In the latest episode of our podcast, The Two Matts, Michael Wolff, author of a definitive trilogy on Donald Trump, urges TNE founder Matt Kelly and me to take seriously the possibility of his return to the White House: “We’re just at this moment… really coming face to face with the fact that he could be the president again. This has gone from the incredible, to the fantastical, to the unimaginable, to the plausible”.
Wolff’s new book The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire is a gripping account of Rupert Murdoch’s decline, his dynastic dilemma (catnip for fans of Succession), and the damage to his legitimacy – not to mention to US democracy – wrought by his highly profitable cable channel, Fox News. It is also a parable of politics, culture and technology in the 2020s, in which Trump is inevitably a looming presence.
Time and again, Murdoch expresses profound exasperation at the former president’s refusal to fade away. He is a “loser”; he is “crazy, crazy, crazy”; he is a “fucking idiot”.
Yet here we are: in a Washington Post-ABC poll published on September 24, Trump was 10 points ahead of Joe Biden. His Christian base is rock-solid. He is doing surprisingly well among young voters. At the very least, it is hard to imagine him not winning the Republican nomination.
Last Wednesday, he was absent from the party’s second presidential debate, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. But when Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, accused Trump of being “missing in action”, the line backfired, merely emphasising what was obviously lacking from the show: its pantomime villain superstar.
True, most polls have Biden and Trump level-pegging, or thereabouts. There are still three months to go until the first GOP caucus in Iowa, and 13 until the election itself on November 5, 2024. It is impossible to know at this distance what impact the expected independent candidacy of Robert F Kennedy Jr will have.
What Trump is trying to do has been achieved only once, by Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, who came back from defeat at the hands of Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to beat the Republican in a rematch four years later.
And Cleveland, unlike Trump, was not facing 91 criminal charges. Last Tuesday, furthermore, Justice Arthur F Engoron ruled in New York that the former president persistently committed fraud by overvaluing his assets, possibly by as much as $2.2bn.
So, yes, there are plenty of caveats that must be mentioned in this case. Equally – and more importantly – there are no mechanisms that can reliably prevent the disaster of a Trump second term. Those who still count on the rules of the old political order, upon sure-fire institutional, legal and prudential forces to prevent such a travesty, are deluding themselves. Today’s politics has more in common with the indeterminacy of quantum theory than with predictable Newtonian physics.
Trump continues to capsize all certainties. Every time he is charged, he gets more popular and attracts more financial support. In the age of the conspiracy theory – no longer confined to the fringes of democracy – the notionally efficient operation of judicial, electoral and representative institutions is grotesquely reframed as evidence of a shadowy malevolence at work.
In Trump’s “Upside Down” – his very own Stranger Things, alternate world – the indictments are not a disqualification for the presidency, but clinching proof that he is the only man for the job. The very fact that the establishment insists so vociferously that he lost the 2020 election is evidence that it was stolen from him.
Already, he has had a profound impact upon American history: notably, in the reversal of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court, the decision secured by three of his appointees; and in persuading nearly 70% of Republicans that Biden’s victory was fraudulent.
What might a second Trump presidency be like? There are plenty of clues. He has indicated that he would end the war in Ukraine (code for: give Vladimir Putin most of what he wants); that he would deploy the military in the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history; that he would send the National Guard into cities afflicted by serious crime; and that he would politicise the appointment of middle-ranking federal civil servants, creating something close to an authoritarian apparat.
In a more general and chilling sense, it would be payback time. In June, he posted on Truth Social a pledge that he would appoint a special prosecutor “to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family”.
In March, he declared at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in Maryland: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution”. On Friday in Anaheim, California, he used this word again, warning that those who rob stores would be shot and that “there must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country”.
No serious candidate for the presidency has ever deployed such grotesque and horrific language. But then there has never been a politician like Trump. He is the evil Ferris Bueller, who truly believes “you can never go too far”.
As Wolff says in our interview: “He wants what he wants. He wants attention. And remember, here’s a man with no particular agenda beyond attention for himself, no particular goals, no particular policy points of view, none of the things – and this kind of marks the difficulty in understanding Trump – none of the things which anyone else in a political role would want, or has been trained to want, or understands that they might need to want.
“None of that exists for Trump. So it is just him. ‘I’m back’. It will be like that: ‘I’m back and I’m going to remind you every day that I’m back, and I’m Donald Trump.’”
In other words: buckle up.
