The question came to mind while reading the thread about getting rid of the internet. It seems to me that Trump and the movement he inspired are a lot more to blame for our current state of affairs than is the internet. One of the ways of testing that hypothesis (assuming we had a time machine) is to ask about what would have happened in this hypothetical where Trump runs as a Republican in 2012. Would Trump have been able to beat Romney in the Republican primary? If he had, how would he have done against Obama in the general election? Assuming he lost, would that have been the end of Trumpism and the MAGA movement? Would 2016 have been Hillary vs. Jeb following a Trump loss in 2012? The underlying question is this, Was the MAGA movement destined to start no matter what, or would history be radically different had a Trump style approach been shown not to work during its initial attempt at being tried on the national stage?
I think Trump would have lost, largely because it’s very difficult to defeat an incumbent candidate. Plus, while Obama did get a lot of racist hate, it wasn’t quite on the level of personal hate that people had for Clinton after decades of being propagandized to hate her.
That being said, because Trump was a major force behind the “Birtherism” nonsense for years after other people had dropped it, I expect the racist parts of MAGA would have been far worse, and far more public. I’m not sure if that would have been a net gain or loss for Trump, though. The Proud Boy types would have embraced him sooner and harder, but maybe the less radical Republicans might have been disturbed by the obvious fact that they were thinking about voting for an obvious racist.
Obama would have mopped the floor with him. After the loss, Republicans would have discarded him as they do with all other election losers. The world would be a better place.
I think it’s the Dems who toss losers. The GOP are willing to bring back the loudmouths.
He did. Not officially, but he did.
It started with a CPAC speech that got him a lot of attention. I remember at the time there was speculation that he’d put his hat in the ring. But nobody took him seriously, and his soft campaigning didn’t seem to be getting him where he wanted to be, so he bowed out and endorsed Romney.
If he had started to build more momentum in 2012, I think he would have made his campaign official. But it was clear that people weren’t ready for him yet.
The biggest part of his effort was the birther movement. He was pushing BS conspiracy theories then, just as he is now. At the time he was trying to delegitimize Obama, claiming he was born in Kenya and wasn’t eligible to be POTUS. (Even though he’d already served a term in that role.) He was hoping the controversy would catapult him into a role as the anti-Obama, and that the Tea Party would rally behind him.
It didn’t work. In 2016, he tried again, and started out in a similar way, where people didn’t take him seriously and thought it was a publicity stunt. But he decided to take the Tea Party folks and radicalize them even further. Instead of one issue, he had a bunch of issues to make them rabid. Building a wall, banning people from Muslim countries, cracking down on “illegal alien voters”. Lots of jingoistic crap. It worked. Instead of relying on the Tea Party, he made his own group of fanatics, the MAGA folks, which built on top of what the Tea Party started. That group of fanatics were enough to help him dominate the primaries and then edge out Clinton in the electoral vote (though not enough to win the popular vote).
Basically, he couldn’t do in 2012 what he did in 2016. 2012 was his warmup, and that practice run helped him succeed in his second try.
So to answer the question, no need for a time machine. We have history already. He tried and failed in 2012.