Capitol Hill Dysfunction Helps Trump, the Chaos Candidate

Drama among Republican House members distracts from Trump’s trial and makes him look relatively stable. That’s good news for his 2024 campaign.

Even before today’s humiliating vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, it was clear that the chaos in the Capitol would continue for a good while. Despite a majority of the House GOP agreeing to a 45-day stopgap spending bill at McCarthy’s behest, Republicans remain miles away from Democrats on spending levels and a ton of related policy measures. They seem determined to slog through individual appropriations bills, which will just multiply the opportunities for conflict and delays. Add in a leadership succession battle if McCarthy doesn’t survive and you have a recipe for more factional madness within their ranks.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party at large is drifting through the final stages of the “invisible primary” segment of the 2024 presidential nomination contest with Mr. Chaos himself, Donald Trump, holding what looks like a prohibitive lead. In the RealClearPolitics national polling averages, he’s at 57 percent and has a 43-point lead over the steadily fading second-place candidate, Ron DeSantis. And even in Iowa, the alleged stomping ground of both DeSantis and third-place candidate Nikki Haley, Trump has been up by at least 30 points in every poll taken since mid-August. This is not a close race, and time is running out for the would-be Trump challengers.

At this fraught juncture, the Capitol chaos would be a godsend for any presidential front-runner, distracting voters from the campaign trail and the debates (which Trump is skipping); it essentially freezes the contest in amber as the voting phase of the competition grows near. In Trump’s case, the House drama also draws attention from his civil fraud trial. But there’s a more invidious pro-Trump effect as well: Even though the former president is more or less aligned with the House GOP fanatics who precipitated a near-government shutdown and are going after McCarthy, he is now the most stable figure in the Republican political constellation. And it’s not like his rivals can get any traction from identifying Trump with the crazy people in Congress: They are stumbling over each other to attack federal spending as a deadly sin.

In a party bereft of any real leadership (notwithstanding perpetual MAGA complaints about a largely nonexistent or at least feckless Republican Establishment), Trump stands tall as the symbol of a pre-Biden era most Republicans embraced at the time and even more so retroactively. It’s difficult to imagine an environment more difficult for those trying to convince Republican voters to conduct a 180-degree turn and consider a new champion.

And so instead of worrying that the criminal trials this wildly erratic and self-centered man is about to undergo are a warning sign of disaster ahead, the Republican rank-and-file may look at the endless drama among their leaders in Washington and decide Trump’s not so dangerous after all. Add in the Trump voters who don’t care for the GOP as an institution at all, and you have a 40-point national lead with a clinched nomination just a few months away.