The end of Invincible Trump

That duck was lame when it got here

I’m not sure whether it’s the holiday season (yes, I said “holiday,” screw Merry Christmas, MAGA bitches, Santa Claus is a cop) or whether I’m desperate for glad tidings, but lately even in the midst of all this fascist administration’s fuckery I sense silver linings. They’re petty thin, and do not gleam too brightly, but seen in a certain light they suggest a way this could all go that isn’t totally disastrous.

Hard to believe, right? I ran through just the latest topline offenses to democracy, common decency etc. in the most recent alicublog Friday ‘Round-the-Horn, and as always I just scratched the surface. I didn’t even get into the appallingly racist National Security Strategy, nor Tubby pardoning the glaringly guilty former Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar and then complaining that Cuellar didn’t switch to the Republican Party, adding insult to bribery. And then there are the ongoing ICE outrages etc.

And holy fuck, have you seen this? I’ve said before that their childishly cruel social media posts are addressed solely to their base of 30-35% of Americans who really have lost 65%-70% of their minds, but this is so stupid I’m starting to think Trump will try to require a reverse literacy test at the polls.

That in itself is telling. This is the kind of rube-rousing a politician does when he expects to lose big and needs to make sure the True Believers remember why they’re supposed to vote for The Boss again (or storm the Capitol, depending) so the results aren’t totally humiliating.

In fact their devotion to the LCD is such that I begin to wonder whether they haven’t given up trying to keep such normies as they lured last time from running away from them. They soft-pedaled the Kennedy Center honors this year, you’ll notice, and I’m leaning toward the explanation that someone in Trump’s brain trust realized what a freak show it would be compared to prior editions, and that his remarks would be, as seems to have been the case, a bunch of embarrassing bluster (“Trump admits he didn’t really prepare to host Kennedy Center Honors,” gamely reports Fox News).

I’ll focus today on Trump’s racist yammer about Somalians. Now, you and I know this administration is actively racist and fascist. But for your not-very-political friends, most of that is sub rosa — they don’t know how Trump is trying to erase minority achievement from public life and the public record and cripple programs that help them. They and most Americans mainly know that he says stuff that they guess is racist, though they wouldn’t make a big deal about it, maybe because they’re racists themselves or at least think he’s all talk and not serious, you know how he is, like when he said countries with a lot of black people in them were “shithole countries” — well, you know, they’re kind of backwards, right, like they have chickens running around in the street, it’s not racist to notice that, right, etc.

Well, Tubby’s rant against Somalians, in Minnesota and elsewhere, and on Ilhan Omar and Tim Walz and how their state was a “hellhole” because of Somalians, was something else. You may recall I mentioned this last week in passing, on the subject of his failing vigor, saying that “when the old bastard previously pulled similar shit, he got it over with his target audience (i.e. assholes) because his brio and showmanship helped them feel like it wasn’t so bad,” but his newly senile-somnolent demeanor and delivery had made it harder for even sympathetic listeners to take it.

In the days since, the stench of Tubby’s tantrum has only gotten worse. Ilhan Omar was given a respectful hearing on Face the Nation. Tim Walz got big press. Even Prestige Press outlets like Axios had to talk critically, actually critically and with historical context, about Trump’s racist ravings. (I know, right? Axios!)

Most Republicans who were not actively employed by the administration just tried to keep quiet about it. There were a few in wingnut world who did try to clean it up — like the loathsome Rich Lowry who, as has become his habit, imitated Trump in a tonier voice. He referred to crimes allegedly committed by Somali-Americans in Minnesota, as if to suggest that Trump was, however incoherently and offensively, reacting to genuine offenses, and added these were “especially galling coming from a group of people whom we did a favor to allow into the United States in the first place.”

But even Lowry couldn’t go all the way with it, and near the end said, “It should go without saying that these crimes don’t implicate law-abiding Somali-Americans.” If Trump had been present for that failure of nerve, he would have smacked Lowry — because that demurrer is the opposite of Trump’s meaning, which is that regardless of whether any Somalians did anything wrong or not, they were all shit and should all be expelled, which is why he sent more ICE goons to Minnesota shortly afterward specifically to hunt them.

I am sure that your average, not-so-bright American saw this more clearly than did Rich Lowry.

My point is this: If your reaction to this event has been, well, Trump’s getting away with being racist again just like he always does and always will, you’re missing that he is only “getting away with it” in the sense that he is still President, which thanks to his Supreme Court stooges he would remain even if he exposed himself to a White House tour group of preteen girls. But the basis of his alleged invincibility — the belief that his reign represents a watershed in American politics, that he is as titanic a figure as he constantly declares himself to be — is done. Because that was based on the myth, repeated unthinkingly and thereby summoned into being by the Prestige Press, that voters don’t care about the evil shit he does and could not be made to.

But that’s not so; they can be made to care, and have — by Trump himself. He has been embarrassing himself and them steadily since he returned to office. That’s why voters, many of whom reelected him as the cure for inflation, have been vehemently rejecting nearly every Republican offered to them in every special and off-year election since — not because they lost confidence in their local elected officials, but because they have finally started to see through the guy. Pity it didn’t happen sooner.