In that infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” This captures an essential part of Trump’s worldview and modus operandi: what you can do – what you can get away with – depends on your status and power.
And of course, Trump has been eager to do anything he pleases, regardless of laws or norms, in that spirit of DEFIANCE I discussed in the previous piece, “The Role of DEFIANCE in the Rise and Fall of Donald Trump.“
In that same tape, he said “You can do anything.” (Meaning that women won’t be able effectively to stop him.)
But he seems to have understood that being a “star” did not enable him to do absolutely anything. We know that, because we saw that he “took it” when President Obama so deftly and humorously put Trump down – in pay-back for Trump’s birther lies to delegitimize Obama’s presidency -- at the Correspondents Dinner in 2011.
Trump seethed, but he took it. When he gained the power of the presidency, Trump took his revenge, bizarrely taking actions repeatedly that seemed motivated by nothing more than a need to strike back at Obama for the humiliation he felt years before, when Obama had so much more power than he.
When you’re a star, you can grab women by their genitals, but you can’t get into all-out combat with the President of the United States.
But when you’re President…. When you’re the most powerful man in the world, I imagine Trump thinking as he became drunk on his sudden elevation to being “the most powerful person in the world,” what can’t you do?
As Trump traversed from being a “star” (the gig as host of the “Apprentice”) to being the President of the United States, he went from being a naughty boy (“they let you do it”) and a chiseler to throwing off restraints to reveal himself as a destructive monster. Endowed with all the powers the Constitution of the United States confers on the Presidency, plus whatever other powers Trump could get away with usurping, Trump launched attacks on the society’s norms and laws and principles with increasing boldness and flagrance and consistency.
And he’s shown a real genius for getting away with it. (This President has been so defiant of restraints — and his administration has generated so many scandals at so many levels — that it has been a challenge to keep up with them.) Whether or not he now gets removed from office, his ability to act in such absolutely criminal, corrupt, destructive and dishonest ways — and nonetheless maintain himself in power for nearly three years — is an extraordinary accomplishment.
The smart talking heads on TV have marveled repeatedly as each new scandal broke, ”Such a thing would be the biggest scandal – would dominate the headlines for months – if it happened in any previous administration.
That “genius for getting away with it” seems more particularly to be a genius for inspiring the allegiance of a surprisingly large portion of the Republican base. What is perhaps most remarkable has been his ability to inspire sometimes as much as 90% of the Republican electorate to give him their strong allegiance when while he has been enacting the Presidency in so many norm-breaking ways, assailing the constraints on presidential conduct beyond anything ever seen before in American history.
That wall of support from the base has provided Trump with the protection that has kept him in office, despite his law-breaking in plain sight. The Republicans in Congress have to this point been intimidated into being his slaves, lest they be destroyed by a hostile Trump-tweet and driven from power by a Trump-supporting primary challenger.
And so these Republicans in Congress – already so morally bankrupt that virtually every one of them has been putting their own political survival before any such trivial things as the preservation of American democracy –have stuck by him, enabling him to survive despite wearing “Impeachability” badges from the very outset.
The outcome of Trump’s battle against the rule of law remains in doubt. Impeachment seems nearly certain. Though the ground may be shifting, removal seems unlikely. And the Ukraine scandal demonstrates what we knew already, i.e. that Trump is clearly prepared to cheat to win re-election.
Nonetheless, at this point I think it unlikely that Trump will be president by the next Inauguration Day in January, 2021. (The futures market pits his chance of re-election at 41%. At those odds, if I were in the betting business, I would surely bet against a second Trump term.)
For all Trump’s accomplishment in getting away with so much for so long, I believe that he has over-estimated what the power of the Presidency would let him grab. Drunk with power, throwing off those constraints that inhibited how far Trump-the-mere-”Star” would take his defiance, Trump has at last — I believe — over-reached, and is bringing down upon himself the destruction such a monster has coming to him.
(Coming next (in this series of reflections around the notion that it is the spirit of “Defiance” that governs Donald Trump) will be a piece exploring what it tells us about the spirit of Conservative America, that it would embrace this habitually defiant norm-breaker so enthusiastically.)