"This Is The Bad Place": 2024 Edition
Some notes on last night's CNN Town Hall with the former president.
There is often comfort in nostalgia.
Nickelodeon, a network once devoted to children’s programming, now plays Friends during the Nick at Nite slot. I’m on board with Gen Z’s affection for all things 1990s; my top SiriusXM listen is “90s on 9”. There’s a reason that I’ve watched The O.C. Season One approximately one thousand times, an activity the show’s star Ben McKenzie (aka Ryan Atwood) is now undertaking with his own daughter. Sitting down to watch a re-run can be soothing in its predictability.
Well, America, have I got news for you: if you enjoyed the 2020 election, the re-run is here.
Of course, pretty much no one enjoyed 2020. But after last night’s CNN Town Hall featuring former President Donald Trump, there’s little indication a potential rematch will be significantly different than last time.
In every focus group I’ve done on this topic in the last few months, raising the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch provokes a visceral reaction, faces twisted up in disgust, audible sighs of despair. Is this really the best America can do? Over 330 million people in this country and these two are the choices we will get stuck with?
And yet here we are, right back in The Bad Place all over again.
I am a CNN political contributor, and I was on-set in New York last night to digest and dissect what we saw in the town hall conversation between Trump, anchor Kaitlan Collins, and a generally pro-Trump audience of New Hampshire voters. I’ve had some more time to think about what we saw, and there is one thing that stuck out to me as an important strategic choice that I expect will define Donald Trump’s messaging for the next eighteen months.
Donald Trump wants to portray himself as the steadier choice, in both a primary and general election.
In 2016, 2020, and now in 2024, Trump’s adversaries have argued that he is the “chaos candidate.” In 2016, this line of argument did not work particularly well against him; a lot of voters wanted chaos, the idea of someone coming in like a bull in a china shop was a feature not a bug in a matchup against the Republican “establishment” and then later against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
By 2020, however, facing deep political division, four years of Trump in the oval office, COVID-19 and all of its related problems, Americans opted for what many viewed as a pair of steady hands. They wanted to put the adults back in charge.
Of course, this did not turn out as planned, which is why so many polls show deep disaffection with Biden, worries about his capacity to be President and so forth. I have long believed that this is why the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan left such a lasting mark on the President’s job approval - not because foreign policy is top of mind for voters, but because the images that emerged deeply undercut the notion that there were steady, competent hands behind the wheel of our government.
American voters, by and large, still feel like the wheels have come off in so many facets of our society. They tell pollsters like me that they think we are headed for a storm, that it feels like the control room is empty, that we are divided and falling helplessly toward a future where our children will be less well-off than we have been.
So when Donald Trump declares “our country is being destroyed by stupid people” in last night’s town hall, he’s echoing something I’ve heard from countless focus group participants, and in just about the same words they’d use, too. When he says Americans are freaked out about the border, and crime, and gas prices, and inflation, and societal decay, he’s not wrong about how Americans feel.
The problem with Donald Trump saying it is that there’s more than a hint of “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” going on here.
My CNN colleague Van Jones noted on our panel last night that he sees Donald Trump eager to “weaponize nostalgia”, to evoke in voters a longing for the pre-Biden times. Sure, there was some turbulence, but wouldn’t you rather be divided and angry but have $2.00 a gallon gas than be divided and angry and have $4.00 a gallon gas?
Donald Trump and his advisors seem keenly aware that voters are looking, yet again, for a steady and competent pair of hands to steer the ship. Surely, they know that this is a key reason Biden was able to defeat him in 2020, and that this was also a reason why many of Trump’s volatile endorsees went down in flames in a 2022 midterm I believe was about an anxious electorate grasping for normalcy.
This is why you heard Trump and his surrogates repeatedly try to make the case that no, actually, it is the other side that is stoking the flames and causing chaos, not him.
For me, an important tell was that he came prepared with a prop on one particular item: January 6th. He knew he’d be asked about a day where his words and encouragement led to an outright riot and attack on the Capitol, and seemed eager to claim that no, actually, he was not a chaos agent that day. It mattered enough to him that he came with a folded-up printout of his various posts on and around January 6th.
Remember what I said at the top: Donald Trump wants to portray himself as the steadier choice.
That does not mean he will succeed at that task.
Wanting to make the case that you are not the Chaos Candidate and actually making the case that you are not the Chaos Candidate are two different things. And not moments after he pulled that paper out of his jacket, he was back to saying he’d pardon many of the January 6th rioters, and here we were right back again, same old Donald Trump as ever, freewheeling into insanity.
To be sure, being Mr. Chaos is still a selling point for a lot of Republican voters. In March of 2016, only 51 percent of Republican voters said they’d be satisfied with Trump as their nominee, and yet today that number is now 75 percent according to ABC/Washington Post polling. They think we haven’t done enough to blow up the way things are going, that we need to let the bull loose in the china shop for another wild round of breakage and mayhem. The drama and the conflict remains a feature, not a bug, for many.
But there are a lot of voters, and even many Republicans, who won’t feel energized - they’ll feel exhausted. “Are you serious? We have to do all of this again?”
The rematch is shaping up to be a rerun. And in an environment where voters are looking for stability and security, the last two elections haven’t turned out so great for Republicans.
Republicans still have many months to consider their options. The reality is that voters don’t want chaos. They want someone to put the train back on the tracks. There’s a strong argument to be made that our country’s current leadership isn’t up to the task of doing it.
But it’s hard to walk away from whatever we saw last night and think Donald Trump is the one to make the case to voters that he’s a steady hand who will set things right.