Trump Campaign’s Big Idea: Get NFT-Hawking Former President to Focus on ‘Politics’

Since announcing his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump has been blamed for the party’s poor performance in the interim, faced tidal waves of backlash for dining with anti-Semites and calling for an end to the constitution, and endured a string of legal setbacks, including the conviction of his family business on fraud and conspiracy charges. For everyone else, it would be a bad year. But for Trump, it’s all come crashing down in a single month, which he ended Thursday with the painfully embarrassing rollout of a series of NFTs, months after the bubble of that scam burst. Perhaps more than at any point in his political career – even more than after the time he actually lost the election – the guy just looks like a loser.

Fortunately for him, the masterminds at Trump’s campaign headquarters have a plan to turn his fortunes around: Follow The Wall Street Journaladvisers to the former president are preparing to send him out early next year on a tour of “political events” across the country to “remind voters of the ideas Mr. Trump promoted during his time in office.”

“If he’s riding on his record,” Republican Rep. Randy Weber told the newspaper, “he’s got a lot going for him.”

Included in this tour: several media appearances, self-released videos discussing what he would do with a second term as president, and speaking engagements for the Log Cabin Republicans, the conservative LGBTQ organization and a group of Jewish leaders, where he will presumably try to explain away his dinner date last month with the anti-Semitic rapper Yes and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. At this time next year, advisors suggested Journal, he will be back on the rally scene. But initially, they said, he will hit the campaign trail for events focused on “crime, border security, foreign policy, big tech and the economy.” Trump should “urgently get to the massive political battles on Capitol Hill”, former adviser Steve Bannon, who was convicted of criminal contempt of Congress and sentenced in October to four months in prison, which he is appealing, the newspaper said. “These are central to Trumpism and must be fought for – now.”

There are, of course, a couple of major problems with this policy-centric campaign strategy.

The most obvious is he has no real political ideas. Oh, sure, he has opinions — let’s buy Greenland, let’s build a big beautiful wall, let’s run the election two years ago again, and so on. But none of that is really politics, and unless he’s spent his month in Mar-a-Lago exile doing a hell of a lot of hustling, it’s hard to imagine him suddenly changing. Susie Wileshis incoming campaign manager, is just the latest to indulge in the delusion of a more disciplined Trump — and like the others who have tried to keep him focused, it’s only a matter of time before she collides head-first with the reality of who he is.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, politically. While he proved to be a useful means to an end for other Republicans agendas—mainly related to tax cuts, the judiciary, and the border—Trump’s appeal on the right has never really been about politics, but about his unique ability to inflict pain on the people they don’t like. The problem is that he even seems to be losing the ability to do so. Yes, the demagoguery is still there. But none of it, in the early going here, has seemed to burn with the same intensity as it once did. His act has grown stale, the far right has found new vessels for its cruelty, and the smell of his desperation is becoming intolerable — even, it seems, to some in his base. “I can’t believe I’m going to jail for an nft seller,” white nationalist internet personality Baked Alaskawho faces six months in prison for his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, tweeted after Trump’s pathetic “big announcement” on Thursday.

This is not to say that Trump cannot once again capture the Republican nomination—or, for that matter, the White House; he’s still probably the Republican front-runner right now, and he still has too big a base in this deeply polarized country to be shrugged off. (Hell, enough fools were willing to pay $99 for his idiotic NFTs that his collection sold out in 12 hours.) But if he was able to make some kind of comeback, it would be because of the sad state of the GOP, whose next best option so far seems to be a cardboard cutout of Ron DeSantisand by our wider culture, which has yet to fully jettison Trumpism—not him or any political magic he wields, and certainly not about “politics.”