Win or lose (and if he loses, he will almost certainly fight like hell to deny it), the fact that Donald Trump made it to this juncture as an even bet to return to the presidency is a development of shocking novelty in American history.
When he finally left office four years ago, without ever conceding defeat, the consensus was that his political career was pretty much over after he incited the forces that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He was in the process of being impeached for an unprecedented second time, was facing enormous legal peril over the coup attempt, and had been branded as a failed one-term president. His tenure, marred by his mishandling of the pandemic that would kill over a million Americans, left no particular policy legacy other than the sort of tax-cut legislation Republicans had been promoting for generations and failed attempts to repeal Obamacare and gut the social safety net. His more authoritarian impulses were generally reined in by the courts, though his success (the product of luck as much as skill) in reshaping the Supreme Court represented a time bomb that would explode during his successor’s presidency.
What Trump did still have was a movement. MAGA, as it soon became known, gave him a firm beachhead in the Republican Party from which he could mount an unlikely comeback. There was without question a mass base for the right-wing populism he represented, focused mostly on fanning anti-immigrant and anti-globalization fears that augmented the GOP’s electoral reach while sacrificing ancient party principles.
After spending 2021 in relative obscurity, Trump moved to reassert his power over the GOP. The party was trying to move past him ahead of the midterm elections, which were widely expected to be a major GOP rout after Democrats put together the most fragile trifecta imaginable in 2020 and Joe Biden’s popularity began plummeting. Trump, though, began to meddle foisting disastrous Senate candidates on his party (including Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania). As the election approached, the Supreme Court’s epochal reversal of Roe v. Wade, which Trump engineered with three of his justices, spurred an immediate backlash against the GOP. By the time his party underperformed expectations in November 2022, a lot of Republicans (mostly privately, but some publicly) were blaming Trump.
Eight days after the “red wave” failed to materialize, Trump became the first Republican to formally announce a........