Ben Domenech

The biggest question for the future of the Republican Party is not whether Donald Trump runs for president in 2024 — he will. It is whether Ron DeSantis chooses to challenge him, or jumps the shark instead. Henry Olsen, the esteemed election analyst and Washington Post columnist, has a new column arguing that the overall lesson from the midterm primaries that have played out over the last several months is that the appetite for Trumpian populist candidates exists almost everywhere. The GOP electorate doesn't just want the policy priorities of populists — they want the style and attitude Trump brought to bear against the media and the Republican establishment.

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Yesterday's 95-1 vote in the Senate to support the admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO is another in a series of signs the Republican Party is figuring out what it means to have an "America First" foreign policy. The additions of the two nations serve to strengthen the NATO alliance in ways long supported by national security-minded conservatives. But they are also a vindication of the more recent arguments, advanced by Donald Trump, that members of NATO must necessarily meet their obligations in terms of military budgets. Finland and Sweden are not freeloaders — they have advanced militaries and spend a great deal on them, and have a long history of taking the threat of Russian aggression seriously.

After all the pro-life enthusiasm following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, it was immediately clear to anyone paying attention that the politics of abortion in America would be completely changed. We now have the first example of that in Kansas, where a well-funded pro-abortion effort was able to block an attempt to amend the state constitution to allow the legislature to regulate abortion. Even in a Republican-heavy electorate, the ballot measure failed by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent as of press time — fueled in part by heavier than expected opposition from more socially moderate mail-in voters. For pro-lifers, their incrementalist strategy over much of the past fifty years focused on the courts.

For nearly half a century, American politics has been defined according to the strictures of a single Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. The 1973 case determined abortion policy for the entire nation, striking down state rules and creating a political movement in response which played out in unexpected and completely polarized ways. It drove southern evangelical Christians and northern Catholics into unorthodox political partnerships. It cut across the Democratic Party coalition, leading to constant squabbling even through the passage of Obamacare. It led directly to the creation of the conservative legal movement, the elevation of prospective judicial nominees as of the utmost importance in assessing presidential candidates.

In all likelihood, Donald Trump will soon announce his re-entry into the presidential stakes — a decision that, with the exception of Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt, is largely unique to American history. In so doing, he plans to build on the success he had in office, the Supreme Court's decisions on abortion and other matters, and the Biden administration's mistreatment of the economy, the border and the culture. But one thing that will absolutely prove to be problematic for Trump when it comes to a primary — which he will absolutely have, given the machinations of multiple politicians who take issue with his approach or who will seek to supplant him — is a defense of his own performance in the last year of his presidency, facing a global pandemic.