The US presidential race is getting the feel of 2016 all over again; Read the review

at that time when >Donald Trump Announcing his presidential campaign, there has been a lot of talk about how anti-Trump Republicans were about to repeat the failures of 2016, refusing to confront Trump head-on and letting him run for the nomination unscathed.

This approach felt wrong in two respects. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a prominent and popular alternative: Ron DeSantisconservative> fl, whose poll numbers were competitive with Trump and far ahead of any other competitor. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now backed Trump in two national elections, making them bad targets for inflammatory attacks on his disqualification for the presidency.

Merging those two realities, the anti-Trump trajectory seemed all too clear: rally around DeSantis early on, gamble on his Trump fatigue, and wait for the slow fade, not the dramatic knockout.

But I admit, seeing DeSantis slip in the primaries — and watching Republicans and the media react to that slump — brought flashbacks to the 2016 presidential race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the dynamics that made Trump the one to reference.

Let’s count some of them. First, there are the limits of ideological alignment in an anti-Trump campaign. That’s my colleague Nate Cohn’s main argument in his assessment of DeSantis’ recent fights — and it’s a good one: DeSantis spent the year racking up legislative victories that matched the official right-wing doctrine, but we’ve already seen in Ted Cruz In 2016 the limits of ideological stalemate. Many Republican primary voters vote with a set of conservative positions in mind, but not enough to trump Trump’s charisma, and the campaign against him will not flourish if his main selling strategy is True Conservatism 2.0.

Second, there is a mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’ advantage now, compared to Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he appears more sympathetic to donors to parties with more money.

But many of these donors don’t really like culture wars: They agree with the anti-woke public rhetoric but hate culture battles. Disney They are generally pro-choice. So conservative social moves DeSantis can’t refuse, like signing off on Florida’s six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how potential donors are considering closing their wallets, with the palpable feeling of, “Why not Nikki Haley?” Or even Glenn Youngkin? “

This leads to the third dynamic that can be replicated: the coordination problemthe Republican PartyAlso known as a pileup in South Carolina.

Do you remember how all my competitors are>Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely similar happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base resentful of DeSantis and willing to support challengers for the long haul, and if two of those challengers — Haley and Sen. Tim Scott — hail from South Carolina, it’s easy to see how they might convince themselves to wait a little longer, but They end up handing Trump the kind of narrow victory that gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.

A certain frame of mind has already declared that Trump is in unstoppable momentum. This reflects another tendency that helped get him elected in the first place: the bizarre fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016, many of them went from “He Can’t Win” to “We Can’t Contain It” with only a scale in between. A tough month for DeSantis has already shown the same spirit – article by Jonathan Martin in Politician A strategist was quoted as saying resignedly, “We’ll have to go downstairs, escape the hurricane, and come back when it’s all over to rebuild the city.”

Influencing this view, again as it did in 2016, is the assumption that Trump will fail to win the general election, so if the GOP lets him lose, they will eventually dump him. Of course, wrong in the past, this assumption could be wrong again – and even if it wasn’t, who’s to say it won’t return in 2028?

Finally, the last dynamic that repeats itself: the media still wants Trump. This does not absolve Republican primary voters of blame. If the former president is nominated again, despite all his sins, it is their fault and their fault alone.

But in the anxiety-ridden coverage of DeSantis’ downfall, I still sense a certain tone that the mainstream press wants Trump back, on some unconscious level. They want to take advantage of the audience of Trump’s platform, and they want the Republican Party to be identified with Trumpism while identifying themselves as advocates of democracy.

Thus, Trump’s opponents will have to fight, not only against manpower, but also against an already clear motive: declaring Trump the winner before even one vote has been put into the ballot box. / Translation by RENATO PRELORENTZOU