How stupid is Trump?

Donald Trump has been on a political suicide mission for a while now, but despite all his efforts he still has some substantial (if slipping) amount of political support. His biggest mistake up until now was to attack popular winners like Kemp and DeSantis. But apparently, the loss of support stemming from those mistakes was insufficient to knock himself out of the running for president.

Apparently, that seems to bother him. Like his friend Kanye “Ye” West, Trump has decided to see how insane he can act before his support collapses entirely.

It’s like a social science experiment with 350 million participants. Researchers are asking: just how batsh!t crazy does a person have to be to lose 95% of their fans? For some reason, Trump has decided to participate as the experimental subject.

Trump’s latest foray into losing all support and credibility is his attack on the Constitution itself. Like, literally, calling for the suspension of the Constitution in order to reinstall him as President of the United States.

Let’s look at this both politically and ethically and think about what he is saying.

POLITICALLY

There are several obvious things about Trump’s statement that are simply politically stupid. Like, really really stupid. Assuming there were no legal or ethical barriers to either calling a new election or suspending the Constitution (stay with me here, I know that is insane!), it is still politically stupid.

America is facing huge economic problems, international problems, and huge internal divisions that are tearing the country apart. Nobody but a small fringe wants to re-litigate the 2020 elections. Not only is that intuitively obvious, the 2022 midterm elections put an exclamation point on that fact. Candidates that looked back to the 2020 elections lost, those who looked forward to solving problems won.

Imagine having an ad hoc presidential campaign or an effective coup in the midst of all the challenges we face. Our friends and adversaries would see a weak, divided America and international chaos would ensue. It would be a disaster. The world economy would be shaken far more than it is. It would be a crisis of enormous proportions.

Nobody wants that, except a few people who want to tear it all down. Trump would get creamed in an election–blamed for making things so much worse than they are.

Americans are done with 2020. Old news. Both election fraud and January 6th are in the rear-view mirror politically.

So politically Trump is tossing a grenade into the country. Few people want to see it explode.

ETHICALLY/LEGALLY

Where to begin? There is no legal basis for anything Trump has suggested. None. Zip. Nada. That is why he is suggesting suspending all legalities in the first place.

Basically, he is saying that in order to fix things we have to destroy everything. This is literally how Caesar came to power. Caesar never asserted that the Roman Republic was over; theoretically, all the same safeguards remained in place. Merely suspended during his dictatorship.

Yeah, right. Once you toss it all out, it’s gone. In order to accomplish what Trump is advocating you would need a coup. Nobody in power today–not the Courts, not Congress, and certainly not the Executive Branch–would even think of establishing a legal basis for a new election or installation of Trump as the legitimate winner, even if it were possible.

So the only way to do what Trump is demanding is a coup. Goodbye America.

Yeah, no.

Also–stay with me here–doing what Trump is suggesting is exactly the opposite of the Oath of Office. You know, that binding, giving your word thing? That makes you legitimate? That you swore on the Bible to uphold?



This isn’t just some promise you make with your fingers crossed behind your back. This is literally key to your legitimacy–the promise to obey the rules, even when you dislike them or hate the outcome. It’s why we accept decisions we abhor in a democracy.

If we could just ignore the laws and rules we dislike democracy really does die.

I am not a Never Trumper. That struck me as a religious affiliation, not a rational political position. For me, the only question that matters about a politician is will they make the country better? Do the right thing as much as possible? Be better than the other guy?

Well, tossing out the Constitution doesn’t make the country better. It blows it up.

THOUGHTS

I don’t see how Trump doesn’t lose even more support after this outburst. For those of us who are political geeks the temptation is to scream “this is it!,” but I doubt that is exactly true. Most people are not process oriented. They support Trump because they were better off under his leadership than Biden’s. They think he is on their side, and the other side is terrible.

Well, the other side IS terrible. But destroying everything to take them down is much worse. I have often used the Roman Empire as an analogy to the US because the parallels are compelling. Our troubles in recent decades mirror in important ways the troubles of the late Republic era in Rome.

Well, we know how that ended. Caesar. Then Augustus, who was a pretty good emperor, and then total disaster. Caesar’s short dictatorship and its end were fatal to the Republic. Rome persisted but did not become better. It became worse in the most important way–liberty for its citizens.

It’s not that the Republic wasn’t flawed or was entirely free–it wasn’t. That is the nature of human life. But the flaws corrected by naming an Emperor were supplanted by flaws infinitely worse. Dictatorship is bad, and everybody knows that.

I think that most Americans will recoil at Trump’s outburst. I certainly did. And while many will indulge in an impulse to defend him because they have liked him, their zeal to do so will diminish over time. How much effort will most people want to put into defending the indefensible?

Trump is becoming like Kanye. Saying more and more outrageous things, driving their support down to a hardcore group who will bear any humiliation.

I can’t defend Trump’s call to toss out the Constitution (or any legal procedures that pass Court muster).

And I won’t.

When Donald Trump was preparing to announce his third run for office, he likely assumed the announcement would spark the beginning of a two-year period in which he would be fêted the world over. Everywhere he went, people would spontaneously break into song and dance, thanking their “favorite president” for stepping up to rescue the country. In towns and villages throughout the United States, parades would be thrown daily in his honor, and not the kind featuring balloons depicting him as a giant, angry baby. No, these would be extremely flattering ones, giving him six-pack abs and hair that doesn’t look like it could blow away in the wind. He’d call into Fox News and they’d tell the audience, “We are in the presence of greatness!” The Republican Party would introduce legislation abolishing the presidential primary, and just give him the nomination. And maybe they’d throw in an addendum that, once he won the general, they’d get rid of the entire electoral process.

Of course, in reality, things didn’t entirely pan out that way. Almost no one in the GOP has come out to support his bid, despite his threats to punish Republicans who don’t endorse him ASAP. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has spent considerable time and effort telling people he’s a loser. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Thursday had Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating him in 2024 by five points. Instead of 24/7 parades, he was hit this week with a guilty conviction for his family business, which a jury said committed 17 different crimes. His own daughter, the one he really likes, wouldn’t even show up to his big announcement and has made it clear she wants nothing to do with his future political endeavors.

And while no one would ever accuse Donald Trump of accurately reading a room or having even the slightest grasp on reality, there’s at least one indication he seems to have an inkling of an idea that his candidacy has not been as well-received as he’d hoped: the fact that he reportedly has barely left the house in nearly a month.

Yes, The Washington Post reports that since kicking off his third White House bid three weeks ago, “Donald Trump has barely left his private South Florida club—except to play golf at his course across Lake Worth Lagoon,” a situation that underscores his current pariah status within the GOP.

Per The Post:

Trump’s seclusion within the ornate walls of his club and a series of controversies—from the dinner with antisemites Ye and Nick Fuentes to a social media post suggesting the “termination” of the Constitution—have left him increasingly isolated within his party as he tries to mount a political comeback. [Herschel] Walker’s loss in a Tuesday runoff election became the latest blow, prompting more Republicans to join the chorus faulting him for dragging down the party’s performance in this year’s midterms. “The former president presents our biggest risk of losing for 2024, and conservatives are tired of losing,” said Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Family Leader, an Iowa-based social conservative group. “Even the former president’s announcement is being greeted like it never happened. There’s no buzz amongst my network at all.”

The criticism of Trump for hurting Republicans at the ballot box is showing no sign of abating, and grew even louder after [the Georgia loss on] Tuesday. “It’s a formula that doesn’t work,” said Brian Robinson, a GOP operative in Georgia, explaining that the party’s candidates needed to reach voters outside the Trump base. “I don’t think moving forward you’re going to have another primary season where the litmus test is vowing to talk about the 2020 election.”

For its part, Team Trump insists that the fact that the ex-president has basically become a shut-in at Mar-a-Lago is nothing to read into, with The Post reporting that they never planned to follow up his announcement with a bunch of rallies or public events. “We’re still two years out,” the official told the outlet. “There’ll be a time to do events and a time to do rallies.”

And of course, no one should assume that the GOP currently giving Trump the cold shoulder actually means anything when it comes to 2024. While it’s true that few if any people are enthused about his candidacy, that’s more or less what happened when he announced his first run in 2015—before they all got on board. Still, there’s no harm in hoping his Howard Hughes era becomes permanent!