By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Did you know that only one president has ever been
impeached twice?
You did know, of course. That’s because said president’s
critics (ahem) are forever reminding people of it.
What those critics usually don’t mention is how odd it is
that the offenses for which the man in question was impeached were so different
in nature.
If I told you that a certain public official had gotten
himself in serious trouble twice, you would assume that both instances had to
do with the same sort of malfeasance. Look no further than Sen. Bob Menendez,
who dodged a conviction on federal
bribery charges in 2017 only to land under federal indictment again in
2023 for—you guessed it—bribery.
It’s an unusual leader who’s capable of committing high
crimes or misdemeanors in two distinct genres of corruption. But Donald Trump
is an unusual man.
His first impeachment was a case of extortion. Congress
approved military aid for Ukraine, but instead of sending the funds overseas
expeditiously, Trump withheld them while leaning on President Volodymyr
Zelensky for a “favor”
in the form of dirt on his likely opponent in the next presidential election.
His second impeachment was a case of fanaticism. Trump
couldn’t cope with losing the election so he began howling that he had been a
victim of fraud. He spun up his supporters about it so relentlessly that they
ended up breaking into the Capitol on January 6 to try to halt the transfer of
power.
His first high crime was a product of transactional
logic, ice cold in nature. His second was a product of passionate radicalism,
red hot by comparison. There may have been more corrupt public figures than him
in America’s distant past but no one matches him for versatility.
“Those two crimes actually aren’t that different,” you
might reply. “The common thread is ruthlessness in clinging to power.” Which is
true: Collectively the two impeachments prove that Trump was willing to do
almost anything to avert the humiliation of being tossed out of office, using
cool-headed forms of pressure when circumstances permitted and turning to
desperate measures when they didn’t. They were distinct means to the same
self-interested end.
The odd thing about his current presidential candidacy is
that the two sides of his personality, simultaneously transactional and radical
to a fault, have never been more apparent than they are at the moment. But this
time they don’t add up to a coherent strategy to gain and hold power.
And each side appears to be intensifying.
***
It may be the case that no candidate in American history
has needed money on the eve of a national race as badly as Trump needs it right
now. And by “money,” I don’t mean campaign contributions.
Although he needs those too.
Money is overrated in modern presidential politics,
especially in a cycle when everyone in the world knows the two parties’
nominees, but it could matter in an election as tight as this one is expected
to be. Trump is behind
Joe Biden in fundraising at the moment and, alarmingly for him, has
seen a fall-off
in small-dollar contributions of the sort that propelled him in his
two prior runs for office.
And that gap isn’t being filled by wealthy right-wing
donors, many of whom have declined to pony up as yet to pro-Trump outside
groups or to his fundraising partnership with the Republican National
Committee. You can guess why: Per CNBC,
“Their reluctance stems, in part, from concerns that the RNC will use the money
not to help elect Republicans, but to pay for Trump’s extensive legal fees,
sources said.”
His donor problems are trivial, though, relative to the
enormous sums he personally owes following the civil judgments against him in
the E.
Jean Carroll defamation case and the business fraud case in New York.
By Timothy
Noah’s calculations, he’s on the hook for a total of $539 million—and
counting—and although Trump is a very rich man, few men are so rich that they
have half a billion dollars in cash in reserve.
On Monday his attorneys revealed that he had approached
around 30 different financial firms to underwrite his appeal bond in the fraud
case, which would require an outlay of somewhere north of $454 million. Every
one turned him down. Next week New York’s attorney general could begin
seizing his assets; Trump and his team are reportedly considering a corporate
bankruptcy to try to fend her off to whatever extent they can.
He’s a desperate man with gigantic debts, no scruples,
and a famously transactional bent who’s more likely than not to be leading the
U.S. government in less than a year’s time. And who proved once before that
he’s willing to leverage public assets such as military aid to an American ally
for personal benefit.
That’s a very bad combination. Between his
financial problems, his erratic temperament, his contacts with foreigners, and
his oft-stated hostility to the “deep state,” writes Tom
Nichols, Trump wouldn’t have a prayer of obtaining a security clearance
without the American people, in their infinite wisdom, electing him to an
office in which he’s in charge of clearances himself.
Whether he’s already engaged in any furtive quid pro quos
to ease his cash crunch is unknown, but the New
York Times reports that he’s begun hosting regular dinners at
Mar-a-Lago with mega-rich Republican financiers where, allegedly, at least two
donors have been asked to make their seven-figure checks to his election effort
into eight-figure ones. And many observers have remarked on how his surprising
turnabouts on Bud Light and TikTok just so happened to follow meetings
he held with well-heeled executives or investors in those companies.
Perhaps it’s all on the up-and-up, with a strict ethical
line being drawn between asking for money on behalf of the Republican Party and
asking for money for the candidate himself to help him meet his private legal
obligations. But, Trump being Trump, none of us would wager very much on that,
would we? This is a guy who just had his own daughter-in-law placed in
charge of the Republican Party’s piggy bank; he betrays no sense of
discerning a meaningful distinction between the GOP’s political interests and
his personal interests. (In fairness, neither do most of his fans.) Why wouldn’t he
begin promising government favors to fatcats in return for secret help in
paying off his debts?
For cripes sake, he’s reportedly thinking of bringing
Paul “Grave Counterintelligence Threat” Manafort back to his operation
with an eye to “playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s
campaign.” Having a convicted criminal with ties to Russian intelligence doing
“fundraising” for him while he tries to dig himself out of a financial hole
sounds like a Resistance fever dream of Trump corruption, but here we are.
Simply put, if you worry that desperation might lead him
to remove whatever ethical brake remains on his penchant for ruthless
transactionalism without regard for the public good, you’ve never had more
reason to worry than you do right now. The only thing stopping him in theory is
fear of criminal punishment if he crosses a line, but how will that scare him
when he’s one election victory away from thwarting all four of the prosecutions
currently pending against him?
At least the transactional side of his personality makes
rational sense for someone who’s so self-interested, though. The radical side
no longer does.
***
I posted this in yesterday’s newsletter but
here it is again for those who missed it, a snapshot of immense Republican
moral and civic decline.
Semafor published a long,
painstaking piece on Tuesday recounting how Trump has shifted over the
past three years from qualified sympathy for the insurrectionists serving time
for January 6 to full-throated
hagiography. It’s as much a psychological portrait as it is a political
analysis. Reading it reminded me of Trump’s trajectory on the “rigged election”
insanity, which began
as a cynical attempt to hoodwink the public but seemingly devolved
into heartfelt conspiratorial conviction once wackaloons like Sidney Powell got
in his ear.
To an unnerving degree he’s a casualty of his own
populist feedback loop, a man forever getting high on his own propaganda
supply. He plants a seed in the soil of the grassroots right; the seed grows
into a poisonous tree, nourished by populist media and influencers; then his
base feeds him the fruit until he gets sick. It’s not so much radicalization as
self-radicalization.
And one of the sickest things about his embrace of the
January 6 convicts is that it’s doing him more harm electorally than good. It
can’t be rationalized the way the coup plot of 2020-21 was rationalized: as an
abhorrent but logical attempt to hold onto power after defeat. Babbling about
the January 6 “hostages” is almost all downside for him.
A CBS
News poll released in January found almost two-thirds of Americans
oppose pardoning those who forced their way into the Capitol. The share
of independents who
feel that way is similar; even among Republicans, a third oppose it. A second
poll from CNN published
a month later found an even more lopsided result, 31-69, when it asked
Americans if they favor pardoning “most” of those who were convicted for
January 6 offenses. Fully 71 percent of independents dislike
the idea, as do 45 percent of Republicans.
One theory we’ve kicked around at The Dispatch is
that, because so many voters haven’t followed politics closely for three years,
they still have no idea that Trump has embraced the J6ers as tightly as he has.
I’m not so sure that’s true, as 77 percent told CNN they believe he’ll try to
pardon most of them if he’s reelected. But to the extent that it is true, Team
Biden is planning to make
sure voters are educated about it. Celebrating insurrectionism will hurt
Trump and the GOP this fall, and the former president has every reason to know
it.
It’s strategic
madness, Noah Rothman notes, wildly irrational. Yet Trump persists in it.
It’s strange because in some ways he’s more clear-eyed
about electoral realities than traditional Republicans are. He was quick to
ditch Tea Party chatter about entitlement reform when he first ran for
president in 2016 and lately has sought the
middle ground on federal abortion restrictions in hopes of
neutralizing the voter backlash to ending Roe. He’s capable of
behaving rationally to maximize his chances of winning at the polls; it’s his
transactional side at work, offering Americans moderation on policy in exchange
for votes.
So what is he doing slobbering over convicted January 6
criminals, a group whom no one likes except for the sort of diehard MAGA
Republican whose vote was already pledged to him? Instead of reminding swing
voters of things they liked about his presidency, like grocery prices circa
2019, Trump is reminding them of why they got rid of him in the first place. He
may be a “moderate” on policy questions unrelated to immigration, but he
remains a dyed-in-the-wool illiberal radical on populist grievances, especially
ones that relate to his own personal grievances like the 2020 election. Why?
Shelby Talcott, the author of the Semafor piece,
offers a theory: “Since leaving office, he appears more determined than ever to
reward and empower loyalists, setting himself up for a second presidency fully
on his own terms.” True enough: There’s no more efficient way for Trump to show
the army
of yes-men he’s recruiting for his next presidency that they’ll be
held harmless for committing crimes for his benefit than by holding harmless
the last group of populist suckers who did so.
But the flaw in that reasoning is that if his sympathy
for the insurrectionists ends up costing him the election, there’ll be no
pardons for anyone. Not for them, not for the yes-men, and importantly not for
Trump himself.
Another possibility is that he can’t resist praising the J6ers because he can’t help but identify with them. Get a load of this, from his speech to CPAC in February:
Again, insofar as Trump may have conceived of this line
originally as a bit of cynical boob bait, his narcissism has probably led him
to believe it earnestly at this point. He commiserates with the January 6
convicts because he’s convinced himself that he too is the victim of a vendetta
by a corrupt “deep state.” Given how supposedly unfairly he’s been treated, why
wouldn’t he be credulous that they’ve been treated unfairly too?
Ultimately, though, I think the explanation for Trump’s
self-sabotaging radicalism is simpler: This is what his campaign is about.
Asking him to relinquish his sense of victimhood and
vindictive desire for retribution against his antagonists for electoral
advantage would be like telling Ronald Reagan in 1980 that he’d stand a better
chance of winning in November if he became a Rockefeller Republican. I imagine
Reagan would respond to advice like that by asking, “Then what’s the point?”
If you’re on a mission to reduce the power of the federal
government and the only way to be in a position to do so is by aborting that
mission, you might as well abort your candidacy. It no longer has a purpose.
The same with Trump. He cares about immigration,
certainly, but any Republican nominee—even a Reaganite like Nikki Haley—could
and would order big changes on the border if elected president. Immigration
isn’t the animating cause of Trump’s campaign; revenge on the people who
thwarted his coup attempt and oversaw the, ahem, “rigging” of 2020 is the
cause. Asking him to turn against the J6ers to earn a few extra votes would be
like asking Reagan to abandon conservatism. “Then what’s the point?”
He’ll transact with rich donors all day long on policy,
promising them this and that. But when it comes to his
retribution campaign and the many conspiracy theories that underlie
it, he’s the picture of resolve.
***
The split in Trump’s personality between radicalism and
transactionalism means that, to an unusual degree, it’s anyone’s guess how
crazy—or not—his second term might be.
All presidents balance ideological commitments with
practical political commitments, but the direction of his administration will
be driven by a foul melange of populist authoritarian fanatics on the one hand
and clear-eyed rent-seekers cashing in favors on the other.
His first administration was a strange brew along the
same lines in some respects, with post-liberal ideologues like Stephen Miller
working cheek-by-jowl with bottom-line former bankers like Steven Mnuchin. But
the second administration could be much more volatile; consider, for example,
Trump’s recent shift on TikTok. Populism requires him to be ruthlessly tough on
China, to the point where he once attempted to ban the platform by
executive order. But the financial interests of mega-donor
Jeff Yass apparently require him to oppose banning the platform,
which, interestingly, Trump now does.
Radicalism versus transactionalism. When the two
conflict, who wins? That’ll be a recurring question in his second term.
It may be that the two will coexist more easily than I
suspect, though. One can imagine Trump taking office next year and invoking the
Insurrection Act to suppress left-wing protests while he goes about trying to
shepherd through Congress another tax cut that primarily benefits the highest
earners. His populist fans will tolerate the latter for the sake of the former
while the conservative side of his base will tolerate the former for the sake
of the latter.
There’s the new Republican coalition, perhaps—radicals and transactionalists, with no room left for classical liberals. Can’t wait.
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