One of my high school teachers made the amusing observation that “charisma” is the Greek word for “ham.” Some politicians have it, others do not. Charisma is not essential for political success.  After all, as I write Joes Biden is still president of the United States. Quod, that is to say, erat demonstrandum. 

Still, charisma is a great asset for a politician. What is charisma?  It is not easy to define. It is not the same as sophistication, social polish, eloquence, or refinement. In order to proof that, I need only adduce the contemporary politician with the highest quota of charisma: Donald Trump.

Trump is now just a private citizen.  But he is probably the best known personality in the world.

On January 5, Joe Biden journeyed to Valley Forge, site of George Washington’s heroic winter encampment in during the harsh winter of 1777-1778. Biden’s subject? Donald Trump and his alleged role in the protest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2023.

Biden’s speech was roundly ridiculed as a hyperbolic mess.  Not only did he wildly exaggerate what happened during the two-hour protest at the Capitol. But he also drew heavily on the prevailing left-wing talking point that Trump is a dictator-in-waiting.

The trouble for that narrative is that the voters do not buy it. Many were initially shocked by the events of January 6. But as more time passes—and as more video footage from that day is released—people have come to understand that the event was largely an orchestrated, Reichstag-fire-like performance, instigated largely by deep-state actors, not Trump supporters.

Moreover, people know what Trump would be like as president because he already was president.  The Left kept saying that he was dictatorial, “literally Hitler,” etc. But no one believed it because he did not act in an authoritarian way.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has Cecily Cardew observe that “a man who is much talked about is always very attractive.” Is anyone in political today talked about more than Donald Trump?

A gaggle of Republican candidates have a nationally televised debate sponsored by the the Republican National Committee. Trump, way ahead in the polls, skips the debate and sits for an interview with Tucker Carlson instead. Untold millions tune into the interview. The debate draws yawns and suggestions it be employed as a sleep aid.

Whether Trump shows up or not, he is the star of the show. Take the debates. He missed them all.  Still, he was the main event.  In this respect, his performance was like that of Tallulah Bankhead who, late in her career, was dissed by some pushy ingenue.  “I could upstage you dahling,” Tallulah said, “without even being on stage.”  She did, too, by the simple expedient of precariously balancing a champagne glass half-on-half-off a table when she made her exit.  The ingenue came on for her big scene, but all eyes were glued to the glass: would it or would it not fall off the table? (No one knew that she had put sticky tape on the bottom of the glass.)

I don’t know what is going to happen in the 2024 election anymore than you do, dear Reader.  But I have been amused by the absolute certitude of the chattering class, which assures us with hands wringing that 1) Trump is a very bad man 2) that he cannot win the general election but that 3) the clever but insidious Dems will assure that he wins the nomination, thus assuring a Republican defeat come November 2024.

Maybe.  But maybe the Dems keep indicting Trump and endeavoring to keep him off the ballot because they are terrified that he could win, and then what?  Wouldn’t it be better to put him in jail, issue a gag order, say that anything he says is an effort to overturn the 2020, or the 2024, election and thereby undermine Our Democracy™?  I think that is the more likely explanation, but I admit that these are deep waters.

There are plenty of scenarios by which someone other than Trump becomes the Republican nominee, beginning with various acts of God. One big problem for the Republican aspirants, though, is that if Trump is prevented by chicanery from being the nominee, a critical portion of his millions of voters will stay home, thus depriving any other candidate of victory. If Trump fails to become the nominee because he is suddenly incapacitated or dies, that is a different story.  But so far, he seems surprisingly robust.

What many of these Trump-can’t-win prognostications overlook, I believe, is that he is will not be running in a vacuum. What matters is not just the “37%” of voters (or whatever the real number is) who say they like or agree with him.  There is also the candidate from the other party: Joe Biden, probably, but possibly Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, or even (some say) Michelle Obama.

But let’s say it is Joe Biden.  I think that the pollster (and former Clinton advisor) Doug Schoen is right.  Despite his many legal woes, Trump could win, less because he is broadly popular himself than because Biden is so unpopular.

“One has to go back to 1980,” Schoen wrote a few months ago, “to look at the last time a Democratic incumbent president was in a situation where he was bordering on unelectable, and that was Jimmy Carter who had a 37% approval rating when Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory, taking with him the Senate, and helping Republicans to gain a net 35 seats in the House of Representatives.”

Biden is currently hovering over that Carter territory, especially on the critical “it’s-the-economy-stupid” issue.  Biden’s approval rating there is a mere 38%, a number that when suitably translated spells J-I-M-M-Y C-A-R-T-E-R. The point is, though, that Trump will not be running by himself.  He will be running against someone. And that someone is likely to have liabilities at least as huge as Trump’s.

You might think that Trump’s charisma doesn’t matter much at this point.  Since he’s not president he is only a force in potentia.  But a look at the political landscape shows that he already dominates the discussion. The Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have thrown everything they could think of at him. So far, their attacks have served only to underscore Nietzsche’s contention that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

It is worth noting, too, that Trump’s shadow is felt at least as much abroad as it is in the United States.  American policy makers have begun to have second thoughts about Biden’s handling of issues like the border, energy, and inflation, not to mention his general infirmity. At the back of their calculations is the nagging question: What if Trump were to return? What then?

The same questions are clearly playing across the minds of European and Asian policy makers. Do an internet search for “Trump return Germany France Russia China” and you’ll get a horde of responses explaining that Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing must not be caught out again by the ascension of Donald Trump to thew U.S. presidency.  Everyone was shocked by his victory in 2016. The world must be prepared should the impossible happen yet again. The anxieties are only half spoken as yet.  But over the last several months, as Trump’s profile has grown larger and larger, one senses a new element of calculation and caution among leaders from Putin and Xi to Macron and Scholz. Even the ayatollahs are exhibiting a new jumpiness.

The real question was posed by Michael Anton, author of the famous “Flight 93 Election” essay that appeared just before the 2016 election.  Last summer, writing in  Compact, Anton wrote a “black-pilled” essay called “They Can’t Let Him Back In,”  Anton noted that “The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

Who are those people? Mostly Democrats, yes, but really, it’s a bipartisan, deep-state consensus, a uniparty assumption that Trump, being an existential threat to their continued existence must be kept from political power by any means necessary. Think the 2020 BLM riots were awful?  They were, but they will seem like Lake Placid if Trump is reelected.

I put that down as a secondary reason to hope that Trump does win, but I understand that others disagree.

It is curious, as Anton also points out, that for all the fury directed at Trump the individual, the real target of deep state animus is not Trump himself but his supporters, his “base.”  Trump was right when he said “they’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just standing in the way.” Anton got to the nub of the issue when he observed that “Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are.”

I think that is worth bearing in mind. It makes me happy about Trump’s surging poll numbers and grateful that, for all his rough edges, he possesses more political potency, more charisma, than the next ten most popular political aspirants put together.