How Trump has Changed Us

Credit: NYT

Trump’s greatest gift to America this year was to liberate people to be their worst selves. It’s ok to relish extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Hegseth: “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that will speed him to a supermax in oblivion. After a PTSD-addled Afghan shot two National Guard officers in DC, killing one of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting. This year has been a master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.

Crock of gold: the 24-karat president

Let’s go on. Trump has normalized foul misogyny towards women reporters, calling them “piggy,” “stupid,” “incapable,” and “ugly, both inside and out.” He has blinded us to the grift, the grossness, the “bigger, bigger, bigger” $300 million ballroom, and the vomitous fairground gold daubed all over the moldings and fireplace in the once-sober Oval Office, now labeled from the outside in gilt cursive script like a high-roller’s Las Vegas hotel suite. Here, he holds forth, the all-powerful potentate in Doritos bronzer, the most aureate of mighty assholes, entertaining a confederacy of smiling despots: Bukele, Orban, MBS.

Jot and Tittle

The problem for liberals is that the multiplicity of Trump outrages are not outrages that seem to overly bother the American public. In a report last week featuring six Republican voters, four of them had no qualms about the boat strike policy. Cf. some dude named Brian in Orlando: “I’m not losing any sleep over the two people clinging to the boat.” Cf. Naomi, the hard-ass from Dallas: “If you’re caught up in something that’s very detrimental to society, I think that you should die…Sometimes we get caught up in trying to have every jot and tittle covered from the Constitution but the reality is that we need to be realistic.”

Trump’s two first-term impeachment hearings consumed the “jot and tittle” crowd, but sent everyone else to sleep. The danger with issues like the Venezuelan boat strikes is that Congressional Democrats’ righteous and necessary battles to highlight constitutional malfeasance drown out the bread-and-butter issues, like the current beef over the cost of beef. Democrats, as a political class, seem to have forgotten how to wield power, even when they possess it. I read with mounting fury Sunday’s NYT report about how the Biden team so irretrievably messed up its response to the immigration crisis they created and, in doing so, lost the election. 2023 saw more than six million unauthorized immigrants waiting for their cases to be resolved, almost double the number since 2020. The Biden response, according to this report, was a combination of dithering base-pandering, dropped balls, and political bubble-wrap. It took the diabolical cleverness of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who loaded up buses of bemused immigrants and pointed them in the direction of such liberally oblivious destinations as NYC, Washington DC, and—gotta hand it to them—Martha’s Vineyard, to test their fiscal budgets and sanctuary sympathies. Only then did the Biden White House realize that, shit, it had to do something. Trump? On the day he took office, he slammed the border shut.

Immigrants walk through a hole in a wire fence cut by a Border Patrol agent in Eagle Pass, Texas (Sept. 30, 2023)

Trump has proved again and again the old Clinton adage that Americans prefer wrong and strong to weak and right. But Trump’s version of strong– brute power winning out over decency and respect – isn’t the only version in the human repertoire. It’s still possible to be strong without being morally wrong. Think of American heroes like Admiral William McRaven, a man as gracious and human as he is quietly lethal, whose resume includes commanding the Navy Seal team that took out Osama bin Laden and the special ops mission that captured Saddam Hussein. McRaven is a real soldier, not a puffed-up toy one, like the cavorting flag-draped pipsqueak currently flailing around as Secretary of War.

With Trump now tanking in the polls over affordability, a word he’s doing his best to turn into a sneer, or more strangely—and hopelessly—into a “hoax,” harbingers of the post-Trump future are already swirling with a restive MAGA. The reason Trump has focused so relentlessly in his second term on filling his own coffers is he knows, whatever he pretends, that there will be no season 3 of his fraying presidential show. His achievement has been to create a debased rulebook for whoever succeeds him. We can learn from Trump without lionizing him:

1) Entertainment always wins. Incoming NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani imbibed that lesson. Make fighting fascim fun. Don’t be too lofty for social media gimmicks like Mamdani’s polar bear swim off Coney Island to dramatize his rent-freeze policies.

2) Exploit leverage. Trump sees a crack in the door and drives a truck through it. When Israel overreached and fired missiles on Hamas leaders meeting in Qatar, a valued American ally, he seized the misstep to strong-arm Netanyahu into a Gaza peace agreement.

3) Blow through the bureaucrats. You don’t have to be a DOGE wrecking ball to know that meetings about meetings are the enemies of action.

4) Keep changing the subject. Except for the eternal stickiness of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump understood our national inattention span better than anyone before or since. He’s always deduced the news cycle’s craving for a fresh angle and made sure to provide it.

But irrelevance comes for all of us. When Trump is a clapped-out political Liberace honoring himself at benefits in his Mar-a-Lago ballroom, the legacy of his traumatic presidency will be a rotting pile of red caps—and the way the game is played.