There Was Always Something Inevitable About This

Donald Trump (AI) looking bored and disgusted, slouching on a throne, holding a golden scepter (trophy). Was this always something inevitable?

From his first hours in office, [Trump] has relentlessly driven domestic, economic and foreign policy in risky new directions; taken a chain saw to the federal work force; challenged the authority of the courts; and sought to purge liberal influence from government, education and culture….

The consuming conflicts of one day regularly give way to wholly new ones with stunning rapidity: pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, stripping out-of-favor officials and former advisers of security details, proposing to turn Gaza into a resort town and Canada into a 51st state, blaming a plane crash on diversity initiatives, presiding over a contentious cabinet meeting with Elon Musk, installing his personal lawyers to run the Justice Department, firing inspectors general, closing down U.S.A.I.D., igniting a global trade war, berating Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office, deporting migrants without due process and edging toward a constitutional crisis by defying judges on multiple occasions.” —from the New York Times, April 28

Before President Trump returned to office, it was widely expected that his administration would again reduce support for clean energy, promote fossil fuels and disengage from global efforts to combat climate change. But during his first 100 days, Trump’s efforts to roll back regulations and stop climate action have shocked even those who were raising the alarm in the months before the election. –from the New York Times Climate Forward newsletter, April 29

Looking Back: Profiles in Mendacity

In November and December of 2020, a shocking number of GOP lawmakers made public statements echoing Trump’s heinous lies that the election had been stolen. And even after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, 139 GOP House members and 8 Republican senators voted NOT to certify Joe Biden’s election.

Lindsey Graham stood on the Senate floor after the riot and denounced Trump. But shortly thereafter, he was met at the airport back home in South Carolina by a group of raging MAGA protesters, and then he never said a critical word about Trump again. He apparently realized he’d misread the political winds, and thus his brief seizure of conviction dissipated. He went on to endorse Trump for president several months before the 2024 primary season even began.

And of course there was Kevin McCarthy’s infamous pilgrimage (so to speak) to Mar-a-Lago shortly after January 6, where he posed for a picture with then-former president, the two of them smiling like best of buddies, creating a semi-iconic image that has been widely viewed as the beginning of Trump’s political “resurrection,” which it really wasn’t. The momentum was already established.

I’m not saying that McCarthy – or Graham – was lacking free will. But they were who they were. They had attained their respective perches of power by being who they were, and who they were in those critical moments of our nation’s unfolding history naturally moved them to cave in to craven motives.

And when Republican House members eventually toppled McCarthy for doing the one sane thing he ever did throughout his tenure as House speaker (and possibly the only sane thing he had ever done in his entire political career) – that is, striking a compromise with President Biden to avoid defaulting on the nation’s debt – we knew that Trump was behind the scenes ensuring that McCarthy’s successor would not be anyone who’d voted to certify the 2020 election, not even an esteemed long-serving conservative like Steve Scalise. No, it had to be a stolid Trump toady. And while Jim Jordan proved to be too disliked and potentially too blatantly pugnacious for public consumption, they found the perfect mild-mannered, inoffensive looking Trump sycophant in Mike Johnson.

And then there was the solemn ceremony at the Capitol on the anniversary of January 6, honoring the sacrifice of those who’d given their lives defending our democracy that day, and reminding our nation of the peril we all faced that day and the fragility of our democracy – and the only Republicans who deigned to attend were Dick and Liz Cheney. By their absence, the rest of the GOP signaled their contemptuous dismissal of the event, deeming it a political stunt, as if the events of the previous January 6 really weren’t all that bad.

And during Trump’s trial in New York last year, several of his VP wannabes showed up to support him there, sporting long red ties a la Trump, and parroting Trump’s filthy lies that the trial was merely a political vendetta perpetrated by the Biden administration.

Clearly, Trump only had only grown in influence over the Republican Party after his 2020 election loss. His base remained fiercely loyal to him, practically worshipping him for some ungodly reason, and GOP senators, House reps, and governors were kowtowing to him all over the place, in more ways than I can even enumerate.

And of course, last summer, we received the SCOTUS presidential immunity decision.

So Trump was clearly more powerful than ever, floating freely above the law, even the laws of rationality. He could lie absurdly about anything, making up preposterous “facts” off the top of his head. Nothing hurt him with the electorate. He won the election.

And it just felt inevitable.

When Trump won again, I felt hollowed out but not really surprised. It had seemed too good to be true that we’d have a President Kamala Harris and a Vice-President Tim Walz, as well as too sickeningly awful to be true that we’d have a President Trump again and Vice-President Vance.

But that’s what we have now. (And “sickeningly awful” doesn’t even begin to describe it.)