One Way Out

No matter who wins, we have to break this cycle

Former Pres. Donald Trump continuing to talk at a Nov. 4, 2023, campaign rally in Raleigh, NC, despite the obvious lack of audience interest. (Screengrab / KSDK video.)

For the last three presidential elections, the Republican Party has nominated the same person: Former Democrat, adjudicated discriminatory landlord, associate of mobsters, non-payer of debts, exploiter of workers, multiple bankruptee, racist, sexist, credibly accused sexual abuser Donald J. Trump, who had absolutely zero relevant job experience when he first ran and since then has added two impeachments, a criminal conviction, and civil judgments against him to his résumé.

It’s a stunning achievement. It was so inconceivable that in 2015 Politico ran a story headlined “The Death of the Three-Time Candidate: Serious presidential contenders used to run multiple times; today they can't. This is why.”¹

Republicans who stood against Trump fell in ignominy and debasement. Former Pres. George W. Bush, whose crusade a world away killed tens of thousands, has yet to muster the courage to issue a press release.

So why are we trapped in this Sartre-esque, Kafka-esque vicious vicious cycle with a classless, thoughtless, anti-intellectual, narcissistic, incurious, aliterate, ahistorical, amoral, infantile bully, blowhard, and tinhorn would-be dictator? How do we break this cycle, regardless of who takes the oath in January?

If Trump wins, we will all need to answer the call. But as his first term demonstrated, Trumpism is its own repudiation. The real challenge is to end the cycle of falling back to it endlessly.

So if Vice Pres. Kamala Harris wins, there’s the danger of assuming the threat Trump poses will have been vanquished.

Yes, the ravages of time and the horrors of daily spray-tanning will eventually shuffle Trump off this mortal coil.

But win or lose on Election day, Trump will be with us politically as long as his heart beats, lips flap, or fingers shitpost.

He will still seek to control his party. Even if he loses — and even if a rump faction waves his losses as the flag of Republican reform — Trump won’t/can’t let go.

A man who gives nothing doesn’t hand off power. He’s no Joe Biden.

Trump needs Republicans — his Republicans — in power. To protect him and his stolen money, protect him from his $2 billion of debt and protect his alleged businesses and his festering legacy and his fragile not-being-in-prison-ness.

He will spend the rest of his days seeking to warp our orbit with his gravitational pull.

Is it possible some fresh-faced Never-Trumper will finally crush Trump? Maybe. But then they’ll have to compete against Democrats without the aid of Trumpers. More likely, they’ll seek to accommodate Trump, to build a new coalition.

But be of good cheer, ye Newsfuckers, because there is reason to believe that Trump is a one-time thing.

Multi-generational dictatorships are often those in which existing autocratic systems are passed down, typically to family.

I’m sure historians have examples, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a recent autocratic movement leader who successfully passed an out-of-power movement on to an ideological heir.

And that’s all Trump has, a ragtag movement. Not a dictatorship. Trump failed to re-engineer America’s government into an autocrat’s dream, stripped of checks and balances. He moved us in that direction, and Democrats as usual did cleanup, but not enough. Most notably, our courts remain skewed.

But there is no tyranny engine for a would-be Trump successor to turn the key on. They must repeat Trump’s success at sustaining the movement. And they can’t.

The Trump coalition consists of factions mortally opposed to each other but orbiting the same orange sun.

Only Trump can pull in both holier-than-thou Christians who tsk-tsk Trump as they vote for him anyway and the vulgar, rapey biker gangs and incel shitposters disguised as political organizations and militia cosplayers. Only Trump can unite the GOP’s Nikki Haleys with its Ofdonald women who oppose no-contest divorce.

Without Trump, things fall apart. And if the center cannot hold, the far right sure can’t.

Trump’s Heir Apparent

The reason no one can succeed Trump is not just that he’ll have everything buried with him, pharaoh style. Even if you wanted to, you can’t bequeath a cult of personality. It’s right there in the ethos: I alone can fix it.

Tapping a successor refutes the essence of his appeal. L’etat c’est moi, motherfuckers. Not moi et mon frères.

Politico has a great article up on the Trump succession question. (“Succession” being another good, albeit fictional, example of futile tyranny bequeathment.)

“The movement is mostly him,” said an astute MAGA Republican in Arizona, where conservative movements are born and then, like Arizona Republicans, die. “The only person who’s been able to win on the MAGA platform is Trump.” said another astute Republican.

Because the movement c’est Trump, today’s Republican bench consists of two classes of people: Outsiders rejected by Trump World and those mired in Trump World. The latter group, the potential heirs, are in Trump’s inner circle for one of two reasons: They serve him or they bring something to the table.

The ones who serve him obviously can’t say Trump isn’t unique. Their raison d’etre is to be inadequate. They knelt before odd² — disqualifying themselves as future leaders.

The ones in Trump’s inner circle as a quid pro quo represent causes or constituencies of value to Trump. In other words, they represent something greater than themselves. But that very commitment to anything robs them of Trump’s core appeal.

Trump appeals to so many not because he opposed carbon capture or whatever the fuck. He simply promised to liberate people from having to think about shit. Before opening their face holes or hitting send.

Trump absolved them of indifference. Fuck your feelings.

The potential Trump heirs succeeded in their lanes because they were strategic and thoughtful (or, less kindly, manipulative and calculating). They won by taking others into account, so they’re a walking repudiation of Trumpism.

Trump’s driving message is nihilism. He can have no heir because every other Republican stands for something or succeeded by not just acting on impulse.

One former Trump adviser who misses this core aspect of Trump told Politico, “[T]here’s somebody who is going to be able to pick up the MAGA flag and put a much better face on it … without it being so harsh and angry and hateful, without it always sounding so asshole-ish.”

I try not to make sweeping predictions, but it’s hard to imagine this scenario playing out, because this former Trump adviser has mistaken Trump’s asshole-ish-ness as a bug rather than Trump’s essential feature.

And we don’t have to wait till Trump is gone to test this theory. If someone in the wings could put a “better face” on Trumpism, what’re they waiting for?

In realityland, the rest of the party is flailing, especially post-Roe. Republican control of the House is a fluke, potentially short-lived, of gerrymandering and New York’s Cuomovian districting.

And even with Trump still wearing his coattails, he has trouble dragging his acolytes through the voting booth. He’s failed in the special elections, where Democrats won in red states. According to Politico, Trump’s even failing to pull it off in Arizona, where Trump absolutist Kari Lake is losing. Again.

So if Trump as the current party leader can’t pull off expanding Trumpism, who could do it without him?

Of course, even if Trumpism is doomed, there are a broad range of futures we face. So how do we hasten Trumpism’s demise and minimize its impact along the way?

Election Day Is Not the Super Bowl

I have many thoughts on Democratic politicians and the party thereof, but I’ll save them for a less fraught time and focus on the current, most important, actionable-as-of-Wednesday Thing We Can Do.

The most dangerous idea in America today is the notion that Election Day is the be-all, end-all of democracy, the Super Bowl of freedom. It’s not.

If I’ve got my sports cliches right, Election Day is draft day, the day we pick who’s on the field for the next two, four, six years.

But every four years, tens of millions of Americans suit up for the election, cast their votes, and then abandon the field.

That’s why we find ourselves here every four years — asking in bewilderment, how is this close? Wondering why Democrats keep wooing the Cheneys and crypto bros of the world.

We’re trapped in this cycle because most Americans take their ball and go home once the votes are counted.

That’s the gist of tonight’s Election Eve bonus TFN: The real fight starts after the vote count. We only escape this cycle with a real, people-driven movement that is perpetual.

If you’re desperate to set politics aside, I get it. And no one says you don’t deserve a vacation. You do. Mountain climbing. Lazy rivers, margarita in hand. Whatever floats your literal or metaphorical boat.

But the majority can’t keep treating fighting as a quadrennial exercise. That’s what it means to say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It’s not about guns on fortress walls. It’s about engaging in democracy always, against those who definitely don’t stop, the crats among us: Theo, auto, and klepto.

They never stop fighting. They pay swarms of lobbyists and others to dedicate their entire waking professional lives to this fight, to protect their ability to poison our environment, to force Jesus onto our kids and into our civic life, to control women, to preserve white male Christian hegemony.

And there is no equivalent on the left.

As a longtime journalist who’s bounced from place to place, I’ve had conversations with people in politics and media about the horrific progressive vacuum. 

A party chair once described the media ambitions of some really rich lefties and these plans were laughably, terrifyingly bad. I once cold-called a VP at an ostensibly progressive media outlet (not the one you’re thinking of) to ask him why every single program on their air was shit.

Know what he said to me, this stranger who’d called him out of the blue to inquire about his outlet’s mealy-mouthed, milquetoast programming? He said, “Thank you!” He knew.

All of which means there’s no justice, there’s just us.³

Nothing changes until we flood the field.

Only when we do that will we change the political calculus so that it pays off better to court the vast pools of unengaged poor than the centrist margins. Right now, poor people see no reason to vote.

Don’t take my fucking word for it:

And here’s another one.

They’re not idiots; the margins of their lives differ from those of the pundit class. Roe died under a Democratic president. The Democratic candidate is boasting of America’s increased oil drilling and fracking.

Yes, Democrats are helping the poor not drown in our current economic system. But it’s hard to feel gratitude for people who throw you an extended-child-tax-credit life preserver if they don’t say shit about building a dam.

Tens of millions of poor people could be inspired and energized by “radical” economic populism. And there’s a good chance they will be, soon. The only question is whether it’ll come from a Trump heir or a Democrat — remember the wild enthusiasm for Sen. Bernie Sanders? It wasn’t his vibes!

On some economic issues, Trump has been to the left of Democrats. Sure, many of them are dumb ideas, but that’s not the point.

The grandest vision, the wildest goal Democrats are daring to imagine is…economic opportunity. Who even thinks in those terms outside political consulting firms?!?

I’ve seen Democratic entertainers talk about the wonders of access to affordable health care.

Nothing is stopping Democrats from articulating a wild, radical, bountiful economic future.

Forget Republicans. Stop internalizing. Stop aiming for what you think is possible. Start aiming for what you think America should be. Tell us the country you want to see, not the country you think you can get a few Republicans to help you get past a filibuster.

Simple things like, no taxes below a certain income. Period. Everyone gets a roof and food and health care. Period. Full stop. No forms.

Of course, there’s a reason Democrats don’t do this. Even the ones who’d actually support it are afraid. Teacher will rap their knuckles and call them Bernie Sanders and ask them how they’ll pay for it.

So we have two options. We magically generate more Democrats with more vision and more courage. Or we make them more scared of something other than Teacher.

But that only happens if we never go away.

And, look, I get it. The prospect of fighting forever is pre-emptively exhausting. But that’s because of how we think about it.

It’s exhausting, in part, because we think of it as something we can somehow magically “win” at. And be done forever.

But maybe the way to see it is not as a pursuit of goals but something pedestrian. Like housekeeping. Except, y’know, bros do just as much of it.

Housekeeping, like fighting for progress, is perpetual. We do it every day a little bit at a time. We don’t neglect our routines so that dishes or garbage build up and the next thing you know there’s A FASCIST RAPIST IN CHARGE.

So, no matter what happens on Tuesday, or in the fraught days and weeks ahead, let’s commit ourselves to breaking the cycle.

Housecleaning politics means we drop media that exhaust us with permanent crisis mode. Housecleaning politics means finding and supporting news sources (ahem) that are helpful — factually, cognitively, and emotionally.

Stop giving your attention to Republicans who had no beef with George W. Bush when it counted.

Get active or at least informed about your local politics⁴. Volunteer not with political campaigns but with activist organizations who fight aggressively for the causes that matter to you: Poverty, climate change, corporatocracy.

Doing that on an ongoing basis gives those causes political power. Which motivates candidates to pander to those causes. Which is what we want.

When enough of us do that, our candidates will be more afraid of us than of the rich, entrenched interests who want a system that sustains us just enough for them to keep extracting from us. Then the poor show up to vote. Then we have the power to unrig the economy, to proudly celebrate people of color and immigrants and LGBTQ+ people from the rooftops without apology.

I know, I know, it sounds so dumbly kumbaya. But here’s the thing — America does this all the time.

FDR did it. Organized labor did it. People of color did it. Women did it. LGBTQ+ people did it. Are there setbacks? Of course. But there’s no such thing as winning permanently.

The point is progress. And the progress in modern American history is undeniable. It’s fucking magical. And it’s achieved by not stopping. Eternal vigilance.

Taking the field every day. A little bit at a time.

---

1. Never forget: No one knows anything.

2. Nerd reference to this:

3. Credit to Terry Pratchett, I believe.

4. I’m not, but paid enough attention to know whose counsel I should follow when it came time to vote for local candidates.