Is Trump a Winner or Loser for 2024? Look at the Record

A question has arisen within the Republican field for the 2024 presidential nomination: Is Donald Trump a loser? In weighing all the elements of the question, I would say the answer is yes, Trump is a major loser — for both the Republican Party and for America. But let's weigh the elements and examine the record.

Let's begin with Trump’s strengths. Politically, polling shows he commands the hard-core loyalty of 30-40% of Republican voters. From his entry into the 2016 presidential primaries, he has dominated the field. His initial, often thinly-veiled, divisive rhetoric and brash style contrasted with and far overshadowed the traditional candidates and claimed 10-15% of Republican primary voters. 

Added to that, the age-old appeal of the “savior on horseback” image (read: incoming Boeing 767 with TRUMP emblazoned on the side), combined with Kitschy Camelot (Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower), and you capture part of the yahoo, as well as romantic royalist, vote, garnering up to a core 30% in each primary — enough to easily slaughter all other contenders in a fragmented field. 

At this stage, Trump has consolidated celebrity and sympathetic warrior status with massive rallies intoning endless grievances, thus hardening his core support among Republicans. He is a solid candidate who easily could become the next president.

Similarly, Trump had some undeniable successes as the 45th U.S. president.

He kept America out of any new shooting wars, and restrained China and Russia from taking hostile actions, or even making serious threats. For a while, he kept North Korea from testing nuclear weapons or missiles. He created peace treaties in the Middle East, and solidified relations with Israel and a number of its Arab neighbors. He ordered the military to hunt down and kill some major terrorist leaders. He annoyed European Union leaders, but then got them to promise to increase their support for NATO and send a trade delegation to Washington, which negotiated a pact favorable to America for the first time in … well, forever. He leveraged trade pacts with Mexico, Canada and the EU, combined with his strengthening our alliance with Japan and other Asian countries, to pry out a favorable trade agreement with China, again for the first time in forever (though the agreement had little time to succeed). His administration had remarkable foreign policy successes.

On the domestic side, Trump created record growth in the economy until COVID hit. He lowered taxes and re-energized business, controlled inflation, made America energy independent, unexpectedly delivered the lowest carbon emissions in a decade, secured U.S. borders, and delivered a record-low unemployment rate for women and minorities.

On the political asset side, that’s a very good balance sheet. But, Trump also has been a colossal failure.

First, let’s dissect his successes. In foreign policy, we can attribute much of his success to his harsh, mercurial and unpredictable style. His experience in doing New York and Atlantic City real estate deals with unions, corrupt officials and reportedly even the mob blessed him with a vocabulary and attitude that the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean leaders understand. But conducting foreign policy on that basis — with a strategy opaque to most Americans and foreign policy/defense/intelligence officials — cannot be sustained. 

In two years, President Biden has destroyed all of the progress that Trump created. In addition, many achievements attributed to Trump were built on the back of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Domestically, Trump’s greatest success was a strong economy, based upon tax policies. But nearly all of those policies were designed and guided through Congress by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who Trump, predictably, belittled in the end, just as he treated other partners and staff. Trump’s failure to build any real institutional or broad political foundation for his policies has allowed Biden to easily dismiss and destroy them — along with any real progress gained from them.

So, in just two years, Trump has been erased from government. That makes him a serious loser.

A central problem is that Trump is a populist who has no idea how to manage in a government setting or to govern. He built virtually no influence in America’s governing structures, nor was he able to broaden his political support. He appears to be unaware of fundamental management principles of how to consolidate power, secure broad loyalty and commitment to strategy, and strengthen leadership and processes to sustain strategy and policy. He is astoundingly inarticulate in policy debates. His pronouncements were neither “perfect” nor “beautiful,” despite his proclivity for using those words.

Before, during and after his tenure in the White House, Trump antagonized and alienated powerful friends and allies, dooming any legacy. In short, he appears to have been an incompetent manager of the Executive Branch. All of his initiatives and policies have collapsed like a building erected with cheap materials.

People often tried to brand Trump as a dictator but he was and is the polar opposite. Many in government didn’t listen to him or execute his ideas. He never understood nor gained any control over the true levers of federal power. The pandemic is a good example: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and officials with the National Institutes of Health ignored Trump. The FBI, CIA and Defense Department largely worked against him. 

The notion that Donald Trump could launch a successful coup is preposterous. True, he has skill and strength to stand up to embedded power, but that does little to change and reform it, and to root out corruption or failure and put more durable frameworks in place.

And Trump also failed the GOP. His clumsy meddling in 2020 states’ races, such as Georgia, and his backing of candidates who could not win, doomed the party’s chances to seize the Senate and prevent the Democrats from eliminating Trump’s programs and passing economy-cratering legislation. His ongoing fixation on supposed election fraud doomed many Republican candidates in 2022.

Trump is fond of conferring dismissive and diminutive nicknames on others, so here’s a final thought: call him “Don the Loser.”

Grady Means is a former corporate strategy consultant who served in the White House as a policy assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.