Betting or Hedging On Trump?

Those who know Trump best are keeping their distance. Others are making... different choices.

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

With the 2024 presidential primaries out of the way, the Biden-Trump matchup that everyone lamented — except for, you know, everyone who bothered to vote in the primaries — is now upon us. And while I was pretty confident last year that Donald Trump would lose the 2024 election, I am less confident now. Still, it’s worth noting that Joe Biden has gained some ground in the past few weeks. While FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics still have Trump with a slight lead in the polling averages, the Economist polling average now shows it to be a dead heat. Recent surveys from Bloomberg and Echelon indicates that Biden has made up ground in recent weeks. Biden is gaining in the betting markets as well.

There is also the matter of the campaign itself, in which it seems as though the Democrats are better-organized and better-funded than Republicans. Trump and the Republican National Committee are cash-strapped compared to Democrats. Trump also keeps saying super-bigoted shit, like how “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” or how migrants are “not people, in my opinion.”

There is also the matter of Trump’s criminal and financial perils. The first of his multiple criminal trials will begin in a few weeks. There is a possibility that more indictments are coming. It is an open question whether Trump can find the money to post the reduced bond obligations from his loss in his civil trial. Trump’s lawyer refused to deny whether Trump has sought out foreign government funding for his bond. One of Trump’s former communications directors said there was “no question” that he would accept foreign money to pay the bond. The legal bills are only going to get bigger. He’s hard up enough for cash to hawk bibles in return for a share of the royalties.

Politico’s Adam Wren and Natalie Allison summed up the state of play last week:

Donald Trump is walking back recent comments about cutting Social Security. He’s searching for an elusive abortion message that will offend neither anti-abortion voters nor suburban moderates. He’s inviting negative news cycles with claims that Jewish Democrats “hate” their religion and warnings of a coming auto industry “bloodbath.” And to top it off, he’s low on campaign cash — and doesn’t have the personal fortune to post a bond in the civil fraud judgment against him in New York.

The former president may be up in the polls, seemingly in the driver’s seat against a deeply unpopular incumbent. But problems, including many of his own making, are piling up around him. And his first two weeks as his party’s presumptive nominee have revealed old tendencies and new vulnerabilities that — taken in totality — amount to a rocky start to his general election campaign against Joe Biden.

Even inside the campaign, advisers are acknowledging the uneven transition to the general election. On a call with staff on Friday, a senior Trump campaign adviser lamented some of the recent news coverage, saying it had been a bad press week for the campaign, according to two people with knowledge of the call and granted anonymity to describe a private conversation. The adviser was particularly concerned about an onslaught of news stories highlighting the Trump campaign’s abrupt decision to close Republican National Committee minority outreach centers and an early voting initiative as part of the campaign and national party’s recent merger.

Despite all of this, one can safely say that there is a 50/50 shot of Trump being elected president this November. That’s a pretty high probability!

It is therefore interesting to see how myriad U.S. political actors are coping with this reality. For example, Trump’s vice president Mike Pence refused to endorse Trump. As CNN’s Abby Phillip points out, Pence’s name gets added to a long list of former Trump officials who are refusing to endorse him this second time around, including:

• Former attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William Barr

• Former national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton

• Former secretaries of defense Jim Mattis and Mark Esper

• Former chiefs of staff John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney

• Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley

• Many, many others.

Indeed, according to the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, “Fewer than one-third of the more than 40 people who served in Cabinet roles under Trump have publicly aligned with him during the 2024 campaign.” That is a pretty damning statement from those who were actually willing to serve him in the past.

As for money, some of his old donors are trying to help him out and some new supporters are warming up to him. What’s interesting, however, is none of them want to loan Trump money to pay for his bond:

The truly weird thing is that even as those who have been closest to Trump appear to be keeping their distance, those who have crossed Trump in the past are tacking in the opposite direction. As Semafor’s Max Tani notes, fear of a second Trump term was a driving factor behind NBC’s bungled attempt to hire former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel:

Behind the move is the reality that is sinking in for U.S. corporate media, and corporate America in general: They may soon be dealing again with a Trump administration, willing to use the tools of government to reward allies and punish enemies. For the great publicly traded conglomerates like NBCUniversal Media’s parent, Comcast, that may leave little choice but to extend an olive branch to the former president.

Companies like Comcast, Disney, and WarnerMedia, which dominate U.S. television, got an object lesson in presidential revenge during the last Trump administration. Trump reportedly demanded that the Justice Department sue to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. (The lawsuit failed, though the merger also quickly unraveled.)

Executives are concerned at the possibility that Trump could take revenge on the company, a high-profile NBC employee told Semafor.

This would seem to be another factor behind the rise of risk-averse news outlets.

It’s just weird that even as Trump’s former supporters turn against him, institutions like the mainstream media seem inclined to pull their punches. As Brian Beutler points out, however, holding Trump accountable is the smarter strategy:

In the real world, accountability has never helped Trump. When he was first impeached, nearly 60 percent of the country believed he should be removed from office. When he was impeached again after inciting an insurrection against the federal government, his approval rating collapsed. When he was first indicted, he warned of (and tried to foment) civil unrest, but nobody took the streets for him. Same when he was indicted a second time. And a third. And a fourth. His favorability ratings dropped back to post-presidency lows when the news was thick with his many indictments, and only narrowed slightly much later in equal-and-opposite measure to Biden’s numbers, which fell through the media feeding frenzy over his age.

And if Trump’s properties had been seized [on Monday], it wouldn’t have made him a martyr. There is no mass pro-fraud sentiment in the public. There is instead a widespread sense that Trump is a crook and a faker, and the fact that he’d finally faced consequences would have galvanized his opposition and weakened the brittle margins of his support base. 

Accountability may make Trump more popular among staunch Republicans… but if anything it lowers his ceiling among conservative voters and the general population. A prosecutor who indicts Trump amid a crowded primary election may inadvertently drive transgressive, antisocial, own-the-libs voters away from candidates like Ron DeSantis and into Trump’s camp. But the same indictment will also remind the kinds of Republican voters who want the party to nominate someone non-corrupt that Trump is beyond the pale. Why is Nikki Haley drawing 20 percent of the vote in primaries, weeks after suspending her campaign? It’s not because Donald Trump is getting more popular.

All I am saying, I guess, is that it sure would be nice if vital U.S. institutions demonstrated at least as strong a spine than Mike Pence. That should not be too hard of a lift.