By Nick Catoggio
Friday, July 19, 2024
The last month of American politics has seen more
bombshells than eastern Ukraine. On Thursday afternoon, Politico dropped
another.
Reporter Natalie Allison served as bombardier by teasing her
latest scoop. “There appears to be a new softness to Donald Trump,” she tweeted,
“with people who’ve talked [to] him describing him with words like
‘existential,’ ‘serene,’ ‘emotional’ and even ‘spiritual.’”
Scott Jennings, a Republican analyst for CNN, echoed the
point shortly before Trump walked out to accept his party’s nomination last
evening: “I’ve seen a big chunk of Trump’s speech … folks, buckle up because
he’s about to blow the doors off and rise to the occasion.”
This was going to be the moment that Donald Trump finally
became presidential.
“This is the moment Trump became president” is a running
joke among his critics who follow politics closely. It began with a comment
made by Van Jones, a Democrat, after Trump’s first address to Congress in 2017.
Impressed by the uncharacteristically sober tone and substance of that speech,
and moved by one passage that paid tribute to the widow of a Navy SEAL, a
hopeful Jones declared
that “he became president of the United States in that moment, period.”
The very belated maturity of Donald J.
Trump had supposedly begun.
Seven years of manic destructive immaturity later, Jones’
comment has become a punchline that’s referenced ironically whenever political
analysts spot signs of restraint and compassion in a man who plainly views such
things as
evidence of contemptible weakness. In one Trump crisis after another, from
the trauma of the pandemic to the trauma of losing reelection to the trauma of
nearly being murdered, breaths have been held and fingers have been crossed
that the gravity of the moment would puncture untapped reservoirs of goodwill
and moral leadership in him.
And every time, it hasn’t.
He didn’t “rise to the occasion” during
COVID. He didn’t “rise to the occasion” after the 2020 election either,
defying some historically embarrassing wishful
thinking in the process. Somehow, despite those painful lessons, pockets of
the commentariat in 2024 continue to search the skies for evidence of Trump
aging into statesmanship, like Linus van Pelt awaiting the Great Pumpkin.
This time will be different. You’ll see.
In fairness, there was more reason than usual to believe
that this time really might be different. The terrifying experience of barely
cheating death will affect any human being. Observers could place themselves in
Trump’s shoes and imagine how having a bullet graze their head would upend
their view of life. A normal, well-adjusted person jolted by mortality might
understandably feel compelled to repent and to use the time they have left to
live a more charitable existence.
A normal, well-adjusted person.
The remarkable thing about Trump’s acceptance speech on
Thursday night is that he managed to do a serviceable impression of a normal,
well-adjusted person—for
28 minutes.
But a man who can’t change, won’t.
***
I don’t think Scott Jennings or the sources who spoke to
Natalie Allison sincerely believed that Trump had turned over a new leaf or
would “rise to the occasion.”
Few of us are qualified to diagnose the precise nature of
his psychological debilitation. But it’s there, plain as day. It’s silly to
hypothesize that it might be “cured” in a blink by a near-miss from rifle fire.
Trump is Trump. He’ll always be Trump. An archangel could
visit him and he’d end up yammering about how the 2020 election was rigged
until the angel could take no more and flew off.
The point of having Republican insiders babble about a
new, “softer” MAGA before the speech, I take it, was to try to prime public
perceptions of it in advance. My theory of GOP messaging in the Trump era is
that it’s less about reacting to events than it is about creating
alternate realities. The reality that Trump’s allies wanted to create last
night for swing voters was that he’s a changed man.
All the tumult and drama and daily exhaustions of the
first term? They’re all gone. He’ll never be the same after having been shot at
without result. He’s seen the light. You can trust him now.
Trump began his speech by recounting the assassination
attempt, which was smart politics in that it was destined to be engrossing and
ensured that viewers not inclined to watch the whole thing would at least see
the part that humanized him. He was subdued in the retelling too, which was
unnerving to his critics—not necessarily because we thought he had earnestly
turned over a new leaf but because his tone might lead persuadable voters to
think he had.
On Dispatch
Live last night, Jonah Goldberg said that the first half-hour of the
address alarmed him insofar as it seemed as if Trump had expanded his
repertoire of emotional manipulation tactics. Watching him succeed with
soft-spoken relatability rather than boorish bravado felt like watching the
velociraptors learn to work the doorknobs in a Jurassic Park movie.
But it couldn’t last. The final hour of what would turn
out to be the longest presidential acceptance speech in the television era
affirmed that a man who can’t change, won’t.
Trump’s handlers wanted to keep things short and
conciliatory in tone, but having been handed a television audience of millions,
their principal couldn’t resist going off-script and holding forth. What was
supposed to be a tightly choreographed rebranding of a demagogue became the
sort of tedious stream-of-consciousness grievance-belching typical of his
rallies.
Before the speech, as evidence of his new tone and
commitment to national unity, his aides whispered
to reporters that he wouldn’t so much as mention Joe Biden in his address. But
then he did, accusing
him by name in what was clearly an ad lib of having done more damage to the
country than the 10 worst presidents in American history combined.
He attacked
“Crazy Nancy Pelosi.” He accused Democrats of having “used COVID to cheat” in
the 2020 election. He whined about unfair media coverage from news programs
like “Deface the Nation.” He lied a
lot. In the end, a speech that was 3,000 words as prepared ended up
being more
than 12,000 as delivered. It was after
midnight on the east coast when he wrapped up.
He was an unchanged man. Those following live reaction on
social media as he spoke could actually track the
horror in real time as viewers impressed by the speech’s somber opening
realized that Trump is, and will always be, Trump.
No one who watched it all the way through could come away
feeling differently. But for the other 99 percent of America, the alternate
reality of a kinder, gentler demagogue that was cultivated by Trump’s allies
and amplified by friendly
media might have legs.
Trump has meaningfully changed since 2016 or even 2020 in
only three ways. He’s much older and more unfocused now than he was when he
entered politics, which might have contributed to his lack of discipline last
night. After years of impeachments, indictments, and a failed coup attempt,
he’s also more aggrieved than he used to be. And he’s surrounded by a thick
phalanx of post-liberal chuds with big plans to turn American government into a
subsidiary of Trump, Inc. None of those changes is for the better.
But in his essence, he is who he is and will forever
remain so. “It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day,” his
top adviser, Chris LaCivita, ominously warned Politico
this week about how the campaign would react to another election defeat. Trump
is Trump, always. Vote accordingly.
“Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump” was half the
story on night four of the Republican convention. The other half was “meet the
new Republican politics,” which was emphatically not the same
as the old Republican politics.
***
A few hours before Trump’s speech, CNN anchor Jake Tapper
asked Sen. Marco Rubio what he expected from that evening’s address.
Rubio pointed to the assassination attempt as evidence of
the gravity of this moment. “At least in my view of it, it sort of reminds us
that at the end … we’re not in the entertainment business, right?” he said.
Define “we,” Marco.
Of the eight people who immediately preceded Trump
onstage on Thursday evening, fully half
were entertainers. Tucker Carlson is a storyteller;
Hulk Hogan is a pro wrestler; Dana White runs UFC; Kid Rock is Kid Rock. The
person who spoke before Carlson was Alina Habba, who nowadays merely moonlights
as an attorney while working her full-time job as a right-wing media
“personality.”
The Republican Party is in the
entertainment business. It didn’t used to be, but there are a lot of things it
didn’t used to be that it is now.
There’s an obvious method to the madness of having
figures like Hogan and White soak up primetime television minutes that would
have otherwise gone to elder statesmen in a party whose base hates many of its
own leaders. Working-class voters (and not just white ones) are Trump’s bread
and butter; watching Hulk Hogan hulk out over “Trumpamania” surely stands a
better chance of moving votes than watching Mitch McConnell burble insincere
platitudes about a nominee he hates.
That may be especially true among the lowest of
low-information voters inclined to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a look, as my
colleague John McCormack speculated
yesterday. The mix of cranks like Tucker and tough-guy showmen who cater to
America’s “bro” demographic was aimed directly at the Joe Rogan fan base, which
is sizable.
But understanding the convention line-up purely in
strategic terms is reductive, I think.
It’s possible that the likes of Hogan and White were
invited for no better reason than that Trump famously enjoys wrestling and
ultimate fighting—and he has for decades. The American right is a monarchy now,
and kings have always had jesters. It’s the job of a royal court to present
silly amusements for His Majesty’s
entertainment.
The likelier truth, though, is that a guy who figured out
that you could become president by becoming a television game-show host first
is following his instincts by treating politics as entertainment.
Consider the most notable line from Trump’s speech, which
wasn’t about his near-assassination, Joe Biden, or the 2020 election. It was
this:
It is technically possible, I guess, to
reduce the national debt while also reducing federal revenue if you’re willing
to slash spending aggressively enough. But it’s so wildly unrealistic,
especially for the GOP in its current incarnation, that it stands out as a
brazen lie even by Trump’s standards.
It’s not the sort of lie you tell when you’re trying to
put one over on voters. It’s the sort of lie you tell when you don’t care a
whit about an issue and can’t be roused to pretend otherwise.
Trump’s party isn’t going to cut spending. If there was
any doubt about that, his record
during his first term—before the pandemic, not just after—removed it. For
him, fiscal policy is determined by what’s good for his near-term polling, not
what’s good for America’s long-term health. “No
tax on tips” is a nice example: That’s stupid for many reasons, starting
with its effect on the deficit, but it might help him win Nevada. The same goes
for his interest in replacing
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell with a flunky who’ll cut interest
rates on his say-so. Reducing rates would goose inflation, but the immediate
stimulus to the economy would give Trump some “numbers” he can boast about.
The growing burden of servicing the national debt is one
of the two biggest challenges facing America, yet the Republican nominee has
never so much as glanced in the direction of meaningfully addressing it. In
2016 he ludicrously vowed to eliminate
the debt in eight years while simultaneously swearing up and down that he
wouldn’t touch entitlements, a promise that persists to this day. The only
thing one can say in his defense is that, incredibly, the other party is even
less serious about fiscal stability than Republicans are.
The other great challenge facing America, by the way, is
containing China. Would it surprise you to learn that Trump seems not
to care so much about that either?
We are in the bread-and-circus stage of American decline.
The way I understood the line-up of Republican convention speakers on Thursday
night was simply Trump and his party leaning into the “circus” part.
If you’re faced with an electorate that’s given up all
sense of civic responsibility or never learned it in the first place, it’s
rational to offer them spectacle in lieu of solutions to their problems.
Trump is offering them a solution of sorts on immigration—also
wildly
unrealistic, go figure—but he’s blessed by the fact that Democrats have no
solutions of their own apart
from outlandish pandering. And so, in a thoroughly unserious country, he’s
calculated that he can win if politics is reduced to a contest of who can put
on the most entertaining pageant.
Pitted against a beauty-pageant promoter, Joe Biden’s
party doesn’t stand a chance.
***
Last night, needing a break, I switched over to Netflix
and was greeted with Hillbilly Elegy at the top of my “recommended”
feed.
“Do you really think so little of me, algorithm?” I
thought. If I wanted to watch a cartoonish
supervillain’s origin story, I would have cued up Joker.
I thought of J.D. Vance again later when I switched back
to the convention and caught Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock doing their thing.
(“Ripping the flag in half to reveal the Trump campaign logo is just too on the
nose,” one clever Twitter
user observed of Hogan’s shirt-tearing shtick.) Four days after Vance
landed on the ticket, it’s received wisdom that the senator from Ohio is the
frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2028. But in a party that’s more
interested in pageantry than in policy, is that really true?
Maybe it is. He isn’t an entertainer to the same degree
as his running mate, but he did get famous selling a book that became a movie.
And he’s a hell of an actor: Of all the people in the GOP who’ve sought to get
ahead by posturing as authoritarians, only J.D. played
the part well enough to end up as the heir apparent.
He’s got chops. I just don’t know that he has the boorish
charisma needed to entertain a party, and a country, as unserious as ours.
Vance is a serious intellectual. Worse than that for him,
he seems serious about nationalist policy solutions. His “real America” cred
may be a hundred times greater than Trump’s biographically, but it’s a hundred
times less so temperamentally. Perhaps with practice he can remake himself as a
demagogue as mean-spirited as Trump or as conspiratorially glassy-eyed as
Tucker Carlson, but that’s a high bar. And there are lots of other talented
lowlifes in the party, like Matt Gaetz, who’ll also be striving to clear it.
Vance seems to be calculating that a dogmatic
post-liberal ideologue can make up for what he lacks in charisma with intellect
and policy creativity. But that was also Ron DeSantis’ calculation in this
year’s primary. How’d it turn out?
In time, I suspect the New Right avant garde will
discover to its dismay that rank-and-file Republicans care no more about
nationalist ideology on the merits than they cared about Reaganite conservatism
when Trump arrived. Fundamentally, they don’t believe that America will be made
great again by policy solutions so much as by personalities.
They want the circus. In the end, as big a clown as he is, I suspect Vance just isn’t big enough.
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