You may inform it’s an excellent profile as a result of the small print lower in several analytical instructions. In the event you assume that Trump’s victory was at all times assured as a result of Republican voters exist in a bubble of delusion and unshakable loyalty, you’ll discover proof for that assumption in Johnson’s perception that Jan. 6 was a setup organized by Trump’s enemies and within the acquainted script he makes use of to make a populist case for Trump — that he’ll battle the self-dealing insiders, “go in and lead” and “care for the typical man.”
However for those who’re struck by Johnson’s professed (if momentary) Trump fatigue and his willingness to noticeably take into account Haley regardless of his clearly Trumpy politics, then Kruse’s piece suggests a couple of attention-grabbing might-have-beens. As an illustration:
What if Trump had been indicted solely within the categorised paperwork case? The pileup of indictments was clearly an inflection level within the major marketing campaign, sending Trump surging towards a safe front-running place. In Johnson’s narrative, you get a concise abstract of the mentality that helped drive that surge of assist: “For a man like me, I’m wanting, and I’m saying, ‘Why is all people so hellbent on getting Trump in jail or getting him to not win?’” His reply is that institutional Washington, the intelligence and legislation enforcement companies particularly, should be “afraid as hell” of Trump coming again, as a result of he doesn’t tolerate their uselessness or play by their bureaucratic guidelines. They’re “throwing a lot stuff at this man, and it’s nearly like I’m rooting for him,” Johnson tells Kruse. “It is a entire system of presidency going after one man who, in all probability, I guess, proper now, 85 million folks need to be president.”
However then when Kruse goes case by case via the indictments, Johnson has to concede that the categorised paperwork case is genuinely troubling, at the same time as he dismisses the others as both prosecutorial overreach or (within the case of the Stormy Daniels hush-money indictment) simply “completely ridiculous.” He nonetheless makes excuses for Trump’s conduct with the paperwork, however listening to him fumble, you get the sense {that a} world the place prosecutors pursued solely that case — which is, certainly, the one slam-dunk case, the one indictment that doesn’t contain some inventive authorized theories — won’t have generated the identical base-rallying, Trump-against-the-world political impact.
What if Biden’s polling numbers had been higher? Kruse notes in passing that an early indicator that Johnson would revert to backing Trump got here after they talked about general-election polling and Johnson talked about watching the information and seeing a ballot exhibiting Trump beating Biden handily. (“Trump’s ‘going to win, man,’” Kruse quotes his topic saying.) And you can argue that Biden’s dangerous polls had been nearly as necessary because the indictments to Trump’s resurgence and subsequent resilience. They modified the narrative created by the 2022 midterms, through which Trumpist nuttiness clearly damage the G.O.P. and helped the Democrats maintain the Senate, by making Trump seem like a possible winner as soon as once more.
