The media's pushback starts now

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If the former president were as strong as he wished everyone to imagine, he could have afforded to wait in Mar-a-Lago, accepting supplicants, while any pretenders exhausted themselves with futile campaigning and the people clamored for their once and future king.

Instead, he decided on this early announcement because his position had steadily weakened over the course of 2022. The emergence of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the singular, popular, potentially deep-pocketed rival, the uncertain politics of a potential prosecution, the pre-election polling showing more Republicans identifying with their party than with Trump — and now the results of the election, the DeSantis landslide in Florida and the underperformance of Trump-associated candidates nationwide — have made it uncertain whether the former president should even be considered the 2024 favorite anymore.

It's Trump's instincts, ultimately, that were decisive in the destruction of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in 2016 — the shamelessness, the cunning, the ideological flexibility, the quick sizing-up of opponents' weaknesses. Does Trump still have those weapons sharp and ready? Is he too deep in his labyrinth of self-pity and conspiracy?

Lucky America, lucky Republican Party — lucky, lucky media. Everyone gets to spend the next year and more finding out.

Ross Douthat, New York Times

Trump will face incredible obstacles and even a possible indictment, but he could turn those negatives into a plus and emerge once again as a national GOP threat.

Recent polls continue to show Trump and President Joe Biden locked in a close battle in a 2024 matchup. If Biden won such a big mandate in the 2022 midterms, then why is Trump still so close? And if Trump is such damaged goods, then why are Democrats fearful of him running?

If Republicans think Trump can win they will get behind him no matter how many insults he hurls. He's won the White House before, and that's something Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can't claim.

Joe Battenfeld, Boston Herald

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Still, as I listened to Trump speak about "cesspools of blood" and sadistic knife-wielding gangsters, it was hard not to feel a sickening sense of déjà vu. Somehow, seven long years after he descended his golden escalator, we're back to a place where most conservative elites are again united against him, waiting for a Florida Republican to take him out, even as his fanatical base remains committed. Once again, we've seen Trump bestowing insulting nicknames on his presumptive Republican competitors.

It's now up to the rest of us to decide if we're going to help him. In 2015 and 2016, much of the media abetted Trump's rise, amplifying his every provocation because it was fun and profitable to rubberneck as he bulldozed through the Republican Party. All that free media helped catapult Trump to victory.

I understand that we cannot avoid writing or talking about a former president who is now a leading presidential contender — I am, after all, writing a column about him. But we can all avoid letting him set the terms of the debate.

DeSantis, a more effective politician than Trump, might do more damage to liberal priorities than Trump did. But Trump will do more damage to democracy itself. On Tuesday, he uttered one true line. America, he said, "can only take so much."

Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

Trump is an old hand at upsetting conventional wisdom, and that's something we're chock full of these past few weeks. A safe bet? Whatever narrative is currently forming around Trump, it's wrong. Conventional wisdom about politics, especially two years out from an election, is almost always wrong.

There will be another story line in a week, and trust me: whatever it is, Trump is going to be at the heart of it. Counting him out just because the GOP's bigwigs are stirring in protest after the midterms' disappointing results is foolish wishful thinking. Trump is likely to upset conventional wisdom as thoroughly this time as he did last time.

There are a heck of a lot of Trump supporters who are neither poor, nor white nor working-class. They include millions of voters of various economic and educational backgrounds who feel marginalized, left out or threatened by the fast-changing culture and demographics of this wondrous country. Trump will be a factor in the Republican Party until those voters give up on him.

Or until he is sent to prison for just cause. Whichever comes first.

Michael Lindenberger, Kansas City Star

As the dust settles from the 2022 election, and as pundits frantically look for a memory hole to toss their "red tsunami" predictions, it's now clear that what might be called the "Biden coalition" reunited to deliver one of the most stunning upsets in modern U.S. political history.

The Biden coalition is not your father's political mandate. The combine of predominantly women (and especially women of color), voters under age 35, African Americans and others revulsed by the anti-democratic and Christian nationalist bent of today's Republican Party isn't like the massive blue-collar New Deal alliance that boosted Democrats in the mid-20th century or the "Reagan revolution" in the 1980s.

The Biden coalition is a majority — but a fragile one. And last week's election revealed the glue holding this brittle but vital voting bloc together. It is President Joe Biden.

A savvy politician who's survived for a half-century by rolling with the changes, Biden overcame any personal qualms about abortion as a practicing Catholic to defend reproductive rights, and overrode any doubts about student debt cancellation to sign a $400 billion-plus relief plan that energized Gen Z. His closing message about saving democracy was mocked by D.C. pundits — but embraced in the heartland.

That's why it seems bat-guano crazy to me that a number of pundits, and even a few prominent Democrats, are sticking with their prewritten, pre-Election Day narratives that Biden will be too old and worn down to seek a second term, and that the Democrats must conduct a chaotic free-for-all before facing down the authoritarian right led by Trump and Florida's Ron DeSantis.

It's true that Biden would be the oldest man to seek the presidency — by far. But American voters have shown they understand extenuating circumstances. Most famously, they returned a frail Franklin Roosevelt — a man whom Biden increasingly stands in comparison to, including his midterm election success — for a fourth term in 1944, because they wanted to stay the course on winning World War II.

As a second-term Biden grows older, he would always have the option of stepping down and passing the torch to his hand-picked successor in Vice President Kamala Harris — ensuring that the 47th president will also be a supporter of democracy, and cementing his legacy by transitioning to our first woman president.

Roosevelt's famous slogan in becoming the only president elected to more than two terms was, "Why swap horses in midstream?" That phrase must echo in the heads of America's thin pro-democracy majority these days.