Trump's Primetime Show was a Flop, but it was also a Preview

Trump is going to steal the midterms. He made that clear this week. When will people wake up?

Nobody watched. That’s the story nobody in the White House wants told. There was better television on. There is always better television on now, which is the real humiliation, the one that only amps up the crazy. Rants about a stolen election he didn’t win have gone from spectacle to wallpaper. America has seen the routine enough times to know every beat, and the terrible thing about routine is that it stops being frightening and starts being weather, something you stop checking for and just dress around.

Here is the part that should terrify his handlers: his malignant narcissism has become so boring people are not paying attention. And not getting the attention, in this particular man, is not a relief. It is an accelerant. A grievance ignored is a grievance that metastasizes. The less the room looks at him, the more he needs the room to burn, and a man whose sense of self depends entirely on the size of the audience does not take a shrinking one quietly.

Consider, as evidence of a mind fraying at the edges, the business of the reflecting pool. He'd just spent $16 million repainting it "American Flag Blue," and he wanted to see his handiwork up close, so his motorcade, limousine and armored SUVs included, drove straight across the drained pool floor while the coating was still wet, tire tracks and all, captured on video with his own communications director captioning it "they see me rolling." Weeks later the paint began peeling off in sheets. Trump's explanation was not the wet paint his own motorcade had just rolled through. It was vandals, he said, armed with a knife, slicing a 350-foot gash into the lining. In the same way cannot accept an election he lost. He apparently cannot accept a paint job his own convoy ruined either, and like any Trump failure, it becomes someone else's fault, a conspiracy to make him look bad, as if he needs any help in that department.

And yet the support holds. That is the question worth sitting with, longer than any of us are comfortable doing: how does a man rack up a record like this and keep a base that would follow him into traffic?

1/6/2021 | Washington Post

Because the record is not ambiguous. He pardoned sixteen hundred violent criminals and called it justice. He bulldozed the East Wing of the people’s house without asking the country’s permission. He ran interference on the release of the Epstein files, and interference is a word doing a great deal of quiet work. He took over the Kennedy Center and put his own name on it, a redecoration project dressed up as cultural policy. He accepted a $400 million airplane as a personal gift and dared anyone to call it what it was. He threatened Canada. He threatened Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Colombia, Brazil. Venezuela he didn’t bother threatening. He sent special forces into Caracas and had its sitting president hauled out and flown to New York in handcuffs, an itinerary of hostility with no discernible strategy behind it beyond the pleasure of the threat itself. He tariffed nearly the entire world except Russia, and handed the planet inflation and instability as a party favor. He ordered an attack on Iran in the middle of negotiations his own administration was party to, undercutting his own diplomats mid-sentence. That war killed 175 children on its first day. He insulted the allies who used to return his calls. His ICE operation terrorized American citizens, and it has killed them too. Renée Good, a Minneapolis mother of three, was shot dead in her own car by an ICE agent in January. Weeks later, in the same city, an ICE agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse. Homeland Security called each one self-defense. The tally keeps growing and the administration keeps explaining it away. He presided over killings on the high seas. And he turned the Justice Department, an institution built to be blind, into a tool aimed at his enemies.

That is not a presidency. That is a rap sheet with a seal on it.

Trump on January 6th, 2021 | NYT

None of this is separate from the speech nobody watched. That address was the opening bid in a longer con: casting doubt on an election that hasn’t happened yet. He is already calling November rigged, months out, with no vote counted and no ballot printed, because the man who cannot accept the last election he lost is laying the groundwork to reject the next one too.

Look at who he’s installing and what he’s pushing to see the shape of it. He wants Todd Blanche, his old personal defense lawyer, confirmed as attorney general, and Blanche has already told the cameras he believes the 2020 election was rigged, the same evidence-free line his boss has been running since he lost it. That is who Trump wants holding the Justice Department through November. Alongside it sits the SAVE Act, sold as election integrity, built to make registering and voting harder for exactly the people least likely to vote for him. This isn’t a coincidence of timing. It’s the plan.

He knows what a real accounting looks like, of the self-dealing, the grift, the family enrichment run out of the West Wing, and he knows a Congress that isn’t his will not let it stay buried. So the GOP majority has to hold, by whatever means the Justice Department and the statehouses can supply, and the doubt has to be planted now, early, loud, so that whatever happens in November can be waved off as theft before it happens.

Remember January 6. That wasn’t the finale. That was the rehearsal. November is the real show, and he has spent this week telling us, quite plainly, that he does not plan to accept the ending unless he writes it himself.

It is getting worse. If America has another civil war he won’t care. In fact he’s betting on it.

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