Trump Is Trying Something New With the 2024 Campaign. It’s Smart—and Terrifying.

Beautiful things can’t last forever: The relationship between Donald Trump and Kari Lake is reportedly strained.

Lake, the election denier who rode Trumpism all the way to an Arizona gubernatorial loss in the 2022 midterms, is now running for Senate with Trump’s blessing. But Trump, as the Washington Post reports, isn’t so sure about it anymore. He’s skeptical she’ll be able to win her Senate race, and he’s been irritated at the amount of time she’s spent at Mar-a-Lago. As the Post reported, he “gently suggested to Lake that she should leave the club and hit the campaign trail in Arizona” last year.

Trump doesn’t care whether Lake wins her Senate race, per se. He is famously uninterested in the satisfaction of others. What he is concerned about is Lake hurting his own chances in Arizona. Trump, the Post writes, “has asked if she can really win in Arizona and if she might drag down his own poll numbers as he seeks the presidency again in 2024.”

Trump had no such concerns about the electoral prospects of Kari Lake in 2022 when he endorsed her then. He liked that she sucked up to him and backed his claims about the 2020 election being stolen.

But, crucially, Trump wasn’t up for election in 2022, so his priority wasn’t building a strong Republican ticket up and down the ballot. His priority was about asserting control over the Republican Party, demonstrating that he could still pick winners and losers in primaries, and forcing candidates to swallow his meritless assertions about the 2020 election. It worked, and the GOP had a lousy midterm cycle. Now that Trump is on the ticket, his priorities have changed, and he’s in the unusual position of trying to suction out some of the more harebrained ideas within his party.

In other words, Trump meted out endorsements in midterm races to candidates who did the best Trump impressions, but being weird and appealing to the narrow MAGA base no longer gets the job done.

For example: There are any number of maniacs in the state of Michigan whom Trump could have recruited for the Senate Republican primary. Instead, Trump endorsed Rep. Mike Rogers, a member in good standing in the pre-Trump Republican establishment, a longtime CNN contributor and a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Rogers is the sort of Republican, in other words, who knows Trump for what he is, and for years struggled to keep that thought to himself. Though Rogers pretended to be an enthusiastic Trumper once he announced his Senate run last year, few found that particularly convincing. He was, however, the strongest Republican in the primary in a state that Trump hopes to flip in November, and so Rogers earned the endorsement. Trump doesn’t want a dingbat dragging him down.

That’s not the only place Trump’s resisted the bait to prop up an extreme candidate. In Montana, Trump endorsed the Senate campaign arm’s recruit Tim Sheehy over Freedom Caucus member Matt Rosendale. The impact of that endorsement was so sharp that Rosendale dropped out days after entering the race. Trump similarly endorsed Senate GOP leaders’ pick of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice in that state’s Senate race, essentially locking up the primary for Justice and forcing Sen. Joe Manchin into retirement. While Trump hasn’t endorsed Larry Hogan in Maryland’s Senate race, he has agreed not to attack him (for now). That’s a big deal, as Trump hates Hogan, and vice versa. In the House, Trump endorsed incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Bost over challenger Darren Bailey, a far-right candidate whom Rep. Matt Gaetz had boosted; in South Carolina, Trump endorsed Nancy Mace, who recently made a Trumpish turn after being regularly critical of the former president following Jan. 6.*

Outside of his endorsements, Trump has also warded off members of his party pursuing various election-year dead ends.

He quickly called on the Alabama Legislature to protect in vitro fertilization procedures after a state Supreme Court ruling threw the practice’s legality into doubt. He played a similar role when the Arizona Supreme Court breathed new life into a near-total abortion ban from 1864. And then, of course, he said that abortion would remain a states’ rights issue—i.e., that he wouldn’t pursue a national abortion ban. (While telling voters that you have to “follow your heart on this issue,” Trump also added, “you must also win elections.”)

It’s a significant change of course from last election cycle. Perhaps most interesting is his newfound relationship to the most embarrassing Republican institution: the House of Representatives. While one of his dear friends, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, was working toward ousting Speaker Mike Johnson following his decision to bring up Ukraine aid for a vote, Trump rode to Johnson’s defense.

“Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” Trump said in a radio interview, defending Johnson. “It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person.”

Trump may or may not care about Johnson’s employment situation. But he does know that another booted speaker—and the prospect of another monthlong saga of House Republicans slapping themselves silly attempting to pick a new leader—would not present the best face of Republican leadership to the voting public. Greene’s plan is going nowhere.

That Trump has a more pragmatic streak now that he’s on the ballot—and may need to win in order to avoid going to jail—does not mean that he’s pursuing a moderate presidency. It’s more that he’s cutting the bullshit on things he doesn’t care about so that there’s more space for his actual priorities.

In a new feature on what a second Trump administration would look like, Trump told Time magazine about his plans for migrant detention camps and deploying the military to deport millions of people from the country; how he’d withhold funding appropriated by Congress; how he might fire U.S. attorneys who wouldn’t prosecute cases he orders them to; and various other visions of mass firings of career bureaucrats. But those are his fights to wage. Republicans running for Congress just need to focus on getting themselves elected by not being stupid so that Trump can have—as one Trump endorsee in the Time piece recounted Trump telling him—“allies there when I’m elected.”

Among those who are certain to not be in Washington when he’s elected is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Noem, a supposed vice presidential prospect, wrote in her soon-to-be-released book about her experience shooting her puppy. Noem’s veepstakes chances were already dim given her state’s strict abortion ban. But if she intended to impress Trump with this display of cruelty, it didn’t work. Trump, again, would like to win the election.

“Trump isn’t a dog person necessarily,” one Trump source told the New York Post, “but I think he understands that you can’t choose a puppy killer as your pick, for blatantly obvious reasons.”

If this were a midterm year, and Trump wasn’t atop the ticket? Sure, maybe puppy-killing would be an asset toward securing an endorsement—or at least not a hindrance. But right now, he has no space for anyone else’s electoral risk but his own.