Knowing What We Know Now, Could Trump Have Still Won the 2016 GOP Nomination?

John ZieglerDec 13th, 2018, 10:06 am

If I could have one magical wish granted about my life, it would definitely be the gift to relive key moments, armed with the knowledge about what was really going at the time, which I only accumulated after the original event. My guess is that this desire is quite common, but, given the huge amount of information we have learned about what was really happening during the 2016 election, would voters, if they knew then what we all know now, have come to a different conclusion about Donald Trump?

This is a thought experiment that is being posed a lot in the media given the new revelation that The National Enquirer has admitted to prosecutors that it helped keep negative stories about Trump out of the media during the campaign. However, weirdly, almost all of the speculation about this relates to the 2016 general election against Hillary Clinton, when it really should be focused on what would have happened during the GOP primaries of that year.

The argument, that if the public had known, for instance, about Trump’s affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, they would have not elected him over Hillary, is weak. He survived the far worse Access Hollywood tape almost entirely because his opponent was uniquely ill-suited to take advantage of the issue, partly because she was so hated that literally nothing could have gotten Republicans to vote for her.

This, however, was most definitely not the situation during the hotly contested GOP nominating process, where there were several good options to choose from who were not named Trump and who could have beaten Hillary Clinton (for my money, had Marco Rubio, John Kasich, or Scott Walker been the nominee, they would have been near locks to beat her as well). This is where the massive amount of new information about Trump, much of which has recently been confirmed via court proceedings, really could have dramatically altered the course of history.

Here is only a partial list of the facts, which were true during those GOP primaries, but that were totally unknown to Republican voters:

The contents of that Access Hollywood tape. (Amazingly, there has never been a rational explanation for how the tape remained hidden by the media until the general election.)
That Trump had engaged in affairs with multiple women while his wife was recovering from childbirth.
That The National Enquirer was effectively an arm of his campaign, breaking the law to suppress negative stories about him, making up damaging stuff about his opponents, and gaining extremely dangerous leverage against him which they could use in any number of nefarious ways, especially if he became president.
That Trump was blatantly lying about having no interaction with Russia, and that he was actively using his campaign, at least through June of 2016, as a promotional tool to build a Trump Tower in Moscow (possibly with a huge bribe to Vladimir Putin). This was partly because, according to him, he accepted the nomination expecting to lose to Hillary. Oh, and his first (extremely soft) statement about Russia on the campaign trail came in response to a question from a Russian spy who had infiltrated the NRA.
That Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and top adviser Michael Flynn, had already engaged in, or were in the process of, behavior which would result in them pleading guilty to felonies, with at least two of them headed for serious prison time.

No one knows better than me the frustrating resiliency of Trump’s “Cult 45” political base, so I get it when people look at his currently steady approval ratings and say that none of this would have mattered in 2016, and he still would have won the GOP nomination. This view, however, incorrectly sees the Trump of that era through the distorted lens of today’s vastly different reality.

In short, when the 2016 primaries began, Trump was no Superman. He was more like Clark Kent pumped up by a two billion dollar steroid injection, provided to him by a news media which was desperate to capitalize on his ratings power, while also enjoying the chance to cause mischief in the GOP nominating process.

People seem to forget that Trump only edged out Rubio by two thousand votes for second place in the Iowa caucuses. Any one of these concealed stories could have easily knocked him to the third position, removed his aura of being a “winner” along with his leverage for mocking his opponents, and made it a two-man race between Rubio and Ted Cruz (which is why it is so incredibly pathetic that neither of these senators has had the guts to make any sort of issue out of these most recent revelations).

In my view, there is no chance that the Trump rocket ship would ever get off the launching pad if all this devastating information had been known to conservatives at the start of the primary campaign. And these stories would have easily knocked it out of the sky if they had been made public before his capsule finally exited, much to the glee of the news media and Hillary’s campaign.

Curious about what others think of this theory, I asked my Twitter followers (which appear to be made up of an extremely diverse political population) who they thought would have won the 2016 GOP primary if we knew then what we know now, and here were the interesting results:

If 2016 GOP primary voters had known:

-Trump was lying about Russia contacts & trying to leverage nomination for Trump Moscow
-Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort & Michael Flynn were lying criminals
-The National Enquirer was an arm of Trump’s campaign & had leverage over him

Then…

— John Ziegler (@Zigmanfreud) December 12, 2018