Trump Essentials (3): Performance Anxieties

Throw A Thousand Spitballs And Some Of Them Will Stick

I actually understand why some life-long Republicans—and even some establishment Democrats—continue to imagine that Trump and his gang of associates will not do what they have said they want to do, whether in the text of something like Project 2025 or in various social media writings and messages.

They assume it because the Republican Party for nearly twenty years perfected a different approach to power, which was focusing largely on obstructing anybody else who tried to govern rather than actually governing themselves. This worked extremely well. Democrats adopted policy platforms that had originated with Reagan-era Republicans only to find that this didn’t create new center but only kept them chasing a retreating consensus further and further to the right. When they came into power, Democrats tried to govern with fiscal responsibility and lower deficits, and then Republicans in the White House spent like they were on shore leave during Navy Week. The Republicans got what they wanted a lot of the time and never had to take the political risk of doing it themselves. There was a sinister brilliance to it.

What changed? In terms of the simple dynamics of party politics, the Republican leadership in the 1990s saw that they were facing a potential problem of numbers—that both the White House and the House of Representatives might slip away from them if they could not build a numerically bigger base. They had to either retain and even accumulate suburban voters or add Latino and Black voters, either by being more socially liberal but retaining economic conservatism or by playing up social conservatism and adopting more protectionism and some highly targeted forms of social spending. But tentative efforts to move in that direction, especially through immigration reform, met with severe resistance from their existing base of white voters. So the GOP leadership and its major funders went with a strategy to play for time and that set them on the road to sabotaging democracy itself. The Democrats weren’t paying attention to state legislatures, they took it for granted that the judiciary would continue to skew towards a reasonable centrism, and they were naive about redistricting. Karl Rove, the Kochs and others went to town on all those fronts.

It is now well-understood that a consequence of these moves is that in safe Republican districts, primary contests suddenly favored the most extreme candidates, that GOP-held state legislatures accelerated that process further, and that judicial relief from resulting abuses became a more and more remote possibility. Trump did not cause this accelerating movement to the far right, but he benefitted from it and then symbiotically reinforced it.

What this change means is that the GOP’s current leadership and its electorate have thoroughly left behind the old obstructionism that had been shaped by people like Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell.

(Yes, I know: “Spelling is also so 1930s”. It’s still a nice shot.)

That is most clearly visible in the aftermath of Dobbs. The GOP is not chastened by the unpopularity of the decision, nor the predictable real grotesqueries of the medical and human outcomes in the most anti-abortion states that have followed, because they are no longer a party that can strategically rethink an unpopular or unworkable commitment. (Trump personally has shown an unusual caution that shows he is aware of the political risk, but he is also personally unwilling to do anything that might interrupt the cultish energy that flows between him and his devoted supporters.) In a number of states, the main response of the state-level GOP leadership has been to try and thwart any democratic initiatives by the majority of voters against extreme anti-abortion laws and policies, and to step up their legal aggression against their own citizens and even against other states with opposing policies. Moves against IVF, hints about restricting birth control, and so on suggest that the party cannot stop upping the ante on reproductive rights, which again is not surprising, since the issue has never been abortion in the first place. The issue has been women and a desire to put them back under male control.

This is only an example of the dynamic that now drives the GOP. This unstoppable drive for more and more extreme versions will be a part of the GOP’s immediate future whether or not Trump wins, but with Trump in charge, that inability to rein it in will explode into disfiguring sociopolitical projects that are inflicted on the whole of the body politic.

Project 2025 is plainly a good guide to what the people likely to staff a second Trump Administration intend to accomplish. It, or something approximating it, will likely be used first and foremost as a catechism during the process of making political appointments and then in subjecting the existing civil service to a loyalty oath. Anybody who tries to object to a particular plan or idea for prudential or legal reasons is likely to be shouted down, isolated or removed from office. Any office or person who is visible as an obstruction will be swiftly bulldozed.

This doesn’t mean that the administration will swiftly and efficiently chase every one of Trump’s whims into a fully realized and implemented policy, but that’s because his whims conflict less with opposing policy preferences or legal constraints and more with material reality.

Far too many centrist pundits seem to rest comfortably on the observation that you can’t possibly do these things. That, for example, you can’t actually deport millions of people overnight no matter how many times you promise to do so, and besides that even trying to do so will so quickly accelerate inflation and cripple industries that are strong in the GOP’s strongholds, like dairy production. They assume that this is yet another car that the GOP will chase but does not really want to catch.

These purveyors of conventional wisdom have a long trail of incorrect predictions and lethally parochial and underconsidered pronouncements behind them, but this sort of confidence that Trump and his associates will not really try what they have promised to try goes beyond that record of complacent failure. It doesn’t matter that it’s impossible and unwise, Trump and his people will at least try to do it. If even trying to do it is economically destructive and a human catastrophe, they will not retreat from the attempt.

If anything those failures will accelerate their commitment, because they will need the added distraction—and that kind of collateral damage will just push them to attack on other fronts. They will argue that they have to stamp out negative press coverage that is disloyally lying about the deportation. They will attack the Federal Reserve and blame the GAO for stoking inflation. They will proclaim that the problem with some industries is not reliance on illegal immigrants but Chinese competition, and call for tariffs. They will offer to grant special dispensation some of those industries from deportation if they show loyalty to the administration and finger suspected immigrants who aren’t in their workforce. They will expand the scope of deportation to cover legal residents that they view as illicit or disloyal, they will argue that “Communist” citizens should lose citizenship and be deported. They will set up hotlines and urge loyal citizens to form militias to round up illegals in their own communities and look the other way when people end up dead and missing as a result. They will argue that the only way to stop the smuggling of people across the southern border is not just finishing a wall but lobbing missiles at Mexican drug cartels. Each outrageous, destructive, failed idea will be like Echidna, a mother to monsters, filling a squalid nest with more outrages. Once the performance starts, once the dance begins, there will be no ending to it but exhaustion. They will never be able to retreat, to stop moving, to let reality catch up with them.

This is how authoritarians work. It doesn’t matter if what you, a flunky, are promising a whimsical autocrat is a fantasy that can never be accomplished and would be a catastrophe if it were. You promise it anyway because he likes it, and stage national-scale performances that pretend to do what he wants done. Only real people, living communities, functioning systems are the props, and the theater invariably becomes a Grand Guignol where real blood and tears mix with the cornstarch and food coloring. When reality stands up to object, you smother it with lies and you toss all the wayward messengers who said otherwise into the dungeon.

It’s an easy future to avoid as long as you still can vote one way or the other. As long as you’re ready to stand against the outrages that the people who are always already two steps into hell will doubtless bring to bear if they should lose. Believe them when they say they will do that and all the rest, because in saying it, they’ve obliged themselves to try.

Image credit: "Fascism is so 1930s." by alisdare1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.