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I don’t want to get myself tagged as the guy who thinks Trump’s done. Far from it. I’m just pointing out what may be some fissures in the edifice. There’s one dimension I wanted to add. Everything Trump talks about now is in the past and about him: The Big Lie, Russia, Tony Fauci. When was the last time you heard him talk about the wall or crime or whatever other rightist nationalist applause lines? There are some. But not much. In a way this started in the earliest days of his Presidency when he became obsessed with how his 2016 victory wasn’t sufficiently appreciated, how the Russia probe was trying to steal it from him, etc.
This points to a central but unstable dynamic with Trump. His great power is that despite being born to privilege and having every advantage he speaks the language of grievance as a native tongue. That makes him a natural for revanchist grievance politics in a way that others more immersed in the formal ideology never can be. But there’s always this risk of him going off the rails because it really is all about him. Obsessions become rabbit holes.
The move away from any policy agenda, even one that is sloganeering and insubstantial, is tied to a related trap. Anything you say is terrible today inevitably raises the question of why didn’t you fix it when you were President. We need the wall? Didn’t you have four years to build it? What about what’s happening now? What’s new?
The big thing the GOP is running on now is inflation. But that’s not something that gets Trump revved up. And really he’s mainly focused on stuff about him – all the the ways he’s been wronged. It’s not that he can’t still do a lot with this stuff. He can just say that antifa’s in power and we’re going to lose our country and all his standard lines. But taken together it makes him seem a bit dated and more so as time goes by.
Over time that creates some opening for someone like DeSantis who is very much in the Trump mold but also responding to current events, things that are happening now. Just something to think about.
