He’s been thriving just by sitting in court while his opponents play fantasy games of defeating him forever.
He's been thriving just by sitting in court while his opponents play fantasy games of defeating him forever.
S ince 2015, a great deal of the American chattering class has wished to turn the page on Donald Trump, to get to the final moral of the story. Somewhere in their imagination, they fantasize about a moment in which Trump casts off all disguise and reveals himself definitely as evil incarnate, and at that moment the forces of light, led by someone like Robert Mueller or Merrick Garland, will assemble and cast him and his people into the outer darkness forever and ever. They live to see the walls closing in.
And consequently, their brains have adapted to operate on a deficit of oxygen.
This week in a Manhattan court, this group of fantasists got as close as they’ve ever been to the dramaturgy they want. The New York Times graphics department made the most boring infographic ever created to represent the 34 individual counts, and to indulge in the exquisite pleasure of printing the word “Guilty” 34 times in red. And this pleasure wasn’t reserved to the infographic department. Reporter Shawn McCreesh also began his news report with the word “Guilty” printed 34 consecutive times, adding: “For the first time in his 77 years, Mr. Trump was a felon.”
It might as well say “Expelliarmus” or some other wizard’s command from the Harry Potter universe. The likeliest result is not to disarm and harm Trump, but to expose that our institutions now operate on magical thinking.
If polls are to be believed, Donald Trump is winning the 2024 election in the funniest way possible. The country’s mood is not febrile, as it was in 2015 and 2016. It is not manic, anxious, and desperate, as it was in 2020. The public and the press are inured to Trump’s rhetoric, when he bothers to offer any. The political temperature in the United States is icy. It’s defined by familiar, cold hatreds.
In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s candidacy represented an ideological takeover of his party. It fit in with a global wave of populist-right insurgencies from Brazil to Poland. For two decades, politics had been cocooning itself in triangulation, spin, euphemism, and poll-tested phrases. “We’re going to build an infrastructure to the future of opportunity zones of tolerance,” a politician might say, trying to hide the reality that it all amounted to a tax break and regulatory change to help a politically connected landlord kick out a black church from a storefront in favor of a Starbucks franchisee. Trump reminded people that politics is also about boldly ventilating emotions like anger, and demanding allegiances.
Trump 2024 is succeeding in an entirely different way from Trump 2016. Now, instead of polarizing the country, driving people insane, and saying crazy things on a live feed of CNN all day, Trump has been thriving just by sitting in court while his opponents play fantasy games of defeating him forever. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are just silently and sullenly concluding that Trump may be a fraud, may be a “felon,” and may be a fool, but he’s still better than what the Dems are offering. Trump, with a whimper.