At The Bulwark, Jonathan Last writes that Trump is forever.
Either a year from now or five years from now, Donald Trump will step away from the presidency. Raise your hand if you think he will retire to Mar-a-Lago and delete his Twitter account.
It seems much more likely—maybe inevitable—that once he leaves office, Trump will continue to tweet and call in to cable news shows. Perhaps he will even attend political rallies, which is the part of the job he seems to enjoy most.
There is no reason to think—none at all—that he will discontinue his penchant for weighing in on American politics on an hourly basis. There is every reason to think that he will vigorously attack any Republican who was disloyal to him during his administration. Or retroactively criticizes his tenure. Or runs in opposition to one of his preferred candidates. Or jeopardizes any of his many and varied interests.
What this means is that there is no way for a Trump-skeptical Republican to simply wait out the Trump years. There will be no “life after Trump” because Trump is going to be the head boss of Republican politics for the rest of his days.
As I said at the beginning: Trump is not a caretaker of the Republican party. He is the owner.
This intellectual hollowness is a ticking time bomb for the GOP. As soon as Trump leaves office, whether in 2021 or 2025, the Republican Party will have to deal with the intellectual and political consequences of elevating him. And it won’t be pretty.
The first problem: Even after Trump is out of office, he’ll still be in charge.
Trump, with the help of Fox News and other enablers, has turned a large part of the Republican base into a Trump cult of personality. As I wrote a few days ago, the “party of ideas” has abandoned everything it used to claim to stand for and has become little more than an extension of Donald Trump’s id. Assuming he is defeated in November and leaves office in January, he’s going to continue to act as the leader of the Republican Party whether anyone likes it or not. As long as he’s got access to Twitter and enough of the news media to get his voice out, he’ll still be in charge. The rest of the party may find moving on without him isn’t so easy.
And I have to add that a big part of the reason Trump was able to so infect the body of the Republican Party is that it had already been hollowed out by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Yeah, Ryan was supposed to be a policy wonk, but he was a fake one. For eight years during the Obama Administration, the only guiding principle of the party was obstructing Barack Obama and the Democrats. Instead of policy ideas, they gave us empty talking points to damage Obama policies. Even before that, the party’s policy integrity had already been challenged by the Bush Administration, to the extent that the Democrats took back Congress in the 2006 midterms. And during the Clinton Administration, the GOP mostly existed to manufacture scandals to damage the Clintons. See also “The Empty Center” from 2017.
It seems to me that Republicans have been coasting on the Reagan Myth for the past forty years. The Reagan Myth is how establishment Republicans love to remember Ronald Reagan, as the “sunny optimist” who nearly single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union and made the world safe for democracy while juicing the economy with tax cuts. Let’s just say I remember him differently. At some point, the optimistic, shining-city-on-a-hill rhetoric — probably more Peggy Noonan than Reagan, anyway — was utterly betrayed by a party that actively undermines democracy in the service of its wealthy benefactors. By the time of the infamous 2000 Florida recount, this process was already well underway.
So it was that by 2016 the Republicans had no genuinely statesmanlike candidates to run for the White House, just a pack of cartoon characters. And the most cartoonish of the cartoons won. Since then Trump has acted as a cancer on the body of the Republican party, turning everything that was still clinging to some kind of political normalcy into variations of himself.
Of course, Trump wouldn’t have won had the Democrats not lost their own way to become a party of socially liberal and economically comfortable urban professionals who sort of forgot there are other people in America. But at least the Democrats have remained serious about governing.
David Byler goes on to say that the Republican Party may need a few years to genuinely move beyond Trump. In the meantime, we’re likely going to see a lot of Trump wannabees running for office. “Republicans spent decades mimicking Ronald Reagan — if they do the same with Trump, the results could be disastrous,” he writes. Perhaps the best thing that could happen for the Republicans would be for Trump to face criminal convictions once he’s out of office, which could very well happen. And then Republican office holders could fake being shocked and dismayed about it and use Trump’s legal downfall as an excuse to change course. We’ll see.
But Trumpism is more than just the Republican Party. It is the American Right. At the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that Kenosha Tells Us More About Where the Right Is Headed Than the R.N.C. Did. The likes of Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter and other people we might loosely call “thought” leaders of the Right have hailed the hapless Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero. Along with the elevation of the McCloskeys as Official Republican Spokespeople, the Right is showing us what they value most of all. And what they value most of all is the right to use deadly weapons to threaten and kill Trump’s political opposition. To the Right, civil liberties and democracy are meaningless technicalities. They will make America “great” again by terrorizing and eliminating everyone who isn’t them, all the while whining about “cancel culture.”
The Right is very dangerous, to the nation and to all of us as individuals. Given global climate change, the American Right is a danger to the planet. Four more years of Trump would possibly close any remaining window we might have to save our species.
I watched none of the Republican convention and have nothing to say about it, except that I am taking some hope from the fact that the RNC convention appears to have been less watched than the DNC convention. Viewership of both conventions has been down from previous years, but “television viewership as a whole has declined significantly in the last four years,” it says here. I take it this is because people are using streaming services more and watching broadcast and cable less. Anyway, I don’t doubt that Joe Biden will win the popular vote, assuming all the mail ballots are counted.
See also Charles Pierce’s critique of Trump’s acceptance speech, which begins, “And, at the ragged and unmasked end of it, he was an old and burned-out magician who’d long ago hocked his cabinet and now was eating his own rabbits for food.”
Kyle Rittenhouse, meanwhile, is sitting in a county jail in Waukegan, Illinois, while his lawyers fight his extradition to Wisconsin. He’ll probably remain in Waukegan for another month, at least. Also:
The Kenosha County District Attorney on Thursday laid out six counts against Kyle Rittenhouse in the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, the attempted killing of Gaige Grosskreutz and the reckless endangerment of reporter Richard McGinnis, after Mr. Rittenhouse was initially arrested and charged with homicide on Wednesday.
The new charges against Mr. Rittenhouse include first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree recklessly endangering safety, first-degree intentional homicide and possession of a dangerous weapon. When he was first arrested Wednesday in his hometown of Antioch, Ill., the teenager was charged with first-degree homicide.
The reporter, McGinnis, was present when Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha, it says here. The more information that comes out, the more it appears Rittenhouse just plain panicked but was in no real danger and did not need to defend himself.
See also Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality by Graeme Wood at The Atlantic and International Conservatism Needs Trump to Lose by John Gustavsson at The Bulwark.
I’m not entirely sure what this expression suggests. I did not Photoshop this.
Of course, Trump wouldn’t have won had the Democrats not lost their own way to become a party of socially liberal and economically comfortable urban professionals who sort of forgot there are other people in America.
'Economically comfortable urban professionals' is a unique choice of descriptions for the Democratic leadership which sold out the working class FDR Democratic Party for their funding from Wall Street and corporate America.
IF The Donald is sufficiently defeated at the polls this fall and IF The Donald leaves the White House relatively peacefully, the leadership of the Democratic Party need to change their neo-liberal stripes from your accurate description of 'forgetting there are other people in America'. Otherwise, there will be another tRump want-to-be clone back in the presidency in four or eight years.
FSM , I REALLY HATED Reagan!
Reagan, who always smiled jovially while he picked your pocket with one hand, while the other one is stabbing you in the back with his silent, velvet knife.
The people whose genetic code helps make them a conservative, as opposed to a liberal, are the cancer.
tRUMP is an "accelerator," which joins and spreads the cancerous cells already there in the body politic.
Frank Rich, Trump Thinks Racism is His Best Chance. I agree with Rich, Trump could still win – particularly since Biden-Harris will need a landslide to get past all the Republican obstruction. All Trump has to do is to turn up the heat on Kenosha or Portland.
My opinion might be a bit biased by a bitterness for that bag of shit called Trump. Putting that aside, my hope and belief is that once Trump is stripped of the power and honor that has been bestowed upon him as President of the United States he'll take a nosedive into irrelevance. Of course he's going to try and hang on and capitalize on any political assets he has thus far accumulated, but the assets that he has are conditioned and dependent to his hold on power.
Once he looses his hold on power his base will abandon him because he's no longer a tool that will benefit their political needs and desires. He'll be the toothless lion. He can say goodbye to the Evangelicals, because he'll no longer be in a position to serve their ends. They stay with him now because they have nowhere to go to fulfill the hopes of their agenda.
That same dynamic that applies to the Evangelicals would apply to any segment of Trump's base. If Trump can't con them with the hope of effecting change with a power that he has or hopes to have then he's been effectively neutered and his following will fall away. People don't gravitate to losers.
His political repertoire is growing old fast and his lies have completely eroded his credibility, so without holding the reigns of power… he's done. Besides that when the law finally pulls off his mask and exposes just how much of a fraud and a cheat he is that will add another dimension to his unraveling and irrelevance.
I find the concept(s) of this post interesting – that Trump has left a permanent mark that the GOP won't be able to wish away after Trump's defeat, which I consider likely. At that point in history, when voters reject Trumpian racism (hopefully in an overwhelming rout) the GOP has to regroup. There will be two camps – and Trump will head one of them. The other (and I'm hopeful) is going to see the rebuke as a path of instruction going forward. If (that's a big word) if the decision in the highest levels of the puppet masters over the GOP decide the Trump model did and will continue to fail, they will design a new model that can bring the GOP back to power. The non-Trump model will be conservative, and intended to feed the profits of the corporations behind the GOP, but they are looking at a platform and policies that can appeal to Independents who rejected what Trump was selling.
This is where things get fascinating. Donald and the racists won't allow power sharing with people of color. The idea of a conservative faction that wants to attract the votes of women with policy shifts if the meaning if a gull throated endorsement of equality. Pitching to Latinos to try to capture TX and AZ won't happen when those minorities know they've been the prime target of voter suppression.
They say that when the Titanic sunk, the bow dragging the front down raised the stern until the ship literally tore in two. That's my prediction for the GOP. Four years ago, Trump ran as an unknown which had an appeal. Now he's known and he's going down in history as a political calamity. But he's exactly what a significant part of GOP voters want. The fascinating aspect is that to become politically relevant, the new GOP will have to go even further to the center than they want to establish parity with Democrats when the Trumpsters refuse to play.
You're entitled to disagree, but the bigger the Trump faction is, the longer they last, the more moderate the emergent conservative party (with whatever label t has) has to be. Democrats might be able to go further to the left sooner than we expected.
The picture of Trump suggests to me sheer panic such as a deer in the headlights. I imagine he is thinking: "Oh no, how did I get here? And what do I do now?
He is trying desperately to hold onto the power he feels he deserves. I have said this before: he is a victim of a messianic complex. This may be one reason he appeals to the evangelical christians. However, he is only human and he is unable to rise to the occasion (pardon the double entendre) and his only defense is attack and blame others.
He's old, decrepit and tired but he cannot let go. If he gets re-elected, then he will go about trying to get the law changed so that the president can have more than 2 terms. If he is defeated, he will do his usual and holler foul thereby riling up his base to come to his defense. I'm not sure that will work in his favor but either way he is grooming Ivanka to run for president. It's obvious she is his favorite and she loves it. This is a dynasty and a cult. However as bad as things are and as much as I want to throw up my hands I keep reminding myself, humans are basically good and he will not succeed.
If you saw the movie, “Spinal Tap” you would remember the scene where they were showing that their amps go up to eleven, which is one louder than all the other bands. When people talk about the Republican Party becoming the party of Trump, I just point out that Trump is the eleven of the Republicans. Let’s face it, the GOP is about racist dog whistles, misogyny, lowering taxes on the rich, taking away as much as possible from everybody else and screwing the vets. Where is Trump different from that? He isn’t, he’s just more loud about it.
So because someone supports the dually elected president, this makes them a racist? Wow. That's a stretch. Anyway, I feel like he is the way he is because the media and the opposing party does nothing but complain about everything and honestly, I've never heard any of them say one positive thing about the guy. I a registered Independent and I have voted both republican as well as Democrat in my past. I say this because I feel like the Democratic party which really has been taken over by extreme liberals, which most of whom I know personally are well educated nice folks. However, that's a small percentage of them because most are very violent with their words and really stoop pretty low when they don't get their way. There are people like this on both party lines though. Anyway, I'll end this half ass post by saying that I don't think VP Biden is mentally fit to lead the worlds top super power and that's not hard to see no matter what side the political debate you are on. Anyway, my plane is here and I must go. Also, be advised there are a crazy amount of independents who leaned left for most of their lives who are now moving to the right due to the childish behavior of some on the left, mainly media personalities. Lastly, the author is obviously biased against the president and that's pretty obvious as well.
I appreciate your attempt at humor but we all know that republican comics are never funny.
I join the author in being biased against the corrupt, misogynistic, racist currently residing in the White House.
So because someone supports the dually elected president, this makes them a racist? Wow. That's a stretch.
That statement isn't logically constructed to arrive at the truth. If you were to say Donald Trump instead of the duly elected president it would answer your question in the affirmative. Than yes, it does make them a racist. Their cognizance of their racism is immaterial and doesn't change the fact that they are racist in their support of racism as championed by Donald Trump.
And aside from that, H Res 490 officially certifies by act of Congress that Trump is a racist, so it shouldn't be hard to discern that if you are supporting a racist, chances are… you are a racist.
PS. He was only elected once.
Swami: Thank you for the correct use of duly as opposed to dually. I know I am nitpicking but I used to work as a proofreader and also got good grades in English. It's obvious some of the contributors here failed their English classes.