Trump The Arsonist Turns On His Own Party The Atlantic

Leo Migdal

-Dec 3, 2025, 11:45 PM

trump the arsonist turns on his own party the atlantic

Donald Trump threatens to use his core skills—peddling conspiracy theories, spreading lies, sowing distrust—against the GOP. It’s begun to dawn on Republicans that they face a potentially catastrophic political problem: Donald Trump may lose the GOP presidential primary and, out of spite, wreck Republican prospects in 2024. That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week. The survey found that a large majority of Republicans are ready to move on from Trump—but at the same time, more than a quarter of likely Republican voters are ready to follow Trump to... Two days after the poll results were released, Trump was asked in an interview whether, if he lost the nomination, he would support the GOP nominee. Trump answered, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.” Translation: no.

In such a closely divided nation, a third-party campaign by Trump would cripple the GOP in 2024, because almost all of Trump’s votes would come from people who would otherwise vote Republican. In some key states—Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan—that could make all the difference. (In a handful of other states, “sore-loser laws” might bar Trump from the ballot.) But even if Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate, he could ensure that Republican presidential and congressional candidates lose... That course of action is more straightforward, and perhaps even likelier, than a third-party bid, but it would be just as devastating to Republican prospects. If Trump does decide to sabotage his party’s chances in 2024, no one should be surprised. After all, Trump has flirted with third-party runs before, including in 2000, and he refused to rule out a third-party run in 2015.

“In 2015, Donald wasn’t initially being taken seriously by the GOP as a potential candidate,” Michael Cohen, who was an attorney for Trump before turning on him, told Semafor. “His threat to run as a third party candidate was to ensure people knew of his intent and that he would have no problem with destroying the party if they stood in his way.” The 2024 race is showing that the -ism will outlast the man. Updated at 1:43 p.m. ET on February 7, 2023. Who’s afraid of Donald Trump?

Not Nikki Haley, who is reportedly on the verge of announcing a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Not Ron DeSantis, whose own run seems certain, and who has been agitating the former president to no end. Not Mike Pompeo, who has published the sort of memoir that usually foretells a candidacy, and which criticizes Trump. Trump is furious about these challenges, especially DeSantis’s. He railed last week against the Florida governor, calling a prospective campaign “very disloyal” and alleging that DeSantis had tearfully “begged” Trump for his endorsement in his first run for governor, in 2018. “It’s not about loyalty,” Trump said.

“To me it is; it’s always about loyalty. But for a lot of people, it’s not about that.” The sudden abundance of challengers is richly ironic. Trump, who doesn’t care at all about his party, has improbably remade the GOP in his own image—yet also seems to be losing his personal appeal to its voters. For years, pundits have discussed the possibility of a Trumpism without Trump, and largely concluded that it was a chimera. As my colleague David Frum wrote in 2020, after Trump lost his reelection bid, “It’s not at all clear that such a thing as Trumpism exists, apart from Donald Trump’s own personality and grudges. Subtract Trump’s resentments and the myth of Trump the business genius and what’s left?” As a result, the odds that another candidate could effectively run on this platform—much less that it could create the...

Trump surrounds himself with those who flatter him in places where he is comfortable. For a decade, Donald Trump’s rallies were intertwined with his political identity. His big crowds were how he first got the media and the Republican Party to take him seriously, and they provided real-time feedback. Those who followed him closely could watch his positions take shape from one rally to the next—an offhand comment that got a strong reaction would become a talking point at the next rally, and... And he took notice when the crowd got bored, pivoting to the lines that would fire them back up. Although Trump hated being on the road, the travel took him out of the Manhattan skyscraper emblazoned with his name in gold and into many struggling, disgruntled communities.

Before and after rallies, he would meet with local officials, law-enforcement officers, and activists, as well as supporters who’d paid to get a photo with the candidate. Sometimes he visited local businesses or ordered takeout. The people Trump met clued him in to the issues his supporters cared about, and in a few cases, they became part of new stories he told (some so confounding—with cries of “sir” and... But it has been many months since Trump hosted a full-on campaign-style rally. He has opted instead to travel abroad, golf at his private clubs, and dine with wealthy friends, business leaders, and major donors. Beyond the rallies, Trump has dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.

And that lack of regular voter contact has contributed to a growing fear among Republicans and White House allies: that Trump is too isolated, and has become out of touch with what the public... Every president, of course, deals with being in a bubble, distanced by the demands on his time and the extraordinary security concerns that come with the office. But in his return to the presidency this year, Trump has seldom ventured across the country to anywhere other than his own clubs. He also inhabits something of a news silo, watching far-right cable channels such as One America News Network and Newsmax along with Fox News. Even his social-media consumption has become narrower: Instead of being on the app formerly known as Twitter, where he’d occasionally encounter contrary views, he now posts solely on Truth Social, which he owns and... And his own White House staff, this time largely populated by true believers and yes-men (and a few yes-women), only adds to the echo chamber.

Infighting. Bad polls. Party divisions. Midterm fears. It’s all back. President Donald Trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness.

His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election. Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original.

And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead. This was not the plan. Trump and his inner circle used their four years out of office to create a policy blueprint—drawn substantially from Project 2025—and form a disciplined team of true believers who used their experience with the... The beginning of Trump’s second term was marked by an unprecedented display of executive authority, as the president dominated a subservient Congress and defied the courts, brought to heel some of the nation’s most... Trump has been a steamroller.

But that has begun to change. Voters punished Trump’s party in this month’s elections, seeming to condemn his presidential overreach and the abandonment of his central campaign promise to rehabilitate the nation’s economy. A rare Republican rebellion on Capitol Hill rattled the West Wing and embarrassed the president. And although the White House likes to project a political image of never surrendering, a pair of retreats in the past few days has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility. Republicans thought about running without Trump in 2024—but lost their nerve. They’re heading for electoral disaster again.

The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it. There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this: (1) Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive. (2) Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles. Donald Trump condemns political violence only when he has nothing to gain from it.

Josh Shapiro is very lucky to be alive. The Pennsylvania governor and his family escaped an arson attack in the early hours of this morning. Parts of the governor’s mansion were badly charred, including an opulent room with a piano and a chandelier where Shapiro had hosted a Passover Seder just hours earlier. Things could have been much worse. The suspect, Cody Balmer, who turned himself in, would have beaten Shapiro with a hammer if he had found him in his home, he reportedly said in an affidavit. Balmer admitted to “harboring hatred” of Shapiro, authorities said, but his precise motives are still unclear.

He reportedly expressed anti-government views and made allusions to violence on social media. He reposted an image of a Molotov cocktail with the caption “Be the light you want to see in the world.” Balmer’s mother told CBS that he has a history of mental illness. But no matter how you square it, the attack is just the latest example of political violence in the United States. Last month, a Wisconsin teenager was charged with murdering his mother and stepfather as part of a plot to try to assassinate President Donald Trump—this, of course, follows two assassination attempts targeting Trump last... Other prominent instances of ideological violence include the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson late last year, and the time when a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home in 2022 and attacked her husband,... (He was badly hurt but survived.)

Shapiro is a Democrat, but in a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Republicans joined Democrats in condemning the attack. President Trump said in the Oval Office today that the suspect “was probably just a wack job and certainly a thing like that cannot be allowed to happen.” Vice President J. D. Vance called the violence “disgusting,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that she was “relieved” that Shapiro and his family are safe. These kinds of condemnations of political violence are good. They’re also meaningless—especially when taken in the broader context of Trump’s governing style.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that since Trump first ran for office, political violence has been on the rise. When it’s useful to Trump, he praises violence and makes leveraging the threat of it endemic to his style of politics. When Montana’s then–congressional candidate (and now-governor) Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter in 2017, Trump later said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!” After Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed... And during a presidential debate against Joe Biden that fall, when Trump was asked if he would rebuke the Proud Boys, a far-right organization with a history of inciting violence, he told the group... (This is also how the Proud Boys interpreted it.)

Trump The Arsonist Turns On His Own Party The Atlantic

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