I’ve been getting pleasure reading some of the commentators I respect talk about how Trump is damaging himself by looking really bad.
- Like the way he called for scuttling the continuing resolution, only to have Republicans pass something that didn’t meet his demands.
- Like looking like maybe Musk is running the show.
- Like the New York judge refusing to dismiss Trump’s conviction of those 34 felonies.
- Like having the Matt Gaetz report being released, showing what a repulsive low-life and scofflaw Trump nominated to be the nation’s top Law Enforcement officer.
I enjoy having the likes of Simon Rosenberg recounting all the ways that Trump is being exposed for the ugly thing that he is.
But then I remember all the joy I’ve taken over those recent years in this Age of Trump of all the times, and all the ways, that the American people were being exposed to what a monster Donald Trump is. Everything from
- his incredible ingratitude to his obsequious Vice President, willing to let his mob “Hang Mike Pense” because Pence wouldn’t violate his oath of office for Trump, to
- all that the January 6 Committee showed on national television about Trump’s crimes around the 2020 election, to
- his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, to
- his fomenting an insurrection to seize power against the will of the American people,
- to his endangering national security with his theft of highly classified documents.
I remember my confidence as the campaign wore on --- and Donald Trump continually showed his ugliness in countless ways (while Kamala Harris conspicuously modeled the virtues opposite Trump’s vices) — that surely the substantial majority of Americans would reject Trump when they got to the voting booth.
(I’d read that “only” 32% said they wanted a “strong man” kind of government, rather than the constitutional order that Trump was attacking, so at the beginning of 2024, I felt that a substantial American majority would drive the would-be fascist dictator into political oblivion. The 2024 Election looked quite possible to mark the end of this fascistic form of the Republican Party.)
In those terms, every week looked like a “Bad Week for Trump,” as the four cases against Trump — all of which looked like pretty sure winners once we got to a trial in which the Facts and the Law, not all of Trump’s Lies, were what mattered — unfolded.
Yet, for all my confidence, and for all the ways that Trump’s was exactly the kind of person who should not get anywhere near the Presidency, Trump won the election.
I thought I knew my fellow Americans, thought the American people were still mostly like those of the America I grew up in, an America in which any one of a whole list of things about Trump that everyone could hardly help knowing would have been an “automatic disqualifier.”
The discovery that I didn’t know the American electorate of today makes me uncertain about what would be a Week for Trump that would be Bad in any way that matters.
So, as things go forward now, just what kinds of ugly developments might actually damage and weaken Trump? Is there any length of Gaetz-like ugliness that will turn a number of his voters against him? Is there any kind of trespass on the First Amendment rights of American citizens that would cost him support? Is there any kind of alignment with the Fascistic world (Putin, et al.) and against our traditional allies in the “free world” that will anger any of the “patriots” who voted for him? If his policies — like the tariffs he talks about — precipitate a recession, will people blame him, or will he lie his way out of that, as he has out of so many things?
I would like so much to believe that Trump will lose the political strength to wreak the damage on the nation he has so vividly threatened to do. And I’d like so much to believe that the half of the country who made the potentially catastrophic decision — to put the powers of the Presidency into the hands of a man whose destructiveness has been so abundantly displayed for years — will recognize the gravity of their error, repent, and do what they can to repair what they’ve helped to damage.
So I am enjoying reading the bad-news for Trump stories from Simon Rosenberg and others. But I’m not forgetting that the “state of consciousness” of Americans today has taken us into new territory that remains to be mapped.