Literary Corner: Ripcord

Image via Kalson.

 

In Conclusion, America Has Always Been a Nation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

.....But with voting, one of your most important things you can do, maybe in many ways, your most important, they don't want to approve voter ID. That's because they want to cheat, But until then Republicans must win, We have to win this election. Most important election ever. We want a landslide that's too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone, you know, and vote, vote early vote, absentee, vote on election day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, And again, Christians get out and vote just this time, you won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, you won't have to vote any more. My beautiful Christians. I love you Christians, I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've got to get out and vote in four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good. You're not going to have to vote. In conclusion, America has always been a nation, one built and sustained by Americans of faith. It was faith that led the Pilgrims to cross an ocean and settle this majestic continent. It was belief in our creator that led the patriots to defend their liberties in the war for independence. It was faith in America's God-given destiny that pushed the pioneers to journey west and it was trusting God that led generations of American believers to end slavery, defeat fascism and communism, and make this into the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower, and its strength.......

This somewhat longer piece of the transcript than you may have seen before provides a lovely illustration of how Trump's strange rhetoric works like a parachute jump, with the teleprompter text, in this case clearly by Stephen Miller, serving as a kind of ripcord to break his free fall and float him safely to earth.

He's clearly exhausted at this point in the speech—he's been going on for nearly an hour—and he's tumbling into truly insane-sounding babble; there on the screen in front of him is the rescue message: "In conclusion..." and he leaps for it, almost coming to grief at the complicated grammar of Miller's first sentence ("America has always been a nation built and sustained..." breaking him after the first six words) but recovering quickly enough and finishing the peroration on how America will become great again on November 5 without serious mishaps.

I think people have been overinterpreting the apostrophe to the beautiful Christians here, by the way, when they tell us it's Trump confessing to his evil plan to cancel the 2028 elections, and maybe all future elections. He may have such plans, and JD Vance's monarchist mentor the former Mencius Moldbug certainly does, but that's not what Trump is talking about. 

To know that, you have to do something the political reporters aren't willing to do, which is to look above the particular soundbite to the speech as a whole. Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ("And by the way, Christians have to vote, you know, I don't want to scold you, do you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don't vote like they should. They're not big voters") and one piece of paranoid fiction he's been retailing for at least eight years, that our elections are plagued by illegal or somehow just bad voting, because our laws on who gets to vote, after the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are too lax in some way he's not really able to clarify, but when he says he's going to "fix" it, what he means is explained earlier in the speech ("But I say look, we got to fix our laws on voting. We have to start with voter ID"). The beautiful Christians must put themselves out now, even if it means indulging in the suspect early voting and absentee voting, precisely so he and Congress can change these "ridiculous" laws—

Christians are a group that's known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election. Just give us and get us into that beautiful White House, vote for your congressmen and -women, vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better, this country will be great again like never before. You've got to vote and I've said it before and I'll say it again. November 5th, which is a period really because you're allowed to vote early, they have early voting, late voting. Everything is so ridiculous. We should have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and certification of citizenship, and that's what we're striving for. But voting actually starts on September 6th in North Carolina, a great state. We're doing very well there....Then it's Pennsylvania toward the end of September and it's various states in September...

—and in 2028 beautiful Christians won't have to stress themselves out any more. That's the message Trump is trying to convey: please ignore all that stuff I told you about early voting, that is, I was right, but you should do it this year anyway, and if you do enough of it this year you won't have to do it again.

The program he's hoping to implement being very precisely the one proposed in this year's Republican platform, almost as if he was reading it off the teleprompter (as he may well have been)

We will implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens.

(solving the imaginary problem of noncitizen voting, which almost never happens, but of course making huge trouble for the 10% of US citizens who have trouble proving their citizenship, who are of course mostly relatively poor, and therefore more likely to vote for Democrats). The standard Republican effort to reduce turnout.

This isn't, again, to suggest that no Republicans are plotting to overthrow the US electoral system altogether, as we know they are. Though they aren't the same as the ones working to overthrow it now, in case Democrats win in November: 

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

What I think we need to understand is that Trump Republicans are working now not just on the "two-pronged" effort to plan for whether they win (Project 2025) or lose (January 6 redux) but on a whole layer cake of strategies, to which Trump himself is not entirely privy; he is personally too stupid to play a decisive role, though he is enough of a loose cannon that he might wreck their plans at any moment. You can't take anything he says seriously, let alone literally, though you should always look in what he says for evidence as to what the state of play is, as far as he's been allowed to see it by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and Claremont Institute and other intellectual stakeholders who are squirreling over the actual work. Trumpism is more than poor Trump, the grinning pumpkinface, their only representative of 2020s rizz. He himself is more like a kind of stochastic candidate—you never know what he'll come up with next—but it's never as interesting as it looks.