Always Ready for His Closeup

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

“President Trump is one of the greatest showmen in history, and we fully expect to have a spectacular showing in Dallas and draw a massive viewership,” RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre recently told Axios.

 

I’m sure Ms. Baldassarre is a formidable one. You would have to be, to go through high school with the first seven letters of your last name spelling out “bald ass.”

 

But such juvenilia aside, I’m not so sure. Ms. Baldassarre was responding to reported concerns that the upcoming GOP midterm “convention” in Dallas may struggle for its desired audience as it will be up against the opening games of the NFL season. Vice President J.D. Vance’s first night keynote will compete with a Superbowl rematch of the Patriots and Seahawks. Who can doubt that a man with such exquisite comedic chops will win the crucial battle for ratings?

 

“President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: How to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections,” according to The Atlantic.

 

The gurus debated different approaches, but Trump knew better. “The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself.”

 

Now, in the abstract, just because this is perfectly consistent with Trump’s narcissism—“America has a fever and the only prescription is more me!”—this isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Democrats are going with the time-honored strategy of making the election a referendum on Trump, so making Trump more popular has a certain logic to it.

 

The logic is even more compelling when you take into account that, at this point, it’s impossible to argue that a vote for a Republican isn’t a vote for Trump by proxy. Trump, more than any other president in American history, has turned his party into an extension of his personal brand. Traditionally, parties support their incumbents. But Trump has routinely intervened in primaries to make loyalty to him the litmus issue, endorsing challengers who vow to be Renfields to his Dracula. The only way the speaker of the House’s press conferences could convey his abject, supine, lickspittelry better is if they began with Trump wheeling out a kennel and having Mike Johnson emerge in a leather S&M onesie. “Gimp, say a few words for the fake news.”

 

There’s more resistance in the Senate, and Majority Leader John Thune deserves more respect and credit for it. But the Senate Republicans, for understandable reasons, keep their resistance very low-key, lest they invite too much of Trump’s wrath. Even the supposedly “YOLO” lame duck senators routinely couch their criticism in the Bad Boyar tradition, claiming that Trump is getting “bad advice.” As a result, the average voter draws the reasonable conclusion that the Senate, too, is simply an extension of Trump. So, again, if the midterms are a referendum on the president—as they pretty much always are, to one extent or another—getting Trump’s favorability out of the mid-30s makes sense in the abstract.

 

The problem is that Trump isn’t an abstraction—he’s been the dominant political figure for a decade. And he’s unpopular.

 

But I don’t think his unpopularity is his only problem.  He’s become boring. His “unpredictability” has become utterly predictable, for friend and foe and bystanders alike. He has no new material. It’s all variations of a very, very, familiar theme.

 

Yes, he can still make me mad. And he can infuriate Democrats. But his schtick is tired. He keeps trying to update the same material. He now says Lake Ontario is “Lake America.” It’s a dumb stunt, but it’s also unoriginal. He did this with the Gulf of Mexico already. That was dumb, too. But at least it was transgressive and shocking. It displayed a kind of confidence—confident asininity is still confidence. This feels more desperate.

 

I remember reading a profile of Bob Hope in his final years. He was making a made-for-TV movie and there was a scene in which a passing car was supposed to splash mud on him when going through a puddle. Hope told the director to make it a lot of mud, so it would be really funny. So, they followed his make-the-gag-bigger advice and had him drenched with gallons of mud. The quantity of the mud didn’t contribute much to the quality of the humor. It was a sad little vignette—the mud splash bit was a staple of an earlier era of humor, but sensibilities had changed.

 

That’s how “Lake America” feels to me. Hit the cowbell with a bigger hammer, the old logic went, and people will love it. Not so much anymore

 

The bigger problem for Trump is that he’s become the “establishment” and the status quo. His rebel-in-the-White-House schtick is now incongruous with the reality that he’s not the rebel anymore—he’s the empire.

 

You can see this playing out on the Democratic side. Numerous “Resistance 1.0” candidates lost their primaries because the old resistance movement worked on the assumption that Trump was an aberration, an unrepeatable fluke. But the fluke was repeated. And this time the “Deep State” backstabbers and Never Trumpers in the crumbling ancient regime were purged. His Cabinet has no John Kellys, Jim Mattises, Jeff Sessionses, Mike Pompeos, or Bill Barrs. It has abject loyalists for the most part, and a few tacticians who know that they can never say “No” to the president but also that they can maneuver how they say yes. He is the unitary executive in the executive branch, and the GOP. The new crop of Democrats still hate Trump, but they see Trump as the face of the status quo and the establishment. And so do Democratic voters, and a lot of independents, and a good number of Republicans.

 

The diehard MAGA types still talk like Trump is taking on the establishment, but where? Mitch McConnell’s hospital room? Mitt Romey’s poolside? Trump controls the party in power. He’s routed the resistance. The only people who earnestly use the phrase “Never Trumper” anymore are the people desperate to keep fighting old fights, to replay greatest hits, to hold onto to the self-serving frisson that they are the insurgents. Though some want to mine the reserves of anti-Never Trump hatred to create a “Never Vance” bogeyman.

 

It’s a rule in ideological media that it’s more fun—and more profitable—to be on offense than defense. National Review always got more traffic and subscribers when Democrats were in power. Rush Limbaugh was at his height when he was the “leader of the opposition.” The Nation surged under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and shrank under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s just easier—and more fun—to play the armchair general than to be in the trenches, responsible for your choices or your team.

 

It’s no surprise that the MAGA infotainment complex is reeling. Megyn Kelly is flailing for relevance, chasing edgelord content to hold attention. Benny Johnson’s views have cratered since the election. Take a gander at this:

 

Source: The Righting.

 

Defending Trump is even harder than a normal president because his predictable unpredictability makes it impossible to make a consistent argument in defense of his policies when his policies can change on a dime. As I’ve argued many times, this has caused a lot of people to revert to a blanket “In Trump We Trust” approach, defending his genius and instincts, rather than his ideas. But that gets hard when the schtick gets old and prices keep going up. Trotting out the talking points about his virility doesn’t work as well when he’s falling asleep at Cabinet meetings.

 

Trump is becoming a Citizen Kane figure before our eyes, increasingly spending his waking hours trying to turn Washington into a Xanadu that will outlive him. When Susan mocks Kane for spending all of his time collecting baubles and trinkets in his monument to himself, Kane responds “You may be right—I sometimes wonder—but you get into the habit.”

 

For Trump, the habit he’s retreating into is talking about marble and gold and how he knows how to build things better than anybody. He knows more about grass than anybody, so let’s talk about the lifespan of grass, rather than the lifespan of the war in Iran. If he has to talk about politics, he’d rather talk about his “landslides,” like Al Bundy talking about his four touchdowns in one game.

 

Yesterday Howard Lutnick removed his cranium from Trump’s sphincter long enough to explain to the press why he has to be allowed to renovate the Kennedy Center.

 

The president works all day, every day. And there are two things that he does for enjoyment. He plays golf on the weekend, and he builds. He loves to build.

 

So, this—like, why are we talking about this? This is what he enjoys. So late at night, 11 o’clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he’s building because it’s fun for him.

 

...

 

And the one thing he likes to do during the week is construction. So I am helping him so he can enjoy constructing the Kennedy Center.

 

And, according to Lutnick and the DOJ, if he can’t figure out a way to put his mark on the Kennedy Center, we might just have to tear the whole thing down.

 

What I love about Lutnick is his natural gift for saying dumb stuff as if it was smart. Remember when he suggested withholding Social Security checks in order to out fraudsters? “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”

 

The key to understanding Lutnick is that he speaks for Trump’s id, not Trump’s ideas or political interests. He says to cameras what everyone else whispers to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. So while the professionals want to argue that Trump is focused on Iran or affordability and deny the “fake news” that 70 percent of Trump’s brain is occupied by renovation projects, Lutnick wants to make the case for letting the baby have his bottle. If he was the spokesman for Louis XVI, he’d be telling the press that the king’s obsession with locks and clocks was something to celebrate even as the sans culottes were building the scaffold and sharpening their pitchforks.

 

There’s always been a King Lear quality to Trump. He wants all the pageantry and esteem of the presidency, but not the responsibilities. He likes to have Natalie Harp post charts designating him the greatest president of all time, but cannot muster the energy to even be a serviceable one if it gets in the way of selecting bathroom tiles. This kind of schtick worked when it was new and shocking, it’s now old and pathetic, aimed more at reassuring himself—and the handful of true believers he thinks represent the silent majority. Never trust a man to make good decisions when the only counsel he listens to is flattery.

 

Making the midterms a referendum on Trump is what Trump wants. He cannot fathom the idea that he’s not actually popular or that Trump fatigue is setting in, even among the faithful. He recently told Michael Cohen that if a presidential election were held today, he’d win by 25 points. No wonder he thinks the solution to the GOP’s problems can be found in more rallies, more greatest hits, more clanging cowbells about the enemy within. Let’s have another chorus of “Free Bird,” or in his case, another shake-weight dance to “YMCA.”

 

Like poor old Norma Desmond, he’s always ready for his closeup.