The Funhouse Fascist
While a Covid-stricken Joe Biden contemplates bowing out of the race, Donald Trump showed us just how little he's changed
Jonah Goldberg was nice enough to have me on his Remnant podcast at The Dispatch to continue the conversation we began in a two-part post right here. I enjoyed it a lot. It was one of those chats where it could go on for endless hours and only feel like five minutes. Thankfully for the audience, we kept it to around 80 minutes. I believe you’ll have to subscribe to listen, but I hope you will.
In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s Thursday night nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the Trump campaign did its best to set expectations. Since the attempted assassination of the former president last Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign surrogates told us, he is a changed man. He is so changed, in fact, that after the shooting he tore up his already written speech and started in on a new one. (Translation: He told his team of speechwriters to scrap the old speech and draft another post-haste.)
Trump has benefitted a lot over the past year from his familiarity to voters. (This is, of course, his third cycle in a row as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, which followed decades in the public eye as a reality-show star and louche billionaire businessman-celebrity.) Rather than President Joe Biden facing an untested opponent voters would have had to make an effort to imagine serving as an alternative commander in chief, he’s facing a man who has already been president for four years. The experience of the Trump presidency didn’t leave me feeling particularly sanguine about letting him back into the Oval Office. But I’m not a Republican or even a swing voter. Enough of both have been comfortable with the idea that Biden has been running neck-and-neck or slightly behind Trump in the polls for many months.
But that creates a problem: The electorate is all-too-familiar with Trump. Voters either love him or hate him, with hardly anyone in the middle, and either way they know him very, very well. Polls have been showing him doing a little better than he did the last two times he ran, but how much of that is a function of Biden’s unpopularity and intense discomfort about his age and accompanying signs of cognitive decline? How might he actually begin persuading more people to support him? It’s been difficult to see how.
The assassination attempt itself doesn’t appear to have moved polls much, at least not yet. But until Thursday night we hadn’t heard from the candidate. Since pumping his fist and yelling “Fight, fight, fight!” with blood streaked across his face and a ring of Secret Service agents surrounding him, he’s been all-but-silent, sitting quietly, even reverently, in his seat at the RNC. On Wednesday night, he appeared almost beatific as he smiled lovingly at his granddaughter Kai Trump while she offered a brief, touching tribute to her grandpa from the convention stage.
Might that be a sign of a new, softer, warmer Trump? Politico seemed to be taking the possibility seriously. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, clearly wanted us to believe it. A new online ad released on Thursday afternoon definitely highlights a soft-spoken, upbeat, almost Reaganesque Trump to go along with the tightly scripted four-day informercial in Milwaukee this week.
I’d be skeptical of anyone who claimed to become a radically new person on the basis of a single event, however traumatic. It might seem for a time like the person has fundamentally changed. But true transformations like that are extremely rare. And one from a 78-year-old life-long embittered narcissist in the middle of a political campaign that could benefit from an unexpected change of direction? Gimme a break.
“By the grace of Almighty God”
I wrote the entirety of the skeptical opening section of this post before Trump began speaking on Thursday night. I’m writing everything that follows on Friday morning. I’ll start by saying my skepticism was warranted.
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