Neither Gone Nor Forgotten
"We live in a propitious time for horrifying writing."
Frank Spring, one of my favorite writers and dearest friends, was the first person I turned to when I needed people to guest host this newsletter while I was busy with a book project. He is singular. Now he’s working on his own book while adjusting to fatherhood, which is like learning a new language while traveling to the moon outside the rocket. Still, he was kind of enough to write us a letter about the ungracious future that awaits us. Never will you have as much fun reading about something so horrible.
We live in a propitious time for horrifying writing. Not horror writing (though no doubt there’s that, too), but non-fiction text to chill the blood and set reason rocking on its throne. One example appeared in this very publication, an appalling and thoughtful and appallingly thoughtful discussion of the mechanics by which Donald Trump might not vacate the presidency if defeated in November. Another ghost ship recently hove into view in The American Interest, reflecting the lessons from a bipartisan wargaming exercise designed to predict (and offer guidance to counter) the various ways that the Trump Administration might contest the election’s outcome. Both are ghastly and unsettling, the political equivalent of the non-Euclidean geometry with which HP Lovecraft shattered the mortal minds of his doomed characters. Both are worth reading in a serious effort to prepare for an attempt by the President of the United States to effectively close the book on the American story.
But I submit to you that the worthy minds behind these nightmares have misjudged their monster. Trump is likely to lose this election, and he’ll leave office. But, to our collective horror and dismay, he just won’t go away. And unless the media makes a collective editorial decision not to cover everything he says simply because he says it (which, honestly, was an understandable if perhaps reductive way of covering former presidents in the past), he’ll keep doing incredible harm to American democracy.
One of the best critiques of how media and political analysts have covered and interpreted Trump is that, in spite of everything, they have thought too highly of him, assuming that he has a motive more sophisticated than “get on television all the time and stay there forever while everyone else talks endlessly about how great he is on television,” an ouroboros of Being More and More Than Ever Before and people on television commenting on how very much More and More he is, that commentary occasioning him to call in to the shows we watches to tell them that Actually It’s Even More Than That, and so on until he dies or the sun goes out, which in his cosmology are the same event. That’s it, that’s all this has ever been.
Trump is likely to lose this election, and he’ll leave office. But, to our collective horror and dismay, he just won’t go away.
To borrow a phrase, a strength is a talent that you’ve invested in, and Trump has historically had two: a sociopath’s capacity to tell his audience what they want to hear, and a narcissist’s ability to forget both commitments and the people to whom they were made as soon as the latter has left his line of sight. Those strengths are deserting him now as his cognitive capacity - never the stuff of legend - publicly and obviously declines. But for a while they enabled him to understand exactly who his audience was and promise them precisely what they craved; it is not a coincidence that in his quest for adulation he found a political base yearning for a leader who could turn grievance, his favorite pastime, into outright and active malice. And so Trump got himself on television all the time for half a decade, for much of which people on the channels he watches obediently talked about how much More and More he is, and he’d call in occasionally to confirm to them that they are correct and You Really Do Hear It.
That’s all coming to an end, undone at last by pandemic and generational social change and brutally hard times. In the face of this, Trump is clearly doing what passes for his level-best to duck the upcoming loss by undermining the Postal Service and sabotaging the cascade of absentee ballots that will probably bury him; it’s worth pointing out that Wisconsin Republicans attempted a similarly brazen act of voter suppression this year and their efforts actually contributed to their party losing a seat on the State Supreme Court rather than preventing it. This is not to say that the assassination attempt on the Post Office shouldn’t be taken seriously; it should. But Trump’s obvious and admitted attempt at suppressing vote-by-mail could very easily backfire.
If Trump loses, his self-image is too fragile to go in for the kind of decisive conflict necessary to overturn the result of an election, because he cannot stand the idea of publicly losing (2016 is an exception to this tendency because he never thought he could win until close to the end). Faced with a loss, he will certainly prevaricate and muddy the waters and mutter darkly about whether the election count is right (he did this in 2016 about an election he won!), attempting to create enough confusion that maybe he could somehow stay in office until it becomes clear that that isn’t really an option. But it is outside of his character to develop, present, and execute, in the face of determined resistance, a plan to deliberately change the outcome of an election that has gone against him, or to refuse to abide by it on pain of being frogmarched out of the Oval Office to a chorus of people on television saying he’s Less and Less Than Ever Before. That humiliation is his nightmare; he will not risk it.
If Trump loses, his self-image is too fragile to go in for the kind of decisive conflict necessary to overturn the result of an election.
It’s fair to note that treasonous skulduggery is not at all outside the inclination of the coterie of degenerate goons who hang around Trump and they sure as hell would risk it, but that’s like having the absolute loyalty of the Three Stooges - nice to be liked, I guess, but what does it really get you?
The rub is in what happens after. Traditionally, former presidents have been fairly quiet after their term of office, advancing their interests (personal or altruistic) in any number of ways but generally not infringing on their successors’ right to hold the conch shell. There is absolutely no chance that Trump will do this. Instead, he has a golden opportunity, perhaps the best opportunity of his sour, wasted life.
Trump will spend the interregnum between the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration gassily questioning his successor’s legitimacy. There will be no presidential transition process; there will be a festival of kleptocracy not seen in the US government in a century. And then he will leave, still muttering about how the election was rigged, and he will be free from what little constraints and expectations the Office has ever been able to put on him and a living former President will be able to tweet and go on television and hold rallies (those will continue, bet your life; whether anyone goes is another question), all in service of repeating the following message ad nauseam and indeed ad mortem:
“I was a great President. I did more for this country than anyone ever has. I was robbed of the election (many people are saying it!) and I should still be President. Will I run again? Maybe, who knows? We’ll see, but a lot of people are asking about it. More and more.”
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