Welcome Back to Pottersville: He Looks Nice Enough

If, on that blessed day, if it ever comes, we'll be looking back on the Trump years as the ones that proved prophets correct when they warned us of people like Trump decades or even centuries ago.

We'll think of what Sinclair Lewis (reportedly) said about fascism coming to America draped in an American flag and holding a cross. Some of the more historically literate of us will recall what Alexander Hamilton said about future despots.

(Editor's note: For those purists who demand good historical scholarship, Lewis did, in fact write in It Can't Happen Here, "But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty."

Which is a seamless and perfect summation of the right wing as we see and hear it in 2023.)

But Donald John Trump breaks all the molds, norms and rules even for authoritarian strongmen and wouldbe strongmen. Reagan, for instance, being a professional actor for decades before jumping into right wing politics, understood the value of charisma, even though his was oleaginous.

Bush II also understood that and, with Karl Rove's and Dick Cheney's help, developed a strange hodge-podge charisma of Aw Shucks evangelical populism and occasional truculence. The result was this bifurcated Frankenstein that, against all rhyme or reason, played well with the enthusiastically cruel and crazy rubes outside of Crawford, Texas.

Donald Trump didn't have any use for these examples. He already had his own strongman persona, carefully crafted, curated and cultivated by Mark Burnett, the right wing genius who gave us a show about a failed businessman who posed as a successful one and made, "You're fired!" his catchphrase.

But once The Apprentice went to that Great NBC Vault in the Sky when Trump went down that escalator before a largely paid flash mob, Trump could dispense with the semi-genial corporate genius who dispensed dubious employment opportunities like counterfeit alms to the poor. What we got, instead, that day was the monster that had been pacing its cage for nearly seven decades, the one of which, in the past, we'd seen just glimpses.

That was the same monster, of course, that we'd seen in full-page front page ads in five of New York's biggest newspapers preemptively calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, five teenagers of color who were convicted of assaulting and raping a white woman. It took 13 years and a confession from the actual assailant to finally spring the five men. And, to this day, Trump still insists they're guilty despite DNA evidence proving the contrary.

The scandal took down Linda Fairstein. Trump has yet to suffer the slightest comeuppance.

So, by 2015, Trump, already a veteran of two failed presidential campaigns (In 2000 and 2008), knew he could dispense with his TV image on The Apprentice. It shouldn't have worked. There he was, before a mercenary crowd just there to earn a quick fifty bucks, inveighing against Mexicans like a drunk uncle at a family barbecue and bragging about how rich he was.

It was perhaps the worst campaign kickoff speech of all time next to Jeanine Pirro who couldn't get past, "Hillary Clinton..." before being made to slink off the stage and campaign trail. Charisma? We don't need no stinkin' charisma.

To paraphrase George Santayana, "Those who do not heed the lessons of history are doomed to avoid them."

The next thing anyone knew, this orange freak was leading all the Republican contenders, including Jeb Bush, who'd announced just the day before Trump. And right after Jon Stewart retired from The Daily Show. O, the timing! 😞

With the help of the usual Republican dirty tricks (namely vote-purging in places like Wayne County, Michigan, where 55,000 African American-majority votes suddenly "disappeared"), Trump gets shoehorned into the White House like an oversized battery in an old Chevy engine block.

Four years and 400,000 needlessly dead Americans later, Trump goes out in an ersatz blaze of glory and kills nine more people on the way out the door. Like a bloated, petulant brat bested in kickball, Trump slunk out of DC, taking Air Force One with him in his waning moments in power, and refused to attend Joe Biden's inauguration at the same exact spot where he'd launched a riot just two weeks before, proving the criminal doesn't always return to the scene of the crime.

And that leads us to now. Most one termers, when they lose their reelection bids, slink away into obscurity and hit the rubber chicken circuit, go into private industry, write a retrospective memoir of lies and omissions or, in the case of Bush II, find their inner Gaugin.

Not Trump. No, Trump once again is breaking the mold or using it to cudgel his self-perceived enemies, which seems to be the entire world. He's angrier and more defiant than ever, floating like whale shit in a vast ocean of hardly-dissipated disaffection into which he'd successfully tapped in 2015-16 at his Nuremberg rallies.

The difference between what we saw eight years ago is two impeachments, four federal criminal indictments, four arrests and 91 felony counts. It's obvious to anyone he only wants to get back in the White House to beat all those charges, even though Fani Willis' case in Fulton County and the 13 counts she brought against him are immune to the presidential powers of pardon and even that of the Georgia Governor, which don't even exist.

We're seeing something in Trump that is at once more dangerous and alarming than anything we'd seen in the dystopian fiction of Sinclair Lewis or George Orwell or the warnings of Hamilton.

Instead, we're being treated to daily rants about how unfair the cases against him are, how crooked the prosecutors are, how low the GOP debate's TV ratings were... Nothing in the way of policy positions or suggestions for how to, actually, you know, make America great again.

And this clown is, once again, leading all the also-rans by a pretty unhealthy margin.

Because, fuck charisma, fuck policy positions and proposals that don't involve gutting the Civil Service and stuffing it with every neonazi psychopath this nation can offer. Or something that doesn't promise only grievance and revenge on prosecutors or lawmakers who'd committed the unpardonable sin of holding him to task for his vast panoply of crimes that would've done Capone proud.

And apparently that's good enough for his supporters who think his countless charges are either hit jobs by partisan Democrats or that his rampant criminality is a splendid example of Trump's rebel outsider status (conveniently forgetting he made DC his erstwhile home while he wasn't golfing at Mar a Lago and set up a hotel just 16 blocks from the WH).