By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
January 24, 2024
It
was right at 9 p.m. eastern time, when I heard Kellyanne Conway on
Fox News previewing Donald Trump’s victory speech in the New Hampshire primary,
that I knew we were in for it. She said,
“I think Trump will be gracious, . . . he’s been incredibly gracious to Ron
DeSantis,” and at that moment the thought simply appeared in my brain as if
there was no other possible answer: “Okay, so now he’s going to come out
vomiting bile all over the front row.” Why? Because I’ve lived too long and
seen too much when it comes to Trump: He’s the world’s greatest rug-puller,
subverting expectations like Rian Johnson on a spree. He lives to sandbag those who
attempt to speak for him in advance by blurting out some intemperate and highly
public nonsense — and usually almost immediately, because when you orbit
Trump’s professional or political sphere, karma gets you
instantly. He is a chaos agent.
Minutes
later I was proven correct as Trump, forever calling audibles only in his own
head, went out and delivered what was a victory
speech in name only and, more accurately, a protracted fulmination
about the audacity of Nikki Haley, who dares to persist in her campaign against
him. (Sample: “Who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before
and, like, claimed a victory? She did very poorly, actually.”) It was a
completely unfocused rant that said nothing about Biden or the 2024 election
but focused exclusively on Haley’s refusal to drop out. Trump talked trash
about her outfit (!) and then later hinted darkly that she would be under
investigation if she ever overtook him. It was so tonally inappropriate and
bizarre that only someone with Trump’s long history of similar speeches could
have made it feel predictable — imagine a 20-minute-long hip-hop diss track
during which Trump hands the mic off to DJ Vivvy Viv midway
through for “one minute or less” of crowd-hyping. (Folks, it was a weird
scene.)
It
was hard to say who came away worse: Trump (who, after all, started from the
position of having no discernible shame and few virtues left to lose) or poor
South Carolina senator Tim Scott. After having terminated his own unimpressive
campaign a month ago, Scott recently endorsed Trump over Haley, the governor
who had appointed him to South Carolina’s open Senate seat a decade ago. Some
affect to be deeply offended by this, but for me it is just a predictable
tacking to Trumpian political winds, however objectively cowardly. Trump is not
going to forgive those who didn’t endorse him in a timely fashion, so you can
choose your career or your political loyalty to a transparently lost cause.
(Are you at all surprised that the vast majority of professional politicians choose
option A?)
But,
of course, Donald Trump is also going to humiliate you every chance he can get
once you’ve bent the knee to him. So, enraged as he was at Haley’s defiance and
her preempting of his speech, he attacked her and gelded Scott simultaneously
in a two-for-one deal. After positioning Scott onstage prominently behind him
and inviting him to speak briefly (sending a clear message that “South Carolina
is not up for grabs” — fair enough, as far as political theatrics go), he then
riffed on how hilarious it was that Scott had betrayed Haley. “Did you ever
think that she actually appointed you, Tim? And think of it — you’re the
senator from her state, and you endorsed me! You must really hate her.”
Scott’s response to this was to nervously laugh and say, “I just love you!”
It
was an utterly humiliating moment for Scott, who had the spotlight shone on his
abandonment of his onetime ally and was forced into the role of laughing,
smiling bootlicker in order to change the subject. And it’s nothing new for
Trump. Rather, it’s the sort of public dominance ritual he notoriously seeks to
engage in with all in his circle. He has no allies, only servile retainers.
(Trump’s fanatics, especially the Extremely Online ones, notice this well and
openly thrill to it; suburban women amenable to voting Republican, on the other
hand, react to it like arsenic. Which is the larger voting demographic?)
What
comes across the most in Trump’s churlish speech — and get used to this style,
you’ll be hearing more of it during the general election from him and his
online minions — is his personal outrage over Haley’s refusal to drop out. He
is angry about what it represents: An entire segment of the Republican Party is
now, during his third go-round, fundamentally unreconcilable to him. There
aren’t enough votes out there for him to survive the loss of the slice of the
GOP electorate that Haley’s vote share represents — a minority now, for sure,
but a determinative one. And yet he cannot control his worst instincts, for
outbursts like these are the worst possible way to win them over. They will not
merely fall in line once threatened with four more years of Joe Biden and/or
Kamala Harris. Negative polarization only goes so far.
We
are all agreed — empirical evidence suggests that the current Republican
primary electorate is in love with Trump and cannot be made to stop loving him.
But here is the reverse of the medal: You can never make those in your own
coalition who hate Trump love him, either, and as last night’s victory speech
demonstrated, demands for a completely unreciprocated loyalty will fall on the
pitilessly deaf ears of those he has already repelled. He cannot win them.
Because Trump forever remains, undisguisably, who he is.
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