… the normalization of Donald Trump.
He’s overcome, in many ways, his past as a misogynistic and insurrectionist twice-impeached felon. Instead, to many, he’s now a fairly reasonable person who believes both parties should negotiate a solution to the vexing abortion issue and called parts of the conservative movement’s Project 2025 “ridiculous and abysmal.”
That’s not the only reason that he’s on a trajectory to win back the White House in historic fashion. It certainly helps that the economy remains difficult for most Americans and he’s running against an 81-year-old man who can’t take meetings after 8 p.m. because he has to be in his jammies. He’s also gotten help from MAGA movement darlings like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, whose antics make Trump look downright liberal.
It’s also been more than three years since Trump left office, and normalization is taking hold because voters have short memories.
“Some people are saying, ‘Things are pretty good until that pandemic, so maybe we’ll give him another shot,’” Lee Hannah, the astute political scientist at Wright State University, said. “I mean, I can’t comprehend that after Jan. 6. But that at least seems to be what opinion polls are showing.”
Trump looks great next to Biden, who can’t decide how to handle the border, how hard to push (or back off) Israel, and looks like he’s going to fall over any minute.
And while Biden is a lifelong politician, voters see a normalized Trump as a symbol of what they want to be. They love that he says whatever he wants, projects a macho personality and is believable when he says he alone can Make America Great Again. He’s everything that his growing base aspires to be.
“There is a unique relatability that he has been able to build … I think it took a lot of us a long time to understand that,” Hannah said.
His opponents will remind people about what he’s done in the past, like refusing to pay his bills to carpenters, dishwashers, and painters, those in the middle class he says he protects. They’ll say he shamelessly goes after the minority vote in offensive ways, like saying Blacks can identify with him because now he has a mug shot, too.
None of that matters much, not anymore—his past rolls off his shoulder like showers down a raincoat.
As stunning as it may seem, his politically motivated trial in New York did make him more relatable, more normal. Alvin Bragg said he would go after Trump, and he did. If that can happen to a billionaire, it can happen to me.
This shouldn’t be viewed as an endorsement of Trump. Neither he nor Biden deserve the White House, and America should be ashamed that these are the choices to lead the most powerful country on earth.
But if this is what we’re left with, Trump stands a big chance to become just the second president ever (after Grover Cleveland) to get voted out of office and voted back in. He could be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. And if trends hold, he could win at least 317 electoral votes and do something no Republican presidential candidate has ever done — take more than 20% of the Black vote.
Who thought that, after 2020, Donald Trump would be on course for a historic return to the presidency with the support of the majority of the country and under the veil of normalcy?
If someone says they projected all of this, ignore their efforts to sell you a bridge.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday.