By Rich Lowry
Monday, June 10, 2024
The legend is only growing.
Perhaps Donald Trump’s conviction in the Alvin Bragg case
will hurt him enough with a segment of swing votes to make the difference in
November, but there’s no doubt that, in the meantime, it has made him even more
iconic for his admirers.
Trump has never been just a politician. He entered
politics in 2015 as a celebrity associated with money and success, attained
near-legendary status when he killed off the Clinton dynasty in 2016, and now
is a kind of folk hero, with the Stormy Daniels trial only making him bigger.
Needless to say, this view of Trump is not universally
shared — he remains unpopular with the broader public. And his folk-hero status
doesn’t mean he’s going to win again. A more conventional Republican candidate,
with less emotive appeal for good or ill, would certainly have a better chance
to beat Joe Biden.
Winning would obviously be much better than losing, yet
Trump is larger than mere electoral politics, in large part — although not
entirely — because of his enemies. They’ve taken a politician who gets much of
his oxygen from the enmity of the other side and ramped up to an unprecedented
level their efforts to destroy him.
Every time he walks away from some trap — whether
Russiagate or the Bragg trial — seemingly unscathed and breathing fiery
defiance, it makes him bigger. Every time he memorably confronts a member of
the establishment, whether Angela Merkel, Jens Stoltenberg, or Lesley Stahl, it
makes him more iconic. Every time he’s in a fix, which happens a lot, and
doesn’t blink or show the slightest self-doubt, it makes his supporters more
attached to him.
His backers don’t just vote for Trump — they make memes
about him, they create kitschy art lauding him, and they go to his rallies
multiple times. They personally identify with him and ardently believe in him.
It’s rare for a politician to get adulation at sporting
events; Rudy Giuliani was an exception after 9/11, but that it took the worst
terror attack in U.S. history to consistently elicit applause at ballparks for
an elected official speaks to how truly rare it is. Trump, though, routinely
gets huge favorable reactions at college-football games and MMA fights. Yes,
this happens on friendly cultural soil. Trump wouldn’t get as friendly a
greeting at, say, a Seattle Storm WNBA game. It’s remarkable all the same.
The pejorative way to put the extraordinary connection of
his supporters to Trump is to say they are members of a “cult.” The more
precise explanation is that Trump is a folk hero. The attachment people feel to
a folk hero isn’t always rational; it often involves a blend of fact and
fiction; and the hero can be, and frequently is, deeply flawed.
Jim Jones and David Koresh were cult leaders; John Henry
and Davy Crockett were folk heroes.
The closest comparison to Trump’s fervent appeal in
recent American politics is Barack Obama. The Democrat was different from Trump
in that he had elite cachet , but he elicited near-messianic devotion from his
grassroots supporters, who also embraced kitschy art featuring him and showed
up in massive numbers at rallies that centered on the greatest hits of his
slogans and tropes.
Both Trump and Obama are supreme performers and
profoundly represent the shared values of their devotees. It is probably no
accident that Trump, who would achieve mythic status in Republican politics,
arrayed himself in the harshest and most lurid terms against the figure who had
already achieved such mythic status for the Democrats.
Still, the best analogue for Trump as political folk hero
remains Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory benefited both from his outrages and from
the reaction of his enemies to them in a dynamic that previewed what we’ve seen
with Trump over the past decade. Jackson was also the outsider whose appeal ran
deep in what we now think of as Jacksonian America, a slice of the country that
has found a new representative and champion in Trump.
For Trump’s supporters, the Bragg verdict underlines
everything they like about the former president — that he drives his
adversaries so crazy they’ll go to extraordinary lengths to get him, and they
haven’t yet; that he never backs down; that his antagonists are a corrupt elite
whom they hold in contempt, just as he does.
If Trump is sentenced to confinement by Judge Juan
Merchan, which isn’t difficult to imagine, and walks free pending appeal, the
legend will be magnified yet again. More than ever, Trump will be the political
bandit whose outlaw status says more about the lawlessness of his pursuers than
of him.
At least, again, in the eyes of his supporters. The
electoral difference between Jackson and Trump is that Jackson was an absolute
juggernaut; he won a plurality in 1824, then after “the corrupt bargain” kept
him out of office, won landslides in 1828 and 1832. Trump had lost the popular
vote twice so far and is one for two in presidential elections going into
November.
His boosters tend to think — perhaps overly focused on
his folk-hero standing — that whatever doesn’t kill Trump only makes him
stronger, but that’s not true. His rocky handling of Covid didn’t kill him in
2020; it just weakened him enough that he lost a narrow election.
It is certainly possible that the Bragg conviction might
have the same effect in 2024. It’s difficult to take a folk hero down, though.
Trump’s loss in 2020 and his reaction to it have made him a harder sell in
2024, but, at the same time, there’s no doubt that the rigged-election
narrative played into his legend. A 2024 loss, with the politically motivated
and legally outlandish trial having played a part, will do the same.
In other words, a defeated Trump may yet again not be
diminished by his defeat because his phenomenon exists on a different plane
than conventional politics. Did the Alamo hurt Davy Crockett’s reputation?
What’s more, how much does it matter whether John Henry really did win a
drilling contest against a machine before dying of exhaustion?
If it comes to that, don’t count Trump out in 2028.
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