Before we get into this, I just want to note that according to a new HarrisX poll, most Republicans see Trump as a person of faith, more so than Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or Tim Scott. It's considered politically incorrect to allude to this, but shouldn't we be asking ourselves if Trump supporters have the brain-power necessarily to cope with the 21st Century... and if they should be voting at all? In his column today, Where Is The Trump Panic? for The Bulwark, former GOP operative Tim Miller wrote that “the media doesn’t mention Trump’s advanced age with the same urgency or concern as Biden’s…Trump is also old, and sure, it would be nice for The Media to mention that from time to time. But the real exasperation simmering underneath goes something like this:
“Any human of any ideological stripe who is capable of looking at that news rundown with the slightest discernment,” he wrote, “must concur that Trump needs to be stopped. Which is why it’s the absence of Trump panic in GOP discourse that is the outlier, not the reasonable ongoing discussion about the best course for President Biden coming from the left. Despite Trump’s disastrous track record and his scary stated plans, it is inarguable that the institutions/politicians/commentators in America’s center-right are more sanguine about a Trump nomination now than they were at this same time in 2016. There’s no Against Trump magazine cover coming. No “Based” Senators plotting convention coups. No new Stop Trump PACs on the horizon. There’s no Shep Smith or Chris Wallace on Fox trying to inject some truth into the madness… This leaves the same old Never Trumpers, not exactly credible messengers with the MAGA base, out here screaming our heads off while everyone else just acts like this is business as usual.”
Last week, Nicolle Wallace talked about the blinking red lights signaling danger for our democracy. I’d take it a step further. It’s a damn siren out there. It’s blaring right now for anyone willing to listen. Trump being the nominee and our country relying on Joe Biden avoiding a health event to survive is an emergency, not a fucking drill.
I have come to terms with the fact that the souls of those who lead the conservative movement rotted long ago. But that doesn’t make their continued inaction in the face of this imminent threat any less appalling.
Remember Allahpundit from Hot Air? Now he’s Nick Catoggio from The Dispatch. He had a warning for his readers on Monday. He wrote about his admiration of George Gov. Brian Kemp as one of the only Republicans tiowhom you can look for moral leadership— and then pointed to Kemp saying that “Despite all of his other trials and tribulations, [Trump] would still be a lot better than Biden. And the people serving in the administration would be a lot better than Joe Biden. And it has nothing to do with being a coward. It has everything to do with winning and reversing the ridiculous, obscene positions of Joe Biden and this administration that literally, in a lot of ways, are destroying our country.”
Catoggio speculated that “Perhaps Kemp has at last let ambition lead him off the moral path. He knows there’s no future in this party for anyone who’s ambivalent between Trump and Biden. But maybe he’s just grown numb to Trump’s insanity. If so, he’s not alone.”
He urged his readers to “strive to resist numbness. Because despite all the blather about Biden and Trump being the two most known ‘known quantities’ in politics, we actually don’t know how dangerous and destabilizing Trump might prove to be as his mind bends under the strain of an election and four indictments. Or whether it’ll break entirely once he’s back in power and surrounded by the most obsequious fascist toadies he can find.
Trump is lazy, easily distracted, not very ideological, and certainly not, shall we say, “detail-oriented.” That makes him easily influenced by knowledgeable people in his circle, especially if they frame their objections to his preferred cause of action in terms of how it might cause legal or political trouble for him. (Good luck dissuading him from doing something he believes is in his interest by appealing to his morals.) As long as he has responsible people around him—Pat Cipollones, John Kellys, James Mattises, etc.—then we should be fine in a second term. The old pattern will repeat.
You’ve already spotted the problem with this theory, though. There won’t be responsible people around him in the next administration. For one thing, he no longer needs the Kellys and Cipollones to help guide him while learning the ropes of the presidency. But beyond that, the whole point of a campaign organized around themes of “retribution” is that he intends to behave ruthlessly toward his antagonists and will want similarly ruthless people in key roles to carry out that program. If anything, he probably blames his most responsible aides for having cost him power when they restrained him to some degree in trying to overturn the last election.
The second term will be pure kakistocracy, by design. (As Politico reports, “The Project 2025 team is scouring records and social media accounts to rule out heretics—effectively administering loyalty tests—and launching a so-called Presidential Administration Academy that tutors future MAGA bureaucrats with video classes in ‘Conservative Governance 101.’”) So who’s going to try to talk him out of it if and when he uses executive power against the “enemies of the people,” American media?
Another possibility for why Trump didn’t follow through on his worst impulses during his first term boils down to incentives. Simply put, he wanted to be reelected. Whenever he got the itch to, say, have the military open fire on illegal immigrants or American rioters, he had to consider how suburban swing voters would react. Electoral incentives may have saved the NATO alliance, in fact. According to two Washington Post reporters, Trump was known to discuss withdrawing from NATO and South Korea during meetings with top national security aides but was warned that exiting those relationships before the election would be “politically dangerous.”
You’ve spotted the problem with this theory too, I’m sure. A term-limited president no longer need worry about what’s politically dangerous.
“We’ll do it in the second term,” Trump reportedly told those aides when they worried about the electoral consequences of withdrawing from NATO, and I suspect he meant it. Shredding alliances, implementing Schedule F, staffing the Pentagon with cronies, persecuting “enemies of the people” various and sundry—I’m not sure why anything would be off the table once he no longer needs to consider reelection. Courts will eventually intervene, but that’s just a different permutation of the same problem. What incentive would he have to obey court rulings in a second term?
For that matter, what incentive would he have to leave office peacefully in 2028? If he was willing to contrive conspiratorial nonsense once to try to cling to power, there’s no reason he wouldn’t try again. Some of his fans on the New Right have already taken a shine to the concept of “emergency powers.”
If electoral incentives can’t deter him and his top personnel won’t deter him, the only other force that might conceivably keep him in check is his own supporters. If he did something outlandishly authoritarian that offended the Republican base, causing his job approval to collapse, that might make him think twice. A strongman can’t work his will on classical liberalism without some political muscle behind him.
You’ve, uh, sensed the problem here as well. He’s campaigning explicitly on retribution against the Bad People and he’s up almost 50 points in the Republican primary because of it. The American right is signing up for this willingly. They’re not going to stop him or hold him accountable. If anything, they’re going to egg him on. And possibly do more than that.
And even Brian Kemp, the “good Republican” who’s demonstrated genuine moral leadership, seems to find that preferable to four more years of Bidenomics.
So, no, with due respect to my unnamed Dispatch colleague, I don’t know that Trump won’t determinedly try to shatter major constitutional precedents once back in office. But I suspect a lot of voters who haven’t thought this through, or who feel obliged to prioritize differently, are willing to take a calculated risk that he won’t in order to rationalize voting for him for kitchen-table reasons.
No wonder, then, that so many of us have grown uncomfortably numb about his illiberal nonsense. What else can we do? The right-wing electorate that craves his brand of politics will abide after Trump passes from the scene, and the swing voters who decide elections seem open to accepting a paradigm shift toward post-liberalism in exchange for a slightly better economy. There’s nothing to be done. What choice do we have but to get used to it?