Until now it has been unclear to me precisely how Trump ends. His manifestly rotten character hasn’t alienated his supporters, who are all too ready with rationalizations and fluent in trade-offs. They’re also unbothered by many of his missteps, because he has sold those to a cynical electorate as media fables and rivals’ fabrications. He’s so enterprising and assiduous at pointing the finger elsewhere that many voters have lost their bearings. Defeat is victory. Oppressors are liberators. Corruption is caring. Mar-a-Loco is Shangri-La.
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“Even Trump’s Supporters Are Getting Tired of His Daily Drama” was the headline on Jim Geraghty’s Monday column in National Review, which sometimes travels fantastically creative routes to reach the sunny side of Trump.
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He linked to a lament by the conservative writer Rod Dreher, who, he noted, “is exhausted from the president behaving like ‘a clown who refuses to meet with the prime minister of Denmark because she won’t sell him Greenland.’”
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I wouldn’t be surprised if voters consciously or subconsciously conclude that they just can’t continue to live like this and that four more years would be ruinous, if not to the country as a whole, then to our individual psyches. By the time Election Day rolls around, they may crave nothing more electric than stability and serenity. That wouldn’t be a bad Democratic bumper sticker. It’s essentially the message of Joe Biden’s campaign.
Donald Trump Has Worn Us All Out
We can only hope that Frank Bruni is correct.