You're Too Honest, Wags!
Dear Wags,
If nothing else, the latest indictment of Donald J. Trump is a masterful piece of storytelling. It lays out what everybody knows, but it’s a stunning production: The former president lied about the 2020 election, and with a passel of toadies, conspired to subvert it. In obdurate pursuit of this, he bullied his vice president and brushed aside counselors who told him it was a really lousy idea. When skullduggery failed, he incited an attack on the Capitol and ignored pleas from allies to put a halt to it. That a malefactor could do all that (and that’s just one set of charges!) and stand a good chance of being elected again should concern anybody with a frontal lobe.
Whatever happens—and recent experience shows nearly anything can—the special counsel, Jack Smith, has crafted a remarkable document. It’s a black comedy worthy of Armando Iannucci, in which the veep calls POTUS on Christmas day, only to have his bulldozer of a boss needle him about upending democracy. “You know I don't think I have the authority to change the outcome,” Pence said. Details! On New Year’s Day, Trump was back at Pence, telling him you’re too honest.
There he goes again, saying the horrible thing out loud. Were they all not on strike, Hollywood writers would kill to write such a character.
No indictment will dislodge the diehards. Trump is overwhelmingly likely to clinch the Republican nomination. But Smith’s work is a record of an extraordinary moment in American history, in which a fantasist tried to burn the house (and Senate) down. Of course, such investigations only fuel Trump’s aspirations. He loves campaigning on persecution. Compounding legal jeopardies are a poll-juicer.
Those of us who knew Trump from his Page Six days saw much of this coming. He wears his psychosis on his tatty sleeve and can’t live with being called a loser. The indictment reveals a bracing determination to drag us all down with him. He’s not yet crowned himself emperor, but he has changed us all.
At this late date, we all understand why the Republican Party cannot quit him, and why his primary rivals are hamstrung. We know that in the coming months, Trump’s congressional supporters will work overtime to create an equivalency between his profound corruption and pathetic Hunter Biden. We can assume a feckless, fractured news media will fail miserably to move the public in these matters. It may be that voters are at last sick of this trashy show. Don’t bet on it.
The swamp that produced Trump —a murk of informational fragmentation, economic dislocation, class stratification, tribalism, and institutional decay—will be with us a long time. Historians reach for precedents, and they are unsettling. This wobbly era suffers from both the external scariness of the prewar period and the internal convulsions of a half-century ago. With all our differences, is there enough cultural glue to hold us together this time? Trump was the biggest beneficiary of a nation riven by identity politics. If we cannot transcend them, perhaps we deserve him. And if the worst happens, Smith leaves our descendants with a tale of just how bad it got.
