Doubling down on ignorant rants plus flip-flopping and old age has cut Trump’s appeal, shrinking his support and reducing his disruptive impacts.
Losing for Trump is undeniably different than for any other known politician—everything comes down to his ego, prison options, and financial self-interests. Rampant narcissism is like that. More voters are seeing through the transparent hustle to deflect criminal penalties, spurred of late by having a far younger, livelier and more moderate Democratic alternative. Though democracy-battering GOP types will again defy a losing outcome, odds of reversing whoever loses is no greater than the 2020 fiasco. Losing again, without White House insurrectionist clout, the Felon-in-chief is running out of escape hatches. Election fraud by a convicted felon (in or out of jail) tests any would-be genius.
Yet, we are wise to project how severe will be the consequences of Trump again getting his clock cleaned. After the immediate, gaseous bellowing, how many professionals on the right will be shaken that Trumpism won’t secure the White House, nor Congressional dominance? Three strikes against Trump, battered by one more popular vote loss, marks the final innings, if not Trumpist leverage. Gambling on a wing or prayer for salvation from a long-shot Electoral College split cannot sustain any national party.
What if Trump has not only become an electoral albatross around the GOP’s neck but a parasite out to avoid jail time while amassing more sucker money before the show ends? What if the great hustler, beyond betraying angry blue collar millions into thinking he’s one of them (if so, they’d be in jail), is eventually indicted for turning the GOP into a chronic minority party? What if his vote-getting peaked with the RNC Convention? Top Republicans scold Trump for dumping insults and putdowns, but who thinks anyone (even Trump) changes his stripes and mouths something beyond superficial, contradictory soundbites? Dream on, as Dana Milbank quipped a month ago, “Republicans want Trump to drop the insults—but that’s all he’s got. They all might as well ask Trump to abandon Mar-a-Lago and move into a double-wide.”
Will/can the GOP face its own parasite?
Demonstrably, Trump cares less about governance than manipulating power and money to game his way out of jail, with surprising success. His minimal interest in knowledge of issues has shrunk along with his cognitive skills—thus he must resort to low-brow, schoolyard name-calling. That he often merges outrageous lying with hatchet jobs dramatizes how little his campaign is focused on workable proposals (whether abortion, IVF, taxation or immigration)—in short, solving any problems but his.
In his dotage, what has surfaced emphatically this summer is the genuine, Trumpian core—a ruthless, law-busting survival mode (re Arlington Cemetery boomerang or the most MAGA VP in existence). As rank selfishness (and less general like-ability) emerges weekly, fleeing droves are centrists, women, suburbanites, minority and younger voters. Self-obsession and constant downers just make for losing politics, certainly not good campaigning against a stronger foe. Telling his “Christian” backers they won’t have to vote again, because he will “fix” everything (as in corrupt?) speaks volumes about his power dreams.
The besieged Trump looks less eager (or capable) of being president for four long years. The question is whether (or when) the party host and base realizes the huge electoral costs when a parasite consumes its integrity, its office prospects and destiny. That means the Scare-monger-in-chief must rev up what happens were Dems to win. What the right learned from the Jan. 6 riot isn’t remorse, nor that it was a bad idea, just not done with enough force (thus the promised pardons for traitorous criminals). That means stirring up intense brutality, thus upping the price for denying his election denial.
America will still pay for his gross negligence and spoiled brat syndromes. Fortunately, no one desperate figure can churn up a civil war (without far more serious external causes), all to save himself. A three-time loser (and more with more trials), plus aging and facing health issues—is hardly the national hero on a white horse who incites a civil war not to save the GOP but his own ass. Civil wars are messy and they don’t just start: They need decades of ignition along with insufficient police and army power to squelch uprisings.
Losing + endless liability defines a loser
Trump, whatever his horror of losing, even being stamped a loser, is I think setting himself up, too vain to realize he’s in over his head and could get doubly swamped. Losing compounded by lawbreaking is just doubling down. Just ask the bankrupt Giuliani, descending from bad to worse. Or Bannon. Or Navarro. Or Alex Jones. Or GOP losers from jailed Trump advisors and lawyers to humiliated Mike Pence or disgraced Congress people. Being in bed with Trump helps in red districts but right now looks like a losing ploy to save House leadership or reverse Senate control. If Harris can win in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, she will have coat-tails that could produce big surprises even, cease my beating heart, in FL or TX Senate races.
In the bigger picture, the worst idiotic rightwingers are losing not just to Dems but to reality, even modernity. How long will they (or can they) defy the Constitution, take law into their own hands, and lurch to political vigilantism? How many nervous nelly Lindsay Grahams, Hawleys or Cruzes will rush to the barricades, risk life and limb, to drive the latest insurgency? Certainly not Trump nor Vance nor House nutcases. They may call for shock troops, and sacrificial amateurs will then confront the forces of local, state and federal officers, even the National Guard. The Age of Trump smokes with self-entitled vigilantism, semi-organized belligerence that favors its deviant order. But authorized peace-keepers will not stand pat this time. There could be greater disruption than Jan. 6, but the enormous, co-ordinated might of law and order won’t get ambushed again.
Can dunces produce smarter riots?
A while back, Dick Cheney complained, “what we’ve done in our [party] politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.” It’s not just the “idiots” getting elected but a number of idiots electing them. Bobby Jindal back in 2012 warned that the Republicans must stop being the “stupid party.” Headline last year from The Hill: “DeSantis: Angling to become king of ‘the stupid party.’”
For true conservatives, the GOP is no longer its political party but simply an electioneering machine. That makes the big question whether a failed electioneering machine is willing or able to foment effective vigilante violence. Trump pulled it off once, but 1,500 lawbreakers, many now with long prison sentences, paid the price. That is the most visible, legal, institutional deterrence against armed attacks on police, let alone the Capitol.
Although Trump has so far escaped justice, the DOJ has dramatized that no such waivers cover ordinary criminals who commit felonious violations. Painfully, most Trumpers understand the real cost of insurgency, especially the doomed effort for an election coup on behalf of a lawless leader. They may be cultists but they can read wall handwriting.
We now have lots of evidence that the Trump clan, despite having police and soldiers in their ranks, are no better at insurgency than Trump was at ordering his riotous coup. Yes, Trump and billionaires will not lack for legal funds, thus brace for legal cacophonies. But what persuades us that criminal malfeasance will succeed any better than when Trump ran the White House. No model of personal sacrifice, he made noises not to depart peacefully but in the end he snuck out, refusing even to endorse the peaceful transfer of power ceremony.
Sometimes it takes force to guarantee respect for two centuries of non-violent transfers of power. Along with the Constitution, that’s well worth keeping—and Trump would need the entire U.S. army to pull off a violent insurrection. After November, he may struggle to put together a birthday party at Mar-a-Lago.
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