No President Has Embarrassed This Country the Way Trump Did Last Night

First of all, I could barely stay
awake. It was only a 25-minute speech, and it’s not like 9:25 p.m. is my
bedtime, but President Donald Trump’s affect was so strained, his rhetoric so
ploddingly predictable, and his “evidence” so vaporous that my mind started
wandering at around 9:13. I wondered if it was only me, because I’m obviously
not the most objective observer in the world when it comes to Trump, so
afterward I flipped on Fox News for a few minutes, long enough to see that even
Sean Hannity couldn’t rouse himself into a state of excitation.

So Trump’s much-ballyhooed (chiefly
by him) speech Thursday night was a dud. So say I; so, in not so many words,
said Hannity (perhaps lurking in the corners of his mind last night was the nearly
$800 million his network paid out in a legal settlement after it was caught
promoting Trump’s lies); so
said Playbook this morning (“Trump’s anticlimax”); so said the gang on Morning
Joe. That’s good. It tells us that that power he had over people and
institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.

More than that, it was just an
embarrassing moment for the United States of America. When has a president ever
done anything like that—commandeered the bully pulpit to spread poisonous
half-truths and lies? Presidents often lie about this or that particular thing.
But no one has ever pressed an obviously bogus case like that. Even the
throwaway lines were poisonous lies (“We had transgender for everybody” before
he returned to the White House). So it’s unlikely that most Americans are
taking it very seriously.

Still: He’s the president, he’s
backed by a couple hundred lapdogs on Capitol Hill who will repeat and endorse
whatever he says, and of course he is reinforced by a propaganda network that
reaches millions of Americans every day that will do the same. So the speech
still matters, and it may set in train naked attempts to rig the election and
prevent some Americans from voting.

But having seen the speech, and
despite what everyone is saying, and indeed despite what I myself assumed going
in, I’m not so sure that the main point here was to lay some kind of groundwork
for November. Trump may be the most corrupt and furtive man ever to occupy the
presidency, but in this one way he is achingly transparent: His motivations are
always right out there. And his motivation last night wasn’t really November.
It was just what he said. It was 2020.

This man-child with the emotional
life of an 11-year-old and an ego that bruises more easily than a three-day-old
banana will never stop being obsessed about 2020. In Trump’s mind, Trump can’t
lose. It simply can’t happen. (Privately, he has admitted
to more than one former aide that he lost, but let’s set that aside for now.)
And nothing is ever his fault. Ergo, the election had to be stolen. And he has
to “prove” it.

A normal person would let this go
after a while and start focusing on the future. The broad interpretation that
last night’s speech was really about 2026 and 2028 is a function of people
making that assumption. But it’s a fatal assumption in this case. Trump is not
normal. Trump is possessed.

His loss must be vindicated,
whatever it takes. It might be vindicated by lies. He will know deep down that
they are lies, but he won’t care. For Trump, the world is a jungle—eat or be
eaten. It’s an authoritarian worldview, because if that’s what you believe,
then any action is justified to avoid being the eaten. But he can’t drop it
until the vindication is received.

Plenty of dangers lurk for the
republic, despite his motivation being mainly retroactive, by the way. The
sycophant he wants to install as attorney general, who referred
to himself as Trump’s lawyer at his nomination hearing this week, has
proven himself more than capable of filing charges against anyone Trump wants
him to indict. And the sycophant he wants to install as director of national
intelligence, who at his hearing this week couldn’t
bring himself to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, will presumably
gather intel on anyone Trump tells him to look into. So we have every reason on
earth to fear that if Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton are confirmed in their
respective positions, they’ll take a torch to the Constitution in an attempt to
give Trump his vindication.

So picture it. Two and a half more
years of sham indictments, destroyed reputations, phony charges repeated by
state propagandists who call themselves journalists. And since none of it will
work, because the 2020 election was not in fact stolen, it will continue until
the day Trump leaves office. Beyond, actually. He’ll be on this jihad until the
day that last well-done steak with ketchup arrests whatever’s left of his
heart.

That’s bad enough. But yes,
inevitably, the speech will have ramifications for this November. It’s hard to
know right now what they will be. On the one hand, it seems that his cherished
SAVE America Act will never become law. So he probably can’t do that.

Otherwise, though, saying what he
said last night about 2020 tees it up for him to repeat as needed between now
and November 3 that he—and Attorney General Blanche and DNI Clayton—have
unearthed new evidence that the deep staters are up to their old 2020 tricks.
Therefore, they have no choice but to deploy ICE agents to certain polling
places. This is clearly against
federal law. Blanche had said at the Conservative Political Action
Conference in March that such a move might be necessary; at his hearing, under
questioning from Senator Amy Klobuchar, he said
he’d “follow the law,” but his language was slippery.

In sum: Trump’s motivation may be
retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the
speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim
reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies
could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice
in this country and our electoral process.

At the same time, let’s conclude on
a more positive note. The reaction to the speech is for the most part
encouragingly negative and dismissive. The New York Times, well known
for the cowardly equivocation of its homepage headlines regarding such matters,
actually used the phrase “outlandish claims” in an early headline. For the Times,
that’s a shot of Tabasco sauce.

Maybe this speech, combined with
those Justice Department goons serving
subpoenas to four Times reporters at their homes, will finally
convince executive editor Joe Kahn that a newspaper’s job actually is to
fight for democracy. The water’s fine, Joe; as Victor Laszlo said to Rick
Blaine, it’s never too late to join the fight. ...