When the field finally did shrink rapidly, after Iowa and New Hampshire, Nikki Haley was left as the sole contestant for the non-Trump mantle, just what the anti-Trumpers believed was needed. This weekend, in the South Carolina Republican primary, Trump trounced Haley, 59-39—an easy victory that came even with Trump opposition united behind her, her fundraising ascendant, and a race on her home turf. The win leaves him poised for a quick and easy march to the nomination. So much for that simple trick.
This has been the pattern for as long as pundits have been placing bets on such simple tricks: Trump always manages to escape.
In 2016, the huge GOP presidential field was thought to be a sign of the party’s strength, right up to the moment when Trump entered the race and took advantage of the splintered support to win the nomination. Then, as in 2024, his detractors suggested that if only Republicans could unite behind someone else, and if only that person would attack Trump, then he would collapse. In hindsight, this is hard to believe. Haley’s stinging attacks on Trump in recent weeks have done little, if anything, to close the gap between them. The problem for any challenger is just that Republican voters love Trump.
Another legacy of the 2016 campaign was the belief that if only the media had covered Trump differently, he would have been finished. Maybe they ought to have covered him less. Maybe they should have covered him more harshly. Maybe the answer would have been more forthrightly describing his rhetoric—branding him a “liar” and his statements “lies” rather than just false, or bluntly calling remarks “racist” rather than using ragged euphemisms such as “racially charged.” Even though these ideas were sometimes directly at odds, each one’s proponents were convinced that had the media done just as they hoped, it would have worked.
Many of these ideas were sound as journalism criticism. Euphemism is a disservice to the truth and to audiences. Trump’s frequent dissembling easily surpassed the range of typical political fibbing, earning the “lie” label. His long record of bigotry earned the “racism” tag too.
Yet even where the critique was right, the idea that it was a means to ending Trump’s ambitions was naive. By now, no consumer of the mainstream press can miss that he is a liar and a racist, nor that courts have found him to have committed fraud and sexual abuse. Outlets large and small have done impressive work ferreting out his history of sexual harassment, financial chicanery, and poor decision-making. At some moments, it seemed like not a word could be spoken in the Oval Office without The New York Times or The Washington Post producing a scathing report within days. Nor can any reader or viewer have missed the fear and dislike of Trump that much of the press evinces. Nevertheless, Trump persists. He’s also used the negative coverage to deprecate the media and lower its impact among his supporters.
As Trump’s administration progressed and his mischief continued, impeachment emerged as a new hope. His first impeachment, which was remarkably popular, probably hurt him in the 2020 general election, but nearly lockstep Republican opposition in the Senate precluded a conviction and removal from office. An unprecedented second impeachment in 2021, following the January 6 insurrection, came closer, but Republicans in the Senate once more blocked conviction, with some arguing that they didn’t have jurisdiction—and more apparently hoping that Trump was finished without them needing to act.
January 6 also resulted in Trump’s banishment from Twitter and Facebook. This was hailed in bien-pensant circles as well past due—an appropriate penalty for spreading misinformation and inciting violence, and one that would help shuffle Trump out of relevance. As with the journalism critiques, this sentiment may have been morally right, but the expectation that it would hurt Trump was unfounded. In fact, the bans may have helped him politically, becoming a rallying point for his supporters, who called them censorship. Moreover, his disappearance from mainstream platforms (and retreat to his own Truth Social) has made it easier to miss or tune out his eruptions, even as his rhetoric has become ever more authoritarian. (This effect also casts doubt on the idea that with less press coverage, Trump would fade.)
With all of these Trump-stoppers having failed, some people have attached their hopes to the courts to stop Trump. Trump is facing legal challenges on many fronts. He owes nearly $500 million total from civil judgment for defamation, sexual abuse, and fraud in New York State. A trial on falsifying business records in Manhattan is expected to begin next month. He has been indicted on felony charges in federal court and in Georgia connected to his election-subversion efforts, and on separate federal felony charges over alleged hoarding of classified documents.
Once again, these proceedings have been morally and legally appropriate, establishing that no one is beyond the reach of the law, even if he is a star. But the barrage of indictments has done nothing to hurt Trump politically. First, the justice system is by design deliberative and careful, which has meant a sometimes-excruciating wait for charges and then trials. That means voters may not see verdicts before they vote. Trump is also reportedly hoping that by winning reelection, he can kill the federal charges and perhaps delay the state cases. Second, even if Trump were convicted before the election, it wouldn’t legally prevent him from running or being elected as president.
Third, in a turn that is astonishing but somewhat predictable, the cases against Trump have actually improved his political position, at least with Republican voters. He saw his poll numbers rise after his first felony indictment, in Manhattan. Perhaps even more important, he managed to turn the indictments into a litmus test for other Republican presidential hopefuls. Wary of alienating his base, they backed him and criticized the charges—thus disarming one of their most powerful weapons against him in the primary.
This is a weird inversion, because Americans as a whole support the indictments in polls. A conviction before the election is one of the very few things that Republican voters say might induce them not to support him. The catch, of course, is that a conviction—especially in either of the federal cases or in Georgia—looks less and less likely to come before the election with each procedural delay that Trump engineers.
Even as the criminal cases proceeded, some legal scholars and activists sought a different solution through the courts: Trump’s disqualification from office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a post–Civil War attempt to bar insurrectionists from office. Though many observers initially treated these efforts as fanciful, they saw impressive initial success. Trump was even barred from the ballot in Colorado and Maine. But when the Supreme Court heard the matter earlier this month, the justices seemed highly disinclined to allow states to block his candidacy.
A common thread that unites each of these failed tricks to sink Trump is how existing American institutions—the Republican Party, the press, congressional oversight, and the justice system—are ill-equipped to handle an authoritarian demagogue of Trump’s variety. That leaves the ballot as maybe the only thing that could stop Trump. Despite his devoted base of support, most Americans still oppose him. Then again, voters solidly rejected him in 2020, yet he remains at the center of American politics, and could be headed back to the office he unwillingly left three years ago.
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