For some time now, many of us have been wondering whether or not Trump believed the put-on that he was telegraphing to everyone else. He’s the greatest con-man since Barnum, right? He is just blowing smoke, right? These inquiries have been floating around since November, after Trump publicly doubted that vote tallying could take place beyond nightfall. He’s just trying to trick his base, the thinking went. Utterly cynical, but the tactic could work.
Remember how we went through these paces all through nearly the entire interregnum?
But now we have substantiated reporting, on background though it may be, that Trump actually does put stock in his own misgivings. In the vernacular, he’s getting high on his own supply.
Why does this matter? Hadn’t we already established that Trump was an unreliable actor, that he manipulates and deceives his audience as a matter of course? For me, the importance is in understanding the chain of causation. Trump obviously began his pretense deliberately (he had been counseled to avoid talking about any definitive win or loss on Election Night, but he went ahead and said that he thought his ticket had prevailed). So whom was the pretense directed toward, and beyond that who believed him? Was it his dedicated base? The general GOP electorate? The rank-and-file GOP officeholders nationwide (including mayors, state senators and representatives, governors and secretaries of state)? Congress, and Congressional leadership in particular?
Early data was cloudy, but in the months since the promulgation of the Big Lie it has become clear that, yes, the base has wholeheartedly swung its support behind the idea that there were colossal errors in the 2020 election significant enough to cause a travesty. Two separate polls recently showed that basically anywhere between 50-75% of the GOP electorate believes Trump’s Big Lie. Rep. Adam Kinzinger earlier this spring offered his own estimation, saying that perhaps only 5-10 Congresspersons, out of 251 total, believed Trump’s theories. Elected officials, in other words, had their eyes wide open and could see that Trump’s statements were strategic, not based in fact. But, of course, for the deception to work, it had to appear that Trump actually believed what he was peddling. The illusion rested on Congressional GOP leadership being in on the base’s bamboozlement.
So, in the scenario just described, we have Trump deliberately misleading the base, with GOP leadership aware of the deception but actively or passively going along with the tactic. There certainly could be several reasons for this, including the fact that the base is punishing those in the party who publicly disagree with Trump’s proclamations. Transgressors can expect censure, removal from committees, expulsion, forced resignations, and other forms of purging; in fact, the Ohio Republican Party Central Committee censured all ten U.S. GOP Representatives who voted in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, despite nine of those representatives living and serving outside of the state of Ohio.
The flip side of that grassroots punishment is that those who are refraining from criticizing Trump (or, more perniciously, helping to spread his Lie) are being rewarded.
That was the calculus that faced elected GOP officials. But now we have a different scenario. Now we have Trump telling a falsehood, his base largely believing it, and the coming to light that Trump now believes this falsehood as well. What we have now, instead of Trump and GOP officials working hand-in-hand to hoodwink their own voters, is Trump holding hands with his electorate, joined in shared conviction. Trump has sublimated himself into the group. So who are the ones who’ve been led astray? The plane has been put on autopilot and no one is actually manning the craft. Cockpit’s empty, folks.
There is no strategy. There is only momentum.
The story goes that Trump has come to accept the rumor that he could be reinstalled into the presidency by August. The pundit class, eminently sanely here, balked at such an outlandish outcome. It can’t be done, not within the law. There is no mechanism for a previous president to regain the Office, outside of re-election. August! Come now. Trump is clearly insane. (Well, the pundits are using the term ‘delusional’, which does not quite capture the depth of Trump’s disorder: Trump has been ambivalent about believing the Big Lie since November. According to the DSM-V, delusion crosses over into psychosis after three months of persistent belief.)
But consider this: it appears, at least to me, that there is some alternate timetable set in that other reality unmoored to the Constitution, some sped-up timetable where events are occurring compressed. It seems I’m not the only one:
“The radicalization of the Republican Party has outpaced what even most critical observers imagined,” Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer told me. “We need to grapple with what that should mean for our expectations going forward and start thinking about real worst-case scenarios.” (Washington Post, emphasis added)
It’s difficult for me to point to any individual happenstance of the last six months as proof of a pattern--it’s all speculation, and I recognize that what could be a pattern to me may be idiosyncratic due to my sociocultural point of view. But I recall that, during the brouhaha with Liz Cheney, at least one pundit the first weekend of coverage said that we could expect leadership to make a move in a couple of months--then in the span of two days (Saturday to Monday) that timetable had been shrunk to within a mere fortnight. It was a remarkable condensing of deliberative action. In a somewhat similar vein, McConnell was prepared to allow debate on the 1/6 Commission bill, but within an obvious 24-hour period he had turned a full 180 and pulled out every stop to ensure the bill would succumb to a filibuster. Whatever happened within that 24-hour window, the action that followed was swift.
Consider also that the normal methods by which a party would check bad actors have been somehow supplanted. Trump, his close advisers and his confidants have created a perverse incentive structure that both rewards this bad behavior of allowing the Big Lie to flourish and punishes dissent. Moreover, the normal punishment structure has been dismantled or is selectively disregarded, punishments that normally would dissuade people from violating rules and norms. This means that nefarious activity intentionally pursued can continue unimpeded. Without any temporal halts occasioned by the fear of being held to account, bad behavior will snowball out of control.
August is surely arbitrary--the product of Mike Lindell’s fevered mind. But now it’s also an anticipated date by the base, by the True Believers. And, as we saw with January 6, just the suggestion of an aura of importance can be enough to manifest that idea into being. So, by the timetable being given to us, we have three months to find a way to stop the general mood and national dynamics from deteriorating so much that something catastrophic happens. (And by stop, I mean defuse, not appease. Latitude on our part will appear as capitulation to the Believers.) As it is, the path is already set. Remember, things are already in motion. They’re gaining steam.
Just last week, the Texas legislature jolted all of us out of our somnambulance. For weeks, opinion columnists and cable news anchors had dutifully informed us that GOP-held strongholds were peeling back voting rights. It was a slow slog over these weeks, steady but resigned, this acceptance of fate. Then Democrats in Austin denied the GOP the quorum necessary to enact those draconian rollbacks. Then they called out to the rest of us: DO SOMETHING! They’ve reset an unseen timer. Let’s heed them.