RIP Donald Trump

We are gathered here today to mark the passing of Donald J Trump: America’s 45th President and the “You’re Fired” guy. He will be remembered for his posting abilities, his love of hamburgers, and harnessing our country’s worst impulses to remake the American political landscape in his own image.

If I could teleport into any one person’s living room right now and have a conversation, I would choose Mitch McConnell. I would set up a poster stand with an enormous picture of Trump’s MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT, point to it with a yardstick, and say, “You sold your party out for this. Remember? In January 2021 you decided you’d rather win the midterms than cut this cancer out of your party. And look at you now. A historic 2022 loss and the man you sacrificed yourself for is selling NFTs six months after NFTs stopped fooling anyone. How do you feel?

Hell, I’d like to assemble the lot of them. Call them forward one by one like an alcoholics anonyous meeting. “Hello, my name is Kevin McCarthy, and I’ve made a terrible mistake.” “Hello, my name is Matt Schlapp…”

It’s a great troll, I’ll give you that. Possibly his best so far. A giant “fuck you” to Musk, to his party, to everyone but the people in on the joke. I’ve written about this before, but MAGA knows that Trump is a silly man. They love it. This is the silliest thing he’s done so far.

Unfortunately for Trump and fortunately for the rest of us, this is not 2016. Large swaths of the American voting public are no longer deeply disgusted with a world that feels like it’s never going to change. They are no longer the 2008 Joker; they do not want to watch the world burn. The world has been on fire since at least 2020. We’ve all had a bellyfull of burning, everything got very exciting very quickly; now people can’t afford groceries and the party of Fiscal Responsibility is off screaming about gay people and calling everyone they dislike a pedophile. I was as guilty as any of the architects of that strategy in thinking it might work, but the midterms put that theory to bed for anyone able to sound out words and feed themselves.

What happens from here I do not know. The energy has not dissipated. MAGA proper might die with Trump but the energy he channelled and concentrated into virulence remains. Where does it go? What happens when the leader of a movement that genuinely believes a pedophelic satanic cult is mutilating children for sexual pleasure starts selling baseball cards? History stands mute on the question.

Who is left to take up the reins? I stand by my statements on DeSantis. He’s no cult leader, no matter how well he did in Florida; Gavin Newsom did well in California but he’s not going to be President either. For a while I thought Trump’s heir might be Musk, he’s certainly got the cult following for it regardless of where he was born, but his recent murder at the hands of Dave Chappelle fans — not exactly a hyper-woke group — shows just how much goodwill he’s lost by providing the world hourly evidence of his lameness, his ineptitude, his bottomless need for adulation. He’s Trump without that killer instinct.

So, you know, he’s Trump as Trump exists today.

It’s weird. I shouldn’t be sad. I’m definitely happy for America. I’m happy for the future. What a pathetic way to go out, though. The man who came closest to achieving American fascism is now hawking commemorative memorobilia while the door’s wide open for a comeback. Like, imagine a final World Cup game where the other team has you down and then they own-goal themselves into a loss.*

Like, damn. Weimar Germany fell to the party of Hugo Boss and Mein Kampf. We got red hats and Presidential Pokemon.

In about 24 hours I’ll be landing in Phoenix, Arizona for TPUSA’s Americafest (which I’ll be writing about here, on the substack). I’ll get to watch people who take themselves very seriously — Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich — pivot away from the fundamentally unserious center of their movement. I mean, they have to, right? We’re getting into Weekend at Bernie’s territory.

I’ve conducted a political autopsy on Trump and my working theory is that J6 and the loss of Twitter destroyed him. When Trump woke up on January 6th, 2021, he had the ability to broadcast his every thought to a rapt audience of 87 million people and believed he had a shot of staying in office too. When he went to sleep on the 8th, he had no shot, no audience, and possibly no political future. That kind of change in fortune would wreck anybody. Imagine what it did to a narcissist.

Eventually Trump got Truth Social going, which as it turns out was the worst thing he could have done. The platform’s a hugbox. Trump could tweet a picture of actual dogshit on the sidewalk and his 4.7 million followers would fall over themselves in adulation, make a meme of it to own the libs. It’s made Trump lazy. It’s made him soft.

I’m getting word as I write this that Trump released a video two hours after his MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT talking about his plans to secure free speech online after he takes office. I suppose the conservative media will take that and run with it. Another split in reality, another dual set of facts to polarize Christmas tables around the country.

It’s hard to tell who Trump is trolling at this point.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

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*this sports metaphor comes courtesy of the kind people in the NYU grad program group chat who workshopped this metaphor with me for 17 minutes so I could sound like I know a single thing about soccer