Why Won't the Teeming Mass of Delusional Morons Trump Cultivated Be Reasonable?
How did they get like this?
Surely I’m not the only one who read Trump’s Truth Social post about Jeffrey Epstein and thought "The lady doth protest too much,” and also “the lady might greatly benefit from some mood-stabilizing meds.”
If we accept that Trump always accuses his enemies of things that he did himself, then this post is probable cause for an indictment. Even within the post, Trump accuses Democrats of something that he did when he says “they created the Epstein Files” — Trump is the one who has been pushing the Epstein conspiracy like a used car salesman hopped up on angel dust. When you add in the fact that Trump associated with Epstein, has been accused of sexual misconduct by many women, bragged about committing sexual assault, said he barged into the dressing room of underage beauty pageant contestants, and once said that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” the notion that he might have something to hide here seems as plausible as the notion that The Hamburglar might somehow be involved in hamburger-related larceny.
But hey: I’ll let the justice system determine whether or not a crime has been committed. The one part of Trump’s post that isn’t crazy — literally the only five words out of 400 that shouldn’t tempt you to google “25th Amendment” — is when Trump asks “why didn’t they use it?” in reference to the notion that Democrats have damning evidence about him. It’s a fair point: The Biden administration had no incentive to sit on smoking gun evidence of Trump’s relationship to Epstein. Alvin Bragg managed to convict Trump on 35 counts of Being A Dickweed, Generally, if there was video of Trump doing lines off Punky Brewster’s lower back in 1987, then any left-leaning prosecutor — or any moderately competent prosecutor anywhere — would have acted.
Still, I’m enjoying the fact that Trump seems annoyed by the MAGA die-hards. The sense of “what the fuck is wrong with you idiots?” is palpable in Trump’s post — it would trigger years of Fox News segments about how the left looks down on Real America if it came from any Democrat. But Trump’s dismay is understandable, or at least would be understandable if he was anyone else in the world. Because he obviously built this monster, and it’s funny that he seems surprised that he can’t fully control it. Apparently, he doesn’t realize that the phrase “I’ve created a monster” implies that the monster is running amok — it doesn’t mean “I’ve created a monster an all is swell, oh how I enjoy the fruits of my relationship with said monster, would you like me to create you a monster, as well?”
My interest in this friction goes beyond schadenfreude; for the first time, it makes me think that maybe I can imagine what the GOP looks like after Trump. Trump’s political career has been synonymous with the New Right. The movement gained prominence when many assumed that the Bush dynasty would continue to front the GOP, and it rejected “stuffy” conservative values like moderation, common sense, knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, and being even remotely in touch with reality. Trump was a natural fit for this faction. And they formed a movement that happened to be perfect for the social media age, which is a polite way of saying “deeply-troubled shut-ins were able to find each other and form a shut-in Voltron, with many times the power of a single dyspeptic virgin.”
Many people — including me — see Trump as a cult leader, and have been stupefied as he’s gotten away with things that would have gotten anyone else drawn and quartered as recently as the late ‘90s. But what if Trump isn’t this movement’s leader, but rather the figure they’ve chosen to latch on to for now? What if their unflinching defense of his actions was simply necessary because he was carrying their banner, but when he stops being useful to them, they’ll move on? What if people like me were wrong, and their fealty is not to Trump, but to the sense that society is being tarnished by malignant forces, and they’ll transfer their loyalty to someone else when Trump is no longer an effective vessel for advancing their views?
I’m reminded of how the GOP turned on Bush at the end of his second term. After the 2006 midterms, Republicans treated Bush like a cat they inherited from their ex. A narrative formed that Bush had developed a taste for pork-barrel spending and frittered America’s prestige on foreign escapades, but the debt and the quagmire in Iraq were direct consequences of policies Bush had enacted with strong right-wing support. The main impetus for the turn against Bush was probably just that he was no longer useful; he couldn’t run for a third term and his leadership hadn’t helped Republicans in the midterms, he was a lame duck with a checkered legislative record who was set to pass the torch to a brother with the personality of a box of packing peanuts.
Something similar seems to be the fate of most presidents in their final term. Democrats were disenchanted with Clinton and Biden at the end of their terms, though in both cases, the president’s misconduct was so bad that it’s hard to draw general conclusions about typical feelings towards a president headed for the exit. Obama remains one of the most popular figures in American politics, but the sense that Obama was a disappointment was pervasive on the far left by the end of his second term.1 It seems to be true that the “circle the wagons” mentality that typically protects a party leader erodes quickly when that leader ceases to be able to do anything for the movement.
Trump is roughly as popular (and unpopular) as he has been since he became president again and people remembered “Oh yeah…that guy.” But maybe the MAGA cult isn’t always destined to be synonymous with Trump. Maybe now that Trump is term-limited, and even a uber-cynic like me struggles to imagine how he’ll get around that constraint, the MAGA movement is essentially a political free agent. Which means that we might be treated to a Trump-MAGA split that makes the Trump-Elon divorce look like a civilized conscious uncoupling. Of course, it also means that Brigham Young to Trump’s Joseph Smith might be arriving soon — I dread the auditions for that role. But it might be true that the abnormal friction over Epstein might become normalized sooner rather than later.
To be fair, this narrative was present on the far left almost immediately. But I’d argue that it was more pervasive at the end of Obama’s second term.
You can tell from Trump's posts that MAGA is a movement steeped in nostalgia because they demonstrate a deep longing for the period from before English capitalization was standardized.
And the chilling lesson from other cults and extreme political movements is that the Second One tends to be less ideological but more ruthless, competent and power-hungry than the founder. Think David Miscavige at the Scientologists or Joseph Stalin.