Trumpery

 

Michael Cohen on television is so great at punching through the punditical assumptions of people scratching their heads to understand what Trump's lawyers are doing in the New York civil case against him and his organization, behaving like idiots and antagonizing the judge, trying to figure out what is Trump's legal strategy or Trump's political strategy: no, Cohen explains, they're doing what Trump wants them to do, and it's more political than legal, but it's not very strategic at all! Or, it's just bad! He's "fighting", is what he's doing, and convinced this will get him reelected and enable him to take care of his legal troubles, and he's wrong about that, as he has been ever since he started insulting judges with Gonzalo Curiel on the Trump University case in spring 2016 and eventually had to pony up $25 million, where this case is going to cost him up toward ten times that and put an end to the Queens-boy-makes-good-in-Manhattan part of his career, but that's probably OK because he's been in trouble before and he always gets out of it, more or less. There's always been money somewhere!

That's Trump the individual, a narcissistic and intellectually challenged fool whose success in life began with the half a billion dollars his father was able to invest in him and continued through daddy after daddy down to the Republican party and the grassroots movement of his own donors. Or maybe the kindhearted taxpayers of Florida

We need a fund to support this in our state. We can use our record budget surpluses to do it. That way ANY Floridians who run for President can have a way to defend themselves from politically motivated lawsuits that just magically appear during an election cycle. (2/3)

— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) November 4, 2023

as suggested a couple of days ago by the Chief Financial Officer of Florida (Florida has a CFO, is that socialism?).

Then there's what I call The Trumpery and the historian Thomas Zimmer calls "Trumpism, the Project" we associate with Stephen Bannon, Roger Stone, the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and the tangle of Tradcath organizations associated with Leonard Leo, and I don't know what other anti-democratic reactionaries, who have adopted him, with his remarkable ability to command enough votes from people who appreciate his comedy act to have won a presidential election once, and could do so again, in the service of instituting an honest-to-god fascist regime in the United States, where the vast civil service, the enormous military, and the army of lawyers around in the judiciary will all be deployed toward accomplishing the will of the—whatever it is, a cadre party or party-within-the-party, which has been taking public shape this week in the reporting of The Washington Post and The New York Times, which will implement Trump's desires of maybe bringing out the military to back him like a dictator in January 2025 and begin prosecuting Trump's enemies (probably replacing Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok with Mark Milley, William Barr, Mark Meadows, and the other treacherous bastards who have been disappointing him so much lately), but are to be principally devoted to creating an illiberal United States on the model of current Hungary or Russia or maybe Spain after the Civil War.

Which is completely horrifying, but completely dependent on the helpless monster in whose name they act. I don't think they can do it without him. Not that Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy or even Nikki Haley wouldn't be willing, but that, as we've been learning in recent months, they haven't got what it takes. Whatever that is.

Horrible as the New York Times–Siena poll this week of the six main battleground states was,

it's not the end yet. There were even a couple of things in the poll that were encouraging: asked who they would vote for if Trump was convicted of a crime, enough Trump voters in the six states switched to Biden that Biden would have won. That feels like a pretty good sign, because he's on track to get a pretty good number of convictions (two or three, anyway) in the course of the next year.

Then there's something more long-term and fundamental that will still be as true a year from now as it is now, if it's true at all:

Note the distance between the two red lines and the closeness of the blue ones: most people really can't stand Trump, most people are uncertain about Biden. A stronger version of the same thing was found in an ABC-Ipsos poll last week:

• First, when asked to rate the favorability of each man, both are viewed as unfavorable by the public, with Trump viewed as slightly more so (50% are unfavorable toward Biden, 60% toward Trump).
• This dislike is driven by intense unfavorable ratings among partisans – 89% of Republicans feel negative toward Biden, and 92% of Democrats feel the same about Trump.
• Biden fares slightly better among political independents; 49% feel unfavorable toward him compared to 69% who feel negative toward Trump. 

I really don't understand the use of the word "slightly" here, in two different places. Among independents and overall, people are split evenly on Biden while overwhelming majorities dislike Trump.

The pattern doesn't show up in the aggregates, like 538, where Biden's negatives look more similar to Trump's, but that doesn't mean it's not real, it means a lot of pollsters aren't picking it up. What it doesn't mean is important: it doesn't mean Biden is bound to win, not by any means. But it does hold out some hope.