There was an unexpected nugget in the New York Times-Siena poll that demonstrated—no surprise—Donald Trump’s continuing dominance in the Republican presidential campaign. Trump led the rapidly deflating Ron DeSantis in the horse race 54-16. But he also led DeSantis by the exact same margin in one of the cross-tabs: which candidate is more fun, 54-17.
More fun. A sign of national moral lassitude, of delirious frivolity? Or maybe, of affluenza: things are going well enough that we can afford to have a felonious clown as our leader. This, despite the constant griping—and the absolute conviction on right and left—that the country is going down the tubes. Maybe the most basic facts of the case aren’t as dire as all that. We’re not at war. We may be in the midst of an economic unicorn, a soft landing after a bout of inflation. We’re having a cotton candy Barbie and Taylor Swift summer. It’s likely that in the absence of a perceived existential crisis—though climate change may be a real one—the big issues in the 2024 presidential election will be notional, gestural, lifestyle stuff. Like which candidate is more fun.
The fun question is different from the old “Who’dya rather have a beer with” probe. The beer thing was about companionship. The fun thing is about entertainment. And, in this case, entertainment is about provocation—it’s about stoking outrage, it’s about insult comedy. A perfect example: DeSanctimonious. Only Trump has the weapon system to produce that sort of torpedo. But he’s almost always good for a frisson of some sort. There is, for instance, this prime Trumpery, in response to a question from Bloomberg News about Mitch McConnell’s health:
That was a sad thing to see. He had a bad fall, I guess, and probably an after-effect of that. But it was also sad that he gave trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars to the Democrats to waste on the Green New Deal, destroying our oceans and destroying our great, beautiful vistas and plains all over our country with windmills that are very expensive energy. So that’s a very sad thing also.
Destroying our oceans? Destroying our beautiful vistas…with windmills? You mean, the view from Mar A Lago? Stone cold crazy uncle rant material, but utterly compelling. He’s a better candidate this time around. He’s a moderate compared to the clueless DeSantis, whose extremism has done the favor of paving the middle road for Trump on social issues. Trump’s position on abortion—vague, uhh, we’ll think about a national thing, but not really—gives Republicans permission to quietly be in favor of early-term abortion, as most Americans are; it’s the same way he gave Republicans permission to say that the war in Iraq was a mistake. He has a knack for finding and excising the soft underbelly of Republican orthodoxy. His appearances on the stump are said to be less chaotic than they were, though still gaggingly self-involved. He blew ‘em away in Erie over the weekend, according to the New York Times:
Former President Donald J. Trump lashed out at Republicans in Congress while campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, threatening members of his party who do not share his appetite for pursuing corruption investigations against President Biden and his family — and for retribution…
“The Republicans are very high class,” he said. “You’ve got to get a little bit lower class.”
And then Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, put party members on notice.
“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should be immediately primaried,” said Mr. Trump, to the roaring approval of several thousand supporters at the Erie Insurance Arena.
Inverse Michelle Obama! When they go high, we go low. But also brilliant politics: there is no greater threat to a pol than a primary, even a frivolous one. These days, you just don’t want to give your constituents an opportunity to say no; they may have some “fun” with you. Which is why tiny bits of courage, like the Colorado Republican Ken Buck’s insistence that impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden would be silly, are so rare. But then, impeachment would have a comfortable place in the current American gestalt: a show trial is still a show. That’s entertainment.
Which is not to say that Trump is safe, or inevitable. He may be in for a rough patch, if the under-oath testimony of people like his former chief-of-staff Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani confirms that he knew he’d lost the election and was scamming his supporters when he insisted that he’d won. Theoretically, people don’t like to be taken for suckers. That may include some of the marginal Trumpers, but probably not the hard core. And Jack Smith may have the goods, the criminal case that locks him up. That could hurt Trump at the margins as well, but it will also inflame his cult.
We find solace in the fact that Trump’s supporters are a minority of a minority. But they are the most coherent constituency in American politics right now. The rest of us, those who believe another Trump term would tank the country, are an inchoate majority—and, at the margins, not a particularly passionate one. The Washington Post reports that Democrats are worried that black men may not come out to vote for Joe Biden, but it has a hard time figuring out what the problem is. There’s a half-hearted effort to raise old chestnuts like incarceration rates (now plummeting) and the loss of manufacturing jobs (unemployment is down and wages are rising) as root causes of the ennui, but it may be simpler than that: Maybe black men just want to have some provocative fun, too.
Some Good News
Jennifer Rubin reports that two of my favorite young members of Congress, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia are aiming at higher rungs on the ladder. Slotkin for the U.S. Senate, Spanberger for Governor of Virginia. The Sanity Caucus is hopeful and thankful and thrilled.
Oppy Talk
I liked Oppenheimer, but wasn't blown away by it. Too long, for one thing…or maybe, too short. It might have worked better as a six-part Netflix or Masterpiece Theater. The acting was terrific, though I didn’t entirely buy Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Evil; the writing was clunky, at times; the second-hour attempt to make the Trinity Test into a popcorn-disaster-special-effects Marvel thing didn’t quite fit the first and third hours, which I liked better. In fact, the first hour—Oppenheimer’s early career as a quantum physicist—reminded me one of our my favorite books of the past few years: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, which is sort of a novel about the failed quest for certainty—a universal field theory—of the early twentieth century and the discovery of quantum physics. It is brilliantly written, almost magical. It conveys the sheer crazy-making excitement of theoretical science better than anything I’ve ever read. Looking forward reading more—anything—from Mr. Labatut.
Not sure we are suffering from affluenza. Might be more complicated than that. Much apocalyptic talk (and then of course, there are the actual slow-moving apocalypses of climate change, minority rule and extreme wealth maldistribution). Republicans are masters at projection, none more so than Trump. He, like Putin, Xi and others, relies on a closed information system. To me,, that's the most interesting thing - how long can these guys keep their balloons up in the air? I'm betting on Xi. Trump's and Putin's will pop, one way or another as reality rudely intrudes in 2023 or 2024.
Trump’s atrocious actions & words merely reinforce the fact he’s the scum of the earth! We should apologize to Al Capone for calling the nation’s worst criminal!