The executive branch of the United States will have a single priority for the rest of Trump’s presidency: revenge.
There will be no other message, no other agenda, no other strategy that gets beyond the white board where Trump aids and advisors dream of what it would be like to have a non-insane boss.
Sure there will be teleprompter bits with cherry-picked bragging about the economy, patently venial appeals to the fundies, and the old hits (the wall, MS13, the war on coal, etc.), but the only real message will be redemption, relitigation, and revenge for Trump.
Thus, the 2020 campaign for Trump will be even more vicious and backward-looking than his 2016 campaign; in fact his 2020 campaign will be nothing more than an appeal to vindicate and establish the legitimacy of his 2016 victory.
He will be unable to talk about anything but his own crucifixion by the media, by the “deep state,” by the Democrats, by insufficiently loyal Republicans, by the judiciary, by the traitors and leakers who betrayed him. And every Republican running for office will need to echo, defend, and support these themes---or risk being abandoned, primaried, and/or attacked publicly for insufficient obeisance.
First, this leaves open to the Dems the entire field of policy. Neither he nor any Republican will be offering anything resembling actual policies that could address the needs, hopes, and (legitimate) fears of voters. It will simply be four-year-old rotten red meat served in a way that doesn’t even pretend any more to address the kitchen-table needs of real people.
The entire slate of GOP candidates will be forced to repeat and reinforce Trump’s narcissistic and paranoid ravings: Shut down CNN, arrest Jim Acosta, impeach Adam Schiff, jail Hillary Clinton, dig up John McCain’s body and drag it behind a Kid-Rock sponsored Chevy 4X4 at Daytona.
This makes, I humbly submit, for a rather different kind of appeal than the one he offered in 2016. He is no longer a novelty, a wild-card, a kick in the pants of the establishment via’s Hillary’s rear-end, a “what the heck, how bad can he be?” candidate. Voters will no longer be able to project on to him their own “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” of a new Washington, drained of swamp creatures and running like a well-oiled and glitzy modern business.
He will instead be offering four more years of endless wallowing in the past -— past grievances, past insults, past betrayals; four more years of increasingly senile and repetitive whining about 2016, of stupid and embarrassing and just plain “what the??” tweets, and tiresome demands for praise, deference, blind loyalty and Stalinist purges of the “deep state,” the GOP, the judiciary, the media.
Not to put too fine a point on it: this is not a winning national strategy, especially against a dynamic Dem opponent coming out of a highly competitive primary where Dems blanketed the country to listen to and talk about the real needs of Americans and the specific policy agenda to meet those needs.
In this way, the frothing enthusiasm of Trump and his cult to turn the Mueller investigation into a “sword,” to make Trump’s supposed victimization the theme of their 2020 election, could backfire on them in almost the same way that was predicted if Dems had pursued impeachment: If all you are doing is re-litigating 2016, you are not talking about 2020, and you are not pointing to the future.
These factors, especially if Trump is running against a significantly younger and more in-touch Democratic opponent, will really paint him as a dead-end option, compulsively flogging old grievances, and appealing only to his most dead-end cultists.