Donald Trump is not really a politician. He is a phenomenon. A recent column on RealClearPolitics, commenting on the ecstatic reception Trump received at the Republican convention on July 18, described him as the “GOP’s Comeback Kid.”
The GOP’s “Lazarus” or “Phoenix” would have been equally apt. Lazarus came back from the dead. The Phoenix is said to reconstitute itself from its own ashes. Donald Trump has several times returned from political death, baffling the pundits, enraging his opponents.
In what is sure to become an iconic image, Trump met a would-be assassin’s bullet at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally last week with a defiantly raised fist and bloodied face shouting “Fight, fight, fight” as a gaggle of Secret Service agents huddled around him. He had just snatched life from the jaws of death.
He went on a scant five days later in Milwaukee, ear bandaged, to deliver an extraordinary speech accepting the Republican nomination for president. His themes? National unity and making America great again.
Once again, the man who was supposed to be yesterday’s news was occupying every headline. The elite, progressive consensus that brought us Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the United States had declared Donald Trump an ephemeral aberration or detour from the road to woke satori. Trump’s performance at the RNC convention, not to mention his soaring poll numbers, showed how wrong they were.
The self-appointed guardians of the consensus have always underestimated Donald Trump. In part that was because they could never take him seriously. Back in the 1980s, Graydon Carter dismissed this naff real-estate developer as a “short-finger vulgarian.” He was rich, yes, but look at the common folk he consorts with: the prize fighters, the B-list celebrities, nary an Ivy-Leaguer among them. Look at his gaudy taste: all that gold and gilt, his name in majuscule plastered everywhere, those horrible ties.
Somehow Trump prevailed. At first it was all a joke. Remember when he ran in 2016? What incredulous laughs the commentator Ann Coulter sparked when, early on in the campaign, she said that she thought Trump was the front runner? What, that clown?
Everyone from former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on down rejected the idea with contempt. “Take it to the bank,” Pelosi said before the 2016 election. Donald Trump is not going to be president of the United States.
At some point, the Democrats got nervous. They released clips of Trump saying rude (but true) things about how many women acquiesce to celebrity. “That will finish him,” many pundits concluded, rubbing their hands and smacking their lips. If it had merely been quoted, it might go away. But there Trump is, in flagrante delicto as it were, saying these misogynistic things. It will crush him.
But it didn’t.
It was impossible that Trump could win until it became inevitable.
Then the gloves came off.
The country was treated nearly two years of the Russia Collusion Delusion in which former FBI director Robert Mueller, the puppet of democratic activist Andrew Weissmann, spent $40 million trying to establish that Donald Trump had won the election only because Vladimir Putin had intervened to help him. Eventually, it was revealed that the whole narrative had been cooked up (and paid for) as opposition research by Hillary Clinton’s team. But that didn’t signify. It tied Trump down. It opened him and his administration to incontinent harassment. It was meant to destroy him.
But it didn’t. Eventually, he was exonerated. The Phoenix rose again. But so did Trump’s enemies. In a phone call with President Zelinskyy of Ukraine, Trump asked, inter alia, about the Biden family’s business dealings there. That was enough to prompt an indictment. Trump won then, too. But, having indicted him once, the Democrats decided to indict him again—mirabile dictu, after he had left office. Why? Because a bunch of his supporters had gone on a self-guided tour of the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Joe Biden and others said that was the worst event in American history since Pearl Harbor, since the Civil War.
In fact, it was mostly a staged Reichstag event in which dozens of federal agents guided and goaded the protestors. For his part, Trump urged his followers to make their views known “peacefully and patriotically.” But that was forgotten in the rush to capitalize on the event and use it as a weapon to Get Trump.
What I have called “the January 6 insurrection hoax” almost destroyed Donald Trump. It failed, but not before relegating Trump to a political limbo where he could be tormented at will by a weaponized and vengeful department of justice.
A year ago, almost all commentators had written Trump off. He was facing indictments in four states. For a moment, it looked as though he might be bankrupted. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits “excessive fines,” but that did not prevent a wretched judge in New York from imposing a $355 million fine on Trump for overvaluing his real estate holdings.
What? Yep, $355 million of the crispest, with bail set at $450 million. Trump was accused of overvaluing his assets to obtain bank loans. Unfortunately for that accusation, Trump actually paid back the loans, with the specified interest, and so the banks were happy and said they would do business with him again. This was a trial for fraud in which no one had been defrauded. There were no victims, no harm, no money lost.
Not good enough said the judge, who denied Trump a jury trial, imposed a gag order, and adopted the KGB principle of “show me the man and I will show you the crime.” Trump is Trump, ergo Trump is guilty. No one was really surprised by the verdict. It was the stunning penalty that occasioned a sharp intake of breath.
Not only was Trump fined what amounted to almost half a billion dollars, he was also prohibited from running any business in New York and enjoined from obtaining loans from any New York banks for a period of three years.
Similar assaults were unfolding in Georgia, Washington, and Florida.
Suddenly, though, several Supreme Court decisions intervened. There was such a thing as presidential immunity, the Court ruled. Laws enacted to deal with accounting fraud could not be dusted off and used to prosecute people who demonstrated at the U.S. Capitol.
One by one the legal cases against Trump crumbled. Even Democratic pundits—the honest ones—can see the writing on the wall. A few days ago, Doug Schoen, a pollster for Bill Clinton, wrote that Trump “may well have sealed the outcome of the 2024 election” with his speech at the RNC. It was, said Schoen, “unmatched in recent American political history.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A year ago, most pundits had written off Trump. But here he is, leading everywhere in the polls. Schoen is not, as he notes, a Trump partisan. On the contrary. But he is a partisan of reality. And the reality is that Trump is on the cusp of a historic victory. The election is just over three months away. One can imagine plot twists that result in a Trump loss. But probability—the “very guide of life,” as Bishop Butler put it—suggests that Schoen is right. Donald Trump, despite the many plot twists he has been central to, really is the comeback kid. Among other things, that also means that he is the overwhelming favorite to win the presidency in 2024.
Roger Kimball