OPINION:
After months of unforced errors and shaky poll numbers since his historically early campaign announcement, former President Donald Trump is finally having a run of good luck. He’s starting 2023 much better than he ended 2022.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rebuffed a bid from a small cadre of fringe House members to claim the gavel. Mr. McCarthy gave the former president credit for helping to end the impasse on the House floor and swing at least some of the votes that allowed the Republicans to proceed with the people’s business.
That business immediately included votes to make good on GOP campaign promises including eliminating the funding for the 87,000 new IRS agents, and protecting children born alive after a failed abortion. Democrats voted in lockstep against all of those, handing Republicans at least rhetorical victories.
The House GOP even garnered bipartisan support for legislation to stop the Biden administration from selling any of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to communist China.
President Biden’s visit to the border was also a big bust with even mainstream media outlets calling it what it was — a sanitized photo-op that was upended by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s laundry list of demands for action, none of which the administration is inclined to implement.
Then the 45th president, who has been unusually quiet over the past couple of months, got to sit back and watch as his successor was exposed for monumental hypocrisy over classified documents curiously discovered by his attorneys at his Penn Biden Center offices and his Delaware garage. Those revelations spurred the naming of a special counsel by the Department of Justice.
The document discoveries have dragged up questions about communist China funding of the Penn Biden Center, our two-tiered justice system biased against conservatives, and what the documents may have to do with Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The Biden document scandal dramatically reduces or eliminates the possibility that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for documents he says he declassified, which were found at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
All of these occurrences of the last two weeks have more to do with the strange mistress that is American politics than anything Mr. Trump or his campaign has done. But they do provide the former president with an opportunity to attempt to get back on offense.
Mr. Trump had a lackluster campaign launch in November that was followed in December by the loss of a third Georgia Senate race. Then there was the public flap over his dinner with the rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and the avowed White supremacist Nick Fuentes, and a campy, widely panned and arguably totally misleading “major announcement” about the sale of $99 digital playing cards — from which he personally made an undisclosed but surely massive sum.
Donors are still asking how much of the more than $100 million Mr. Trump raised to help 2022 candidates actually ended up being spent on key races.
But 2023 could mean a reset of sorts for Mr. Trump, who continues to lead a GOP presidential primary field but has experienced some erosion of support in recent months. The challenge for him now is clear. Mr. Trump is an exceptionally well-defined personality. It’s a blessing and a curse. While his policies garner a great deal of public support, he must convince GOP primary voters that he can win a general election in 2024. That means addressing his political Achilles’ heels — namely women, suburban voters and disaffected Republicans who are looking for new blood.
Rallies don’t win elections. New messaging and perhaps a new approach to reach beyond his political base is necessary. It’s anyone’s guess if he will do it or what that will look like. His upcoming event in South Carolina will be a major test.
Donald Trump has reinvented himself many times in his long and varied career, from young developer to fashion designer to reality television superstar to president.
People, however, tend to stay stuck on their perceptions of those who have achieved such fame. Mr. Trump could have as hard a time trying to convince people now that he can be more presidential, emotive or likable as Mr. Biden can getting people to believe he’s a young 80, lucid and in control.
With public polling showing a majority of Americans preferring something other than a Trump-Biden rematch and Mr. Trump upside down on favorability by 20 points, the former president needs a campaign as bold as his reputation to regain momentum not just with primary voters but those he’ll need to win the general election. The DeSantises, Pompeos and Hutchinsons of the party are waiting in the wings if that doesn’t happen.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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