This meant that no matter what Trump tweeted or what corrupt things he tried to do, for much of his presidency, establishment and business-class Republicans felt as if they were — to some degree, at least — in charge of the American government, getting exactly the judges they wanted, arming Ukraine and supporting Israel, passing a very traditional Republican tax cut. (And if they didn’t get sweeping spending cuts or dramatic entitlement reform, well, they didn’t get those with George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, either.) Throughout, Trump’s general haplessness eased their fears about his authoritarianism, helping convince them that he was dangerous, sure, but also ultimately under their control.
The shock of Jan. 6, 2021, temporarily undid this conviction, temporarily reminded this faction of Republicans of Trump’s unfitness for the job. But like the left’s subconscious, the Republican establishment’s selective memory is a powerful force. And as the difficulty of preventing Trump from regaining the nomination has become apparent, many Republican elites have consoled themselves by remembering the years when they felt like they were running the Trump presidency — as opposed to the postelection months and the January day when they were definitely not.
Then, finally, you have the Trump nostalgia of swing voters, which is a simpler matter to explain. Chait focuses on the unreasonable-seeming economic pessimism of some Americans, the weird tensions and contradictions inside the current mood of doom and gloom. But while it’s fair to argue that there’s too much economic doomerism, there’s still a good case (as I’ve argued here before) that a general median-voter preference for the pre-Covid Trump economy over the Biden economy is entirely rational — pending a 2024 of low inflation and rapid economic growth, at least. Nor is it necessarily surprising that voters would give Trump more of a pass for the economic crisis created by the shock of the pandemic’s arrival than they give Biden for the state of the economy four years later — especially since the Trump administration’s initial economic response to Covid was arguably quite effective at propping up incomes and righting the stock market.
Meanwhile, there’s more to the national mood than G.D.P. alone. Trump ran for president in 2016 promising not just a blue-collar economic boom but also a new amoral, hard-edge approach to the American national interest overseas and a crackdown on illegal immigration. Once in office, Trump never fully controlled his own foreign policy, and his bigotry and the special cruelty of the child-separation policy made his immigration policy unpopular. But on both fronts the overall results (including during the pandemic itself) still look preferable to what’s followed under Biden: A border that seemed relatively secure under Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy is now an ongoing disaster area; a Pax Americana that seemed strained but relatively resilient four years ago is now facing a direct military challenge or a serious threat almost everywhere you look.
To be clear, I don’t think that Biden is at fault for all these trends (though he does bear some responsibility!), or that bringing Trump back would magically whip inflation (his stated policies would not) or cause peace to break out around the world. Just as you can’t step in the same river twice, you can’t rerun a presidential term, especially one that existed in the very different prepandemic world. Instead, a second Trump term would be an undiscovered country, in which anyone nostalgic for either his first term’s conventional Republican policies or its left-empowering cultural atmosphere might be bitterly, disastrously disappointed.