If you were a Republican planning on running for president in 2020...what would you do?
The first question would be whether you were willing to run against Donald Trump? If you are, then you are gonna need to run as a moderate, but not actually moderate. You would need to make sounds like you believe in common decency, respect for women, minorities and such—but you must never actually vote in any way that would make the lives of women, minorities and such better. That would more-or-less doom any chance of winning the primary.
If you are a republican willing to run against Trump, you would want to leave your current position at the end of this term, and start visiting Iowa and New Hampshire, start putting together an exploratory committee, start hustling the big donors, and basically follow a fairly standard election plan. More or less, you’d be these guys…
But let’s say you are a Republican who is not willing to run against Trump, but you have a sneaking suspicion that Trump is not going to run again in 2020—maybe because he’s going to be impeached, resign, or that 100,000th cheeseburger is finally going to blow his heart up. In that case you need to be careful. You need to be publicly supportive of Trump. You need to be a good soldier, but not so close that you can’t take a more centrist position (not as centrist as the person who plans to run against Trump, mind you). You somehow need to be seen as being a moderating influence on Trump from within the Republican party, not a critic of Trump, not a never-Trumper. You need to flatter Trump, not for Trump’s sake, but rather for the Trump voters you hope to win once Trump is out of office. You need to act like Trump, but not too much.
In this case, you may or may not need to leave your current position in government. You might, or might not. Instead, you need to start planning quietly, very, very quietly. You need to be ready to pounce if and when Trump falls. You need to have your plans laid, your donors in a row, and your ground game planned. If you already have campaign infrastructure because you are an elected official, you can quietly use it to lay your groundwork. If you aren’t an elected official, you likely need to get out of government and work quietly behind-the-scenes. More-or-less, you need to be one of these folks…
Much of what we’ve been seeing over the last month or two is different Republicans positioning themselves for 2020, in one way or another.
And a bonus dark horse...he certainly fits well into strategy 2….