Trump might be too demented to remember there is a future, but enablers shouldn't forget
Accountability is waiting.
The president is demented. It's why he lashed out at a reporter today in the Oval Office. Donald Trump said: "Quiet. Quiet! What's wrong with you? Are you a sick person?"
It's also why he acts like there is no future.
With the prospect looming over him of a US Congress controlled by the Democrats, Donald Trump is behaving like time is running out. In the last week, he has lifted sanctions on Russian oil, sabotaged Ukraine, and "waived" news laws designed to punish Vladimir Putin.
The devil gets his due.
And the due date has come.
Courtesy of the White House via Aaron Rupar.
That might sound like a good thing, but a demented, futureless president is dangerous. Consider that right now, before the midterms, Trump has the incentive to end the war against Iran. Prices are extortionate. The solution is restoring the flow of oil. But there may be no such incentive after November. As Cole Bucy and Nate Swanson wrote in Foreign Policy last month, Trump "may no longer feel burdened to pretend to be interested."
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Once election season is over, odds are Trump will turn his focus entirely inward to avoid accountability or settle scores or strawboss the public's attention to stop it from moving away from him in anticipation of the next election. One result is an Iran that's free to do more of the same burning up of the US economy. Short-term, there is little to be gained with a president who believes if he's going down, he's going to take everyone down with him.
That's why it's important to remind authoritarians that there will be a future, said Zeb Larson, a historian who writes for Dame and Liberal Currents. In the interview below, Zeb told me one of the ways the Democrats can be a truly oppositional party is by constantly reminding the president – but especially his enablers – that "the future awaits them."
They won’t change their behavior on their own, Zeb told me, "because none of them can imagine a post-Trump future. It terrifies them. If they can just not deal with it at all, that leaves them freedom of action. Constant reminders about the fact that the future awaits them will break up his coalition, and also tee the country up for a post-Trump future."
Initially, I got in touch with Zeb, because I wanted to talk about a piece he wrote a year ago, published in Dame, about the president's clear cognitive deterioration, and what happens when authoritarian coalitions like his wait around for their leaders to unravel completely.
But after our conversation, news broke of former and current national security officials advising state elections officials on what to do if Trump uses "federal powers to sway the upcoming vote, covering categories that include legal and illegal activity," according to the Post. "Among their concerns are that the administration could deploy troops or immigration agents to polling stations or seek to nullify results based on claims of voter fraud."
Suddenly, Zeb's point took on bigger significance.
There will be a future. Accountability awaits there.
Trump may be too demented to remember, but others shouldn't.
A year ago, you said Trump's cognitive deterioration is obvious and asked: Who's really running the administration? Your piece in Dame came out before the war. The question is more pressing now. What can history teach us about moments like this?
Yeah, I wrote that before I knew anything about Natalie Harp, but she fits the historical mold perfectly. Her actual position is unclear but she wields access to Trump and his dwindling attention span, so she is now a power broker. And that’s where history is useful, I think, because whatever the normal processes for decision making in government are all gone now.
More philosophically, the opposition (Democrats) need to understand that they have to offer a vision of the future. Trump and those around him won’t do it because none of them can imagine a post-Trump future. It terrifies them. If they can just not deal with it at all, that leaves them freedom of action. Constant reminders about the fact that the future awaits them will break up his coalition, and also tee the country up for a post-Trump future.
In your piece, you describe two roads: one is rigging elections from maga figures who won't give up power. The other is in-fighting between maga factions that plunge us all into chaos. Seems kinda hopeless?
I don’t personally feel hopeless, unless what you’re hoping for is a return to an earlier political status quo. Everybody should now know that Republicans won’t do the right thing on their own. Even the Iran War has just barely dented his control over the party. But he is hugely unpopular, and that seems poised to get worse.
I think what we can’t afford is complacency and the idea that Trump is at the root of all of everything that’s wrong. Democrats should be teeing up every aspect of civil society they can to fight against election tampering — in other words, act like an opposition party. Authoritarians do lose their own rigged elections, but it happens because the vote totals are too hard to ignore and because people are out in the streets. Maga infighting could be an incredible opportunity if and when it comes, as long as Democrats are organized themselves.
A lot has changed since your piece ran. The Dems are now more oppositional than they were, but are they oppositional enough?
Ha, it would take a lot to be enough in my book, but they’re getting there. I still want to see more concrete plans for what they want to do once they regain power. Focusing on economic issues feels safe in a bad way: as Trump has demonstrated, politicians tend to be better at breaking the economy than making it hum.
I want specific, concrete plans for accountability, fixing parts of the government like the Supreme Court, undoing the damage done by DOGE, and so on. My peers at Liberal Currents have done a whole series on this, The Reconstruction Papers. Be ambitious! Try to shape public opinion with demands and stop acting as though they can only ever respond to what they think voters want. This latest attack on Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is perfect because it shows how dangerous a large immigration police apparatus is: it can become fundamentally undemocratic. We can’t live with this thing going forward, so talk constantly about what comes next.
Trump will be a lame duck soon. The center of gravity is going to move away from him, virtually overnight. Being a sadistic narcissist who is clearly struggling with dementia, he's not going to take kindly to that. Do historians recognize these situations and what can be done?
He will absolutely rage over this and it will be dangerous. He knows at some level that he’s old and dying, and one of the things about dictators is that they rarely talk about lineage or what comes after them. If something can succeed them, it could do so right now, which makes succession a threat. He will be very content to burn everything down.
Luckily for us, it’s terrible for the maga coalition. People hoping to escape accountability, or be Trump’s successor, don’t want to live in the burned down ruins that he’ll leave behind. It will promote infighting, but a savvy opposition can use that to its advantage. The coalition collapsing makes it so much more likely that individual members can’t escape accountability, so it’s better for them to cut deals.
Anthony Scaramucci said months ago that Trump is going to sabotage the GOP. "His personality is 'you guys were nothing before I got on the stage and I’ve carried you for the last 12 years, and the 2020 election was rigged and everyone knows it, and I should’ve won that election, and I’ve returned to the presidency carrying all the Republicans on my back, and when I leave ... you’re going back to nothing' ... that’s Donald Trump's personality." Hopeful? Scary? What should a reasonable person think?
Hopeful in the medium-term, because I don’t really see how the GOP reinvents itself post-Trump. He is a political anomaly and we’ll never be able to separate his appeal from "The Apprentice." What that does is create an opening for the rest of us, because the GOP will come out of this so bruised and without any real core ideologically.
But in the short-term, it is frightening. Whether he’ll embark on another foreign policy disaster, I don’t know; Trump hates being a loser and [the Iran war] has already painted him as one. But at home, he’s going to feel even less inhibited about going after his critics or tanking the economy even further. The best thing for us to do is not to lose heart and just not stop shouting or resisting; reminders of his mortality and that this will end will make it harder for those around him to keep going.
