Donald Trump After the Midterms
Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end “a whole civilization.” We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is “fascist to the core.” You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump’s unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.
We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.
A decade ago, those who believed that Trump’s ascent represented a grave and multifaceted danger, a national emergency, were often met with sneering dismissal. The right generally regarded Trump’s most vocal opponents as pussy-hatted snowflakes, woke snobs indifferent to the struggles of working people. They were, in a word, “deranged.” Some on the left, too, insisted that those who thought of Trump as aberrant and sought nightly salvation in a tankard of Chardonnay and “The Rachel Maddow Show” ignored America’s complicated legacy. Was Trump really so much worse than his predecessors? Hardly! In fact, he was practically mainstream, “not some strange eddy in the current of American history,” one knowing essayist wrote in The New Republic. “He is where the ordinary river flowed.” All that distinguished Trump was “aesthetics”—“He is vulgar. He is rude.”
In the passage from lame duck to pensioner, Trump still has plenty of time to inflict further damage on the Republic while milking it for profit. He is the sum of his whims and his rages, and, a change in Congress or not, he will likely go on flouting the law, tightening the screws on universities, cultural institutions, and the press. What he seems to value most of late is the humiliation of his enemies and, even more, the accumulation of vast wealth. Since the second Inauguration, the Trumps and their satraps have operated with all the commercial cunning of the Corleone family; the White House is their front, their Genco Pura Olive Oil Company. The Attorney General, Todd Blanche, is an obedient Tom Hagen. Recently, Kristen Welker, of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asked Blanche, “If the President asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied, “The President will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.” Not a wartime consigliere, perhaps, but Blanche understands the expectations of his Don.
Every week brings word of a new grift, a new meme coin, a Melania doc, a pay-for-access club, or fresh funds from Gulf grandees looking for leverage. The other day, we learned that Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald, Jr.,’s ex and the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, texted a maga donor insisting that he pay off her hundred-thousand-dollar Amex bill in exchange for favors from, in no particular order, the I.R.S., Tucker Carlson, and Kid Rock. (Guilfoyle has disputed the authenticity of the messages, which include, “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.”) But who cares? The Administration counts on an exhausted nation’s distraction. This may well have been the singular lesson that Trump absorbed from his moral instructor, Roy Cohn: if you keep up a steady stream of bullshit, if you keep denying and counterattacking, all of Monday’s trespasses will be forgotten by Tuesday.
There are signs that the President is unravelling, in ways that are different from late-period Joe Biden but are alarming all the same. It’s not so much the thickening ankles as it is the loosening inhibitions. Nearly every morning, the Daily Beast publishes headlines that archly reflect the situation: “Confused Trump, 80, Makes Bizarre Blunder in Late-Night Meltdown”; “Sleepless Trump, 80, Goes Full Disney Adult in 1 A.M. Posting Frenzy”; “Trump, 80, Repeatedly Slumps in Chair Ahead of Midterm Blitz.”
What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though “affordability” is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us—that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. Who are we to lecture him about oligarchy? This is the ethos of the era defined by Putin and Trump: morality in politics is for dupes; all that matters is interests. Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.
But if we are uncomfortable using a word like “evil,” how else are we to describe the spectacle of the President unleashing Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the history of humankind, to slash the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development? According to an article in The Lancet and the intensive research of Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a former assistant administrator for U.S.A.I.D., and a writer for this magazine, the agency’s support—focussed on fighting malaria, polio, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and H.I.V.—saved at least ninety million lives in the previous two decades. Researchers estimate that the cruelty-by-budget-cut has been responsible for the loss of as many as seven hundred thousand lives.
This is among the many depredations that this supposedly mainstream Administration has committed. In 1788, at a ratifying convention in Richmond, James Madison defended the newly drafted Constitution, but warned that its fulfillment would depend on the quality of the people as well as the document’s written principles. “To suppose that any form of Government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people,” he said, “is a chimerical idea.” Election Day is November 3rd. In some states, voting has already begun. ♦