Election Countdown, 262 Days to Go: Do ‘Turning Points’ Exist Any More?
Damaging news doesn't make people like Donald Trump any less. Good news about Joe Biden's economy hasn't made people like him any more. What would a turning point look like?
Summer of 2018, Helsinki, the press conference at which Donald Trump said he would trust Vladimir Putin’s word over that of US intelligence agencies. Body language experts could write whole books about the way the two men interacted and carried themselves. (Photo Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images.)
This is a post about turning points. The question is whether this past week, in mid-February 2024, will eventually be seen as one.
In the Trump era the whole concept of “turning points” has been odd. For Democrats, they still register. For Hillary Clinton, October 28, 2016 was undoubtedly such a hinge-of-history moment. That is when James Comey decided to inject himself into political news, eleven days before election day. For Joe Biden, February 29, 2020, also marked a turning point. That was when his robust win in the South Carolina primary saved his campaign, near-moribund after bad losses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and put him on the path to the nomination and the presidency.
For Donald Trump there never seems to be a turning point. His political story since 2015 is of setbacks that would have been fatal for other candidates: Mocking John McCain and other POWs as losers; the Access Hollywood tapes; the “Mexican judge” comment; later the Covid chaos; and of course the corruption, the impeachments, the indictments, the denunciations by appointees, the jail time for supporters, the insurrection, the civil and criminal trials, and all the rest.
There’s a lot of it, and it bounces off. Here are two charts about Trump’s approval levels.
First, from Gallup, about support for him while he was president:
Chart from Gallup.
It shows a drop around the time of the January 6 insurrection. But his support picks up again in this chart from 538, covering Trump’s time out of office. (The blue line in the chart below corresponds to the green one in the chart above.) Trump has had basically steady sailing with his base all the way along.
Chart from ABC/538.
Trump’s situation is a mirror image to Joe Biden’s predicament: Nothing bad about Donald Trump has made people like him less. Nothing good in the economic news under Joe Biden has made people like him more.1
So I am wary of concluding that there will be any turning points in this year’s campaign. But if people looking back on these times think something changed in mid-February 2024, they might settle on these three events of the past few days:
1) The death of Alexei Navalny.
I say “death” rather than “murder,” since the facts aren’t in yet. But whatever happened to Navalny yesterday, in a prison camp in Siberia, it was almost certainly at the direct or indirect order of Vladimir Putin.
This is one of those clarifying “which side are you on” moments. It puts in special context Tucker Carlson’s stint last week as “useful idiot” for Putin in Moscow. By the way, it’s not me applying that label to Carlson, though I think it is appropriate. I am quoting Republican Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina. And it was just one week ago that Trump himself notoriously encouraged Putin and the Russians to “do whatever they hell they want” to NATO allies that had not paid what Trump thinks of as protection money.
As best I can tell, and as of mid-afternoon on the day after Navalny’s killing, Donald Trump has never once, in any way, in any venue, at any time dared criticize Vladimir Putin. If there is an example I’m missing, please let me know.
Might the vividness of the Navalny case finally make Trump’s subservience to Putin “relevant”? In a way the Ukraine horrors have not? Will more in the GOP follow Tillis’s lead, in calling out the Putin “apologists”? Might Navalny’s killing be a turning point? We can’t know.
I do know that one week ago, the NYT on its front page flatly declared that Robert Hur’s snark about Joe Biden was “a political disaster” for Biden. Let’s see how they frame this. And let’s see if voters care.2
2) The latest verdict, but not the last.
Yesterday Trump was ordered to pay more than $350 million for a multi-year pattern of corporate fraud in New York State. His outlays in this case alone will reportedly come to more than $450 million, when all the related interest payments and other fees are added in
That is a lot of money, even for a putative billionaire. Especially on top of the more than $83 million he was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll three weeks ago. And especially when state and federal courts have more sure-fire ways of collecting payments than do Trump’s many other unpaid creditors.
Trump’s immediate response has been even more desperate fundraising. I am on several of his email-grift mailing lists.3 Here is one I received a few minutes after the $350 million judgment came in (typography and colors in original):
It called for millions of “Friends and Patriots” to respond by giving him money.
Here is something else that came into the email inbox just a few minutes later. It’s from a friend with a long background in both politics and governance:
Today for the first time I have felt that things are actually closing in on him, instead of appearing that they may soon close in on him. I think the combination of the New York money judgment, Putin‘s murder of Navalny, and Fani Willis protecting herself darn well on the stand do represent walls closing in on him and also on the Maga Republicans, especially with respect to Ukraine.
Obviously, this is just a hunch, and of course it is propelled in part by desire as well as judgment. But I do think it is the beginning of those walls actually closing in. Things feel different today.
On the Fani Willis point: Yes, I believe she showed poor judgment in having any relationship at all with a prosecutor on her team. But yes, she acquitted herself well in the courtroom, and YES her father did spectacularly well. And yes again, the Trump-ally opponents operated on the clownish Habba/ Rudy/ Sidney Powell level we’ve come to expect from Team Trump.
Will things “feel different” tomorrow, or a week from now? I don’t know. But I agree about the feeling today.
3) Refining the age argument.
In several recent posts I’ve talked about the blurriness of the “Biden is too old” argument.