The successor to Donald Trump will struggle to deal with the shadow the 47th POTUS casts on the election cycle, a political analyst has claimed.
John F. Harris, writing in Politico, believes Trump's second term will be an incendiary topic which any successor, be it JD Vance, Marco Rubio or a different choice, must tackle. Whether that is possible with Trumpism set to outlast the president's time in office is yet to be seen, but Harris is convinced any move the next GOP's chosen candidate takes will be considered a loss of ground for the party.
He wrote, "The reach of Trump’s policies and his disruptive way of implementing them almost inevitably will dominate the campaign and first term of his successor — perhaps more so if that person is a Democrat than a Republican.
"In this sense, Trump is getting a third term even if he doesn’t actually flaunt the Constitution, as his critics suspect he wants to, and attempt to remain in office.
"Will there be executive orders demolishing the Triumphant Arch, the so-called Arc de Trump, a structure critics regard as architectural pornography that the president is planning near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery?
"What about military bases named for Confederates, erased in the Biden years but restored under Trump? Don’t forget the Gulf of America and the Department of War."
The "symbolic battles," as Harris described them, may be a trickier topic for the Republican Party, as it could be seen that a future successor pulling back on these changes is a sign that Trump still dominates the political landscape.
Harris continued, "Probably even a Republican successor, if it were someone other than Vice President JD Vance, would be ready to rhapsodize about NATO and join Democrats in saying how much we respect and want to work with allies.
"But no successor would want to risk political exposure at home by conducting anything that could be caricatured as an apology tour or relaxing Trump’s insistence that Europeans pay much more for their own defense.
"Trump’s personality and actions are so incendiary — and the political culture he presided over is so infected — that it is hard to imagine this customary way of ending a historical movement by partially co-opting it happening in this case."