Why Donald Trump won the GOP nomination

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Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee after a dominating performance in the Iowa caucuses, a performance in which he won more than 50% of the vote and left his closest competitors in the dust. Trump is currently leading the polls in New Hampshire, South Carolina and all other primary states.

Get ready for “Trump vs. Biden II: Electric Boogaloo.”

The big question, of course Because? Why Trump maintains such a hold on the Republican imagination after losing the 2020 election, contributing heavily to the Republican loss of two Senate seats in Georgia in 2021, and contributing heavily to the loss of the Senate in 2022 with his series of strange primary elections ? Why should Trump, who spends much of the day blustering about his upcoming legal cases, have the edge against Republicans without that baggage? Why does Trump, who is certainly not a conservative ideologue, live so much in the imagination of conservatives?

There are several reasons.

Mostly, Trump is lucky with his enemies.

To be more precise, Trump's very presence on the political stage—and his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016—confused his enemies. Those enemies determined that any and all means were suitable to undermine his presidency and his 2020 re-election bid: from the nonsense of Russian collusion to multiple impeachments, from nodding to riots historically harmful to blaming it for a pandemic, from changing the voting rules to lying and lying. then, closing the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story, anything was on the table. So when Trump claimed in the post-2020 election landscape that he had been robbed of victory, that claim rang true, even if his claims of outright voter fraud had not been proven.

Trump has been the main character of “Trump: The Series” since 2015. In the end, the chances of Americans allowing a re-election before his re-election effort were always slim. But those chances shrank to zero when Trump's enemies rigged the legal system against him.

When Trump's enemies, after Joe Biden's election victory, continued to come after Trump used the legal system, Trump argued that he was a stand-in for conservatives everywhere, who feel they are being targeted for destruction by the most powerful institutions in the United States. That argument had significant purchase: Based on polling data, Trump's rise to the top of the Republican heap in 2024 came not with his re-election announcement, but with his March 2023 announcement that he would be impeached in Manhattan on misleading allegations of campaign finance violations. The drumbeat of new legal charges against him, from Florida to Washington, DC to Georgia, simply added fuel to the fire.

Perhaps even this legal news could have been turned against Trump in a primary race. But there was one more factor Trump needed: He needed Joe Biden to be so terrible at his job, so absolutely awful, that Trump would suddenly seem competitive. The electability argument, the argument that Trump's record losses from 2016 would continue through 2024, collapsed for Trump's Republican opponents when Biden's approval rating sank into the 30s. The heart of the Republicans was with Trump; now his bosses might as well be with him.

And so Trump is the presumptive candidate.

The only question is whether he will re-enter the White House in January 2025. And that question, ironically, will be answered less by Trump than by Biden. Trump's campaign will be relatively quiet: he will be relegated to the courts and TruthSocial; there will be no debates. Which means 2024 could easily be a referendum on Biden's presidency. And if that happens, Trump will have capped the most remarkable political comeback since Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968.

Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized American Institutions Against Dissent.” To learn more about Ben Shapiro and read features from other Creators Syndicate writers and artists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Ben Shapiro, 36, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, The Right Side of History, and Bullies.

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