Here is a brief and incomplete list of what former President Donald Trump did this week:
- sunday: Trump says US troops should be deployed “againstThe enemy is within“on Election Day. It’s unclear exactly who he’s talking about, but he mentions Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview.
- Monday: Trump stopped by to conduct a town hall A 40 minute impromptu dance partywhere he played songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Christy Noem (R).
- Tuesday: Asked in a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, Trump responded with: An extended ref to an election case in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, Trump launched into a tirade about critical stories appearing on Google News, saying he had called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response.
- Also Tuesday: Trump warns that “Hydrogen is the new car“And tells a story about a man who died when a hydrogen car exploded near a tree and his wife couldn’t identify him. Hydrogen-fueled cars are actually 10-year-old technology. A small and declining global market share. there is There is no evidence that they can explode like the HindenburgA car with a hydrogen fuel cell is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas.
- Wednesday: Asked about “enemy within” comments from Sunday, Trump doubles down – says Democrats like Schiff Such an enemy indeedThat they are “Marxists” and “Fascists” who are “very bad” and “dangerous to our country”.
Throughout these events, Trump has appeared (by turns) as a buffoon and a dictator. One minute, you’re laughing His campy dance moves on And the Hindenburg car rant, next you worry that he might actually try to send troops after American citizens.
Yet the two trumps, the clown and the manes, are closely bound together: absurdity helps to normalize its dangerousness.
For his biggest supporters, Scotch helps create a sense of joy in transgression. For non-MAGA Republicans, it helps them feel comfortable ignoring what makes Trump extraordinary in favor of traditional dirty partisanship. For many of Trump’s opponents, this makes him seem like something we don’t have to worry about all the time – even when we really do. His absurdity works to create a terrifying reality our Reality, something mixed into the mental frame we use to get through the day.
I don’t think Trump did it by design. He is not an evil genius, moving 10 steps in advance of the plan. He is exactly this person as a person; What you see on stage is what you get.
But that persona stems from a gut-level understanding of human behavior, which has allowed Trump to build an extraordinary political and business career based on lying to everyone around him and pushing the boundaries of “normal” to the breaking point. Without his buffoonery, none of it works — you get unpopular figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. JD VanceWho have all Trump’s brutality but none of his charm.
Put differently: The dance is a kind of alchemy that takes its grim ideas, such as deploying the military against the “enemy within,” and turns them into just another day in American politics.
America’s Clown Prince
In late 2016, The Atlantic was published Selena Zito channeled a campaignA conservative reporter, exploring Trump’s appeal to his voters. The piece was forgettable except for one line, a description of Trump’s relationship with his fans that has been quoted endlessly over the past eight years: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
In context, Zito was talking about Trump’s lies about unemployment among young black men. At the time, he claimed that the unemployment rate was actually about three times that—a figure he arrived at in part by counting full-time students as “unemployed.” Zito admits that this is a literal lie, but believes that his dismissal by the press is wrong. He believed that Trump fans interpreted the inflated numbers as symbols of some larger truth, less concerned with reality than the general picture he paints of a broken America.
Over the years, “seriously not literally” has become A punchline among political journalists. the time after the timeTrump and his fans have proven that they take his foreign accent literally. When he said the 2020 election was stolen and demanded Vice President Mike Pence illegally try to overturn it, he meant it — and his staunchest supporters rioted to try to make his vision a reality.
If there’s one group of Trump supporters whom Zito’s phrase actually describes, it’s not superfans, but squishes.
Republicans who blanked on Jan. 6, but liked the tax cuts and court appointments made earlier, are the most likely to dismiss the idea that Trump should be taken at his word. For these Republicans, his proclamations of authoritarianism are just part of the Trump show — a kind of brand-burning performance with silly slogans like “Hydrogen is the new car.”
With his most extraordinary ideas Safely slotted into the clown boxThey can return to treating him seriously as a “normal” Republican presidential candidate: evaluating his policies against Harris and naturally getting what he wants. The bitter dilemma of choosing between democracy and democracy can be overcome.
As disturbing as this attitude is, it has some basis in truth. The truth is that we all, to one degree or another, love Trump “seriously but not literally.” We do this because dealing with what a second Trump presidency would actually mean is difficult for even his most ardent critics to wrap their heads around.
Trump and his team have offered advice at various times during the campaign Millions of detained migrants are held in campsReplacing the civil service with Trump’s cronies, deploying the military to quell dissent, deploying Special prosecutors to investigate Democratsimposed 1,000 percent tariff across the boardnirvana Federal Reserve under political controlwithdrawal From NATOAnd Unconstitutionally serving a third term.
If we take all these steps literally, integrating the reality of what these steps mean into our daily behavior, it will be difficult to live normally. The specter of out-and-out authoritarianism, a battered economy, and an international system torn apart from the alliances that preserve world peace. Actually trying to imagine the enormity of this world is psychologically taxing; Trying to live as if it were really an imminent possibility leads to a life emotionally devoted to trying to stop it.
For most people, this is neither desirable nor possible. And the fog of Trump’s distortion creates a mental space where one can reasonably tell oneself that this is not necessary. He lies and exaggerates so much that it’s hard to tell which of his policy ideas are being taken literally. You can make an educated guess — it’s pretty clear he’ll try to fight the 2024 election results if he loses — but that’s really the best any of us can do.
Trump’s claim is being taken literally everything What he does seriously is both emotionally difficult and analytically incorrect. So it makes sense that we all do at least a little “seriously, but not literally”: it helps manage the fear and uncertainty inherent in a second Trump presidency.
The buffoonery helps with that.
Laughing at Trump makes it easy to see him as anything but a bogeyman. I mean, look at him! He’s rocking the stage to “Ave Maria,” babbling about Pavarotti, creating. Christie Noem Sweat WHO could not Appreciate that?
We’re laughing not only because he’s ridiculous (which he is on purpose), but because then we don’t have to face the reality that he really represents—at least for a minute.
The problem, though, is that Trump is a fundamentally serious matter. He’s not just doing a traveling stand-up show; He is running for President of the United States. He wants to be in charge of the most powerful nation in human history, with his fingers on a nuclear button that could destroy the planet.
It would be bad enough if anyone who wanted such power was just a clown. That he’s a clown with a proven track record of doing extremely dangerous things makes the laugh a little hollow.
Former President Barack Obama — who I’m sure Trump understands better than almost anyone — recently gave a speech that Distills the problem down to its core. After recounting some of Trump’s recent lies about hurricanes, Obama asked, “When did it get fixed?” He elaborated:
If your co-workers behave like this, they won’t be your co-workers for long. If you’re in business and someone you’re doing business with just outright lies and manipulates you, you stop doing business with them. Even if you have a family member who behaves like this, you can still love them, but you tell them you have a problem and you don’t hold them responsible for anything. And yet, when Donald Trump lies, cheats, or shows complete disregard for our Constitution, when he calls prisoners of war “losers” or fellow citizens “vermin,” people make excuses for it.
And that’s just it. It shouldn’t be OK, but enough people have accepted that it’s OK by default.
Helping us deal with the normalization of abnormality, the fact that the old rules for politics that keep things safe are being blown away at a faster and faster rate. When the prospect of a second Trump presidency seems so real, it’s comforting to laugh about it.
