Donald Trump is fading away
The belief that President Donald Trump has gone into hiding in recent weeks is perhaps as much a figment of the media’s imagining as it is a reality. Trump has certainly disappeared from the public stage. Trevor Noah captures the prevailing mood by suggesting Trump has “checked out of the presidency”, but it’s also natural in the days and weeks after an election for the key players, both winners and losers, to scale back their efforts. If it’s understandable why network anchors disappear for a couple of weeks of R&R after months spent covering the campaign, then the same must surely true of presidents sitting and elect, who spent so much time trying to convince us they had boundless energy. Now, however, like everybody else, they take some time docked to their recharging stations. Christmas looms and January will be a busy month.
All of this is especially true in the twilight days of a presidency when you simply see less of the outgoing president than you did beforehand. That’s to be expected in a system of government where it’s often said that a president’s power diminishes after the second year of their term. By the time they enter the period of transition, the incumbent has usually turned their mind to thoughts of legacy, perhaps a presidential library, a publishing deal, and a few egregious pardons. It’s just the media who project onto it some grander narrative about the transitory nature of power.
In the case of Donald Trump, however, there’s also the added tendency to look deeper and try to recognise some psychology at play. This, after all, has been a presidency that is so much more understandable through the language of psychology than the language of politics. Mary Trump’s opposition to her uncle would not have been as effective were she merely another Trump instead of a trained psychologist.
For example, when the President appeared in the Oval Office on Monday to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to wrestler (think “Olympic”, not Lycra and permatan) Dan Gable, Trump abruptly walked out during questions from the Press. It left Gable to stand there looking slightly embarrassed. “He’s gone!” he announced, which, in a political sense, really is the big question.
Though Trump has always been characterised by his willingness to spar with the press, it’s not unknown for him to have a mood change mid-sentence and turn on his heels. Is he bored, annoyed, or does he merely possess a flighty temperament? Might there be even more to it than that? Has he simply given up? Just where do we place the emphasis about a president who, for four years, hasn’t been overly keen on the routines of the office, who has already shattered records for days spent on the golf course, and whose daily schedule introduces largely comprise blocks of “executive time” whose purpose remains vague?
The simple truth of the matter is that Trump is still out there but the nature of his power is now changing. He might still be playing his usual disruptive ground game but his proxies have neither the character nor ability to carry it through. Rudy Giuliani is dripping hair dye and Louie Gohmert spitting teeth but without the power of a re-elected commander-in-chief at their back, this has become a grotesquely unfashionable pantomime.
The best Tweet of the US election belongs to whoever came up with the line: “This is the way the Trump era ends: not with a bang but a WI/MI/PA.” And so it has proved. Predictably, arguments that the Supreme Court would side with Trump and overturn the election across the key swing states have proved baseless. Trump elevated conservatives to the Supreme Court not understanding that conservative justices will do what conservative justices tend to do: they preserve rather than offer radical reinterpretations of old laws. Don’t, in other words, expect to see Trump raising his hand on 20th January except, perhaps, at a rally meant to spoil Joe Biden’s inauguration.
And that is the story going forward. Transition means both Joe Biden working to elevate the old professional political class but also Trump accepting his new role as celebrity former president, perhaps the role to which he’s most suited. Yet to assume Trump is “gone” is to presume that this is a binary choice. Rumours that Trump will depart the White House for Christmas at Mar-a-Lago and will not return in January sound entirely reasonable but that shouldn’t assume that he will disappear entirely. Money has been raised in the name of the court challenges that aren’t much of a challenge and will continue to be raised in the name of Trump’s 2024 election campaign that is unlikely to be much of an election campaign. His story now has less to say about the future of America than it does about the future of the Republican Party.
And that is why the next chapter of this story might prove to be the most interesting. The runoffs for the two Senate seats in Georgia loom in January, with Trump (or, more specifically, Trump’s populism) likely to play enough of a part that party unity will last until then. Look beyond the pragmatism of this continued alliance, however, and you can see how Republicans are eager to move on. The House of Representatives just passed a $741 billion defence bill by a vote of 335-78, despite opposition from Trump. Those numbers don’t lie. Clearly, many Republicans wish to escape Trump who stands in the way of anybody with presidential ambitions. Yet, over in the Senate, the loyalty to this president remain, underscoring the contradictory belief that to succeed in a post-Trump era, they cannot entirely disavow the 45th president. That is their conundrum. Trump will soon be both gone and ever-present; an unresolvable paradox that will trouble Republicans for the foreseeable future.