The Gloomiest Places To Talk About the 2024 Election

My Beltway/Embassy Theory of Election Doomscrolling.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

As of this writing, it would appear that convicted felon Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has not been helped by his 34 felony convictions — but it hasn’t been hurt too badly by them either. Of course, it is still early days. Soon there will be other events, like the June presidential debate, that could affect the race.

Until then, the 2024 presidential race is in the same place as it was a few weeks ago: really close with the slightest of polling edges for Trump. What is striking, however, is the degree to which Trump’s victory is taken as a near-certainty in some quarters. As I noted a few weeks ago, it is an article of faith inside the Beltway that Trump will win:

Every time I have been in Washington this year the overwhelming vibe of the place is that Trump’s victory is a lead-pipe cinch. The miasma of moroseness begins the moment one gets anywhere close to I-495. Unsurprisingly, the elite exasperation that Biden is not campaigning more actively also runs far and wide inside the Beltway.

There is one other place where Trump’s victory is presumed to be a certainty: the capitals of allied countries. Back in April Lionel Barber wrote for Politico about Japan’s state of geopolitical queasiness at the prospect of Trump’s return to the Oval Office. And this week, the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins’ reported something similar from Europe:

In capitals across the continent—from Brussels to Berlin, Warsaw to Tallinn—leaders and diplomats expressed a sense of alarm bordering on panic at the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection.

“We’re in a very precarious place,” one senior NATO official told me. He wasn’t supposed to talk about such things on the record, but it was hardly a secret. The largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II was grinding into its third year. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed, and Russia was gaining momentum. Sixty billion dollars in desperately needed military aid for Ukraine had been stalled for months in the dysfunctional U.S. Congress. And, perhaps most ominous, America—the country with by far the biggest military in NATO—appeared on the verge of reelecting a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance.

Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win….

In interviews, State Department officials in Washington, who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly, acknowledged that efforts to “reassure” European allies are largely futile now. What exactly can a U.S. diplomat say, after all, about the fact that the Republican presidential nominee has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that he considers freeloaders?

“There’s not really anything we can do,” one U.S. official told me. European leaders “are smart, thoughtful people. The secretary isn’t going to get them in a room and say, ‘Hey, guys, it’s going to be okay, the election is a lock.’ That’s not something he can promise.” (emphasis added)

The pessimistic-but-certain expectations of a second Trump term are understandable in both quarters. Inside the Beltway, the shock of 2016 has generated PTSD among the pundit class of being that wrong again. As a result, “ever since Trump stunned the Washington establishment in 2016, that same establishment has been confident that Trump and the GOP will overperform the polling.”

The pessimism is even more understandable in allied chanceries. U.S. treaty allies survived the chaos of Trump’s first term but a second term would make the first one seem constrained by comparison. Since the possibility of Trump winning a second term is decidedly greater than zero, it is only prudent for allies to prepare for that contingency. As Coppins notes, “Whether Trump wins or not, there’s a growing consensus in Europe that the strain of American politics he represents—a throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s—isn’t going away…. ‘We can’t just flip a coin every four years and hope that Michigan voters will vote in the right direction,’ Benjamin Haddad, a member of France’s National Assembly, said at an event earlier this year.”

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not begrudge the reasons why diplomats are expected and preparing for a second Trump term. And the staff gets the psychology behind the pundit expectations, My concern, however, is these behaviors are taken as objective indicators of what will happen in November. And that is neither a healthy nor accurate way of looking at the 2024 U.S. presidential election.