Donald Trump is in no shape to pivot from a GOP primary to a general election

One of the moldiest political tropes around is the one that says a presidential candidate needs to run to the base during the primaries and then pivot to the center once he or she locks down the nomination. It makes some strategic sense, for sure, and we've seen it in action many times — but it doesn't always work. Donald Trump is not one for standard campaign strategy so even though he's the de facto nominee of the Republican Party for president, he's not making any kind of pivot to the center. If anything he's embracing the MAGA base ever more tightly, even though there is a substantial minority of his party that's rejecting him in these primaries. 

Over the weekend Trump bagged some more wins in caucuses in Michigan, Idaho and Missouri, all three of which were the result of amateur hour mistakes by local and party officials who messed up the usual primary system. From what we can gather there still exists an anti-Trump vote among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. We'll see on Super Tuesday if that phenomenon (which I wrote about last week) continues, even as it's obvious that Trump is the nominee. 

Nikki Haley won her first primary on Sunday in the District of Columbia, which Trump claimed he lost on purpose and immediately disparaged as nothing more than a win for "the swamp," calling her "Birdbrain" and the "Bird" in a series of furious posts on his Truth Social platform. He can't bear to lose anything, even when it doesn't matter. 

The AP reported on the anti-Trump vote in GOP primaries from their APVotecast surveys over the weekend, noting that while many of those who voted for Haley are Democrats or independents who didn't vote for Trump in 2020 "about 1 in 10 early contest voters who said they supported Trump in the 2020 general election said they wouldn’t be doing so this year." So this group exists and it's a problem for the Republicans. 

As a result, according to a different AP report, many in the Trump camp would like him to make that pivot to the center, the sooner the better. Campaign professionals understand that this Never Trump faction is his Achilles' heel but his people are committed to "let Trump be Trump" — mostly because they have no choice. People have tried to get Trump to soften his edges in his previous campaigns and he's simply incapable of doing it. They're still trying:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said,

That's downright hilarious. A "happy warrior" is the last thing anyone would ever call Donald Trump. A whining warrior, maybe. A vengeful warrior definitely. But he is the unhappiest presidential candidate in history and he never shuts up about it. 

Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the AP, "Their role is to provide the organization 'to amplify and to force project' Trump’s message." And they insist that he is already running his general election campaign against President Joe Biden which means that what he's saying in his rallies right now is the general election message. Well, that message is so extreme it's very hard to believe that the 10 percent of Republicans who say they're not going to vote for Trump again will come around in the fall. He's going further than he's ever gone before and people are going to see all this eventually. 

He rambles on for hours at a time, often speaking off the cuff about strange notions like magnets don't work in water and suggesting that Abraham Lincoln could have negotiated the country out of the Civil War if he hadn't wanted to be famous. He calls the insurrectionists "hostages" and opens his rallies to the recording of the so-called January 6th prison choir. Even weirder, the finales of his prepared speeches are now accompanied by spooky Q-Anon-inspired music, which seems to send the crowd into paroxysms of ecstasy.

He vows to enact the greatest deportation program the world has ever known, describing immigrants in the most demeaning terms imaginable saying they are "poisoning the blood of our country." He calls his political enemies communist, Marxist and "vermin" who must be "purged" and promises not to allow anyone into the country who doesn't believe in "our religion." They are divisive, hateful diatribes that should make any decent person recoil in horror. 

But that's just Trump, right? It's just a schtick and nobody should take it literally. He's just playing to the crowd because they love that stuff. But the truth is that his speeches seem to be written by Stephen Miller or are, at least, very Miller-esque in that they are full of plans and policies. It's not just Trump riffing away to please the crowd. 

For instance, this past weekend, he threw a new idea into the mix, saying that he plans to withdraw all funding from any schools that require vaccines, which would be virtually all of them:

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That was on the teleprompter and considering what we know about the planning for a second Trump term with Project 2025 and Agenda 47, I think it would be very foolish not to take such promises seriously. The Republicans have become so nihilistic that they would easily allow polio to once again ravage the children of this country if it would get big cheers at a Trump rally. 

Republicans and independents who've been voting for Nikki Haley in these primaries should know that Trump doesn't want their vote. He made it clear this weekend when he said that MAGA now represents 96 percent of the party and they are getting rid of "the Romneys"

If that's what the campaign plans to "amplify and project" to their potential voters, good luck to them. He's openly purging his coalition of anyone who isn't MAGA and if these surveys are correct, that means he has no intention of doing or saying anything to appeal to that 10 percent (or more) who say they won't vote for him in the fall. Let Trump be Trump, I say. It can only help the Democrats.