August 8, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
The more he tries to dominate, the more Trump ‘decomposes’
He can’t change a lifetime of habits.
Just before I posted this piece, the former president gave a press conference at his Florida mansion. The questions weren’t as difficult as those he faced at last week’s convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, but if the current Theory of Trump is accurate, they aren’t going to help Donald Trump’s White House bid. They’re going to hurt. We should all be so lucky.
The current Theory of Trump comes from Sarah Longwell. She’s the publisher of The Bulwark, a former Republican and a pollster. She’s often on cable news talking about what swing voters want. Last week, after the NABJ interview, she said the more people see Trump, the lower his approval ratings are. The less they see, the higher they are.
That’s her Theory of Trump, and that should sound familiar to you. I have been saying for months that most people, most of the time, have not been paying attention to politics. That’s why the president’s approval rating has been so low relative to Trump’s. Once Trump secured the GOP nomination, people would start paying attention, and once they did, I argued, Biden’s approval rating would start to improve.
Perhaps today’s presser will be for Trump what the debate was for Joe Biden. The president hoped to ease concerns about his age with a knockout performance. Trump may have hoped to quell concerns about him after “decomposing” at last week’s NABJ convention.
It may not look like it, since the president is no longer in the running, but I was right – for about two days. On June 25, the polling average of the president’s approval rating eclipsed Trump’s for the first time this year. (This is according to 538’s polling average tracker, and granted, it was low, about 40 percent.) But then came The Disaster Debate on June 27. That was the end of my theory, at least as it applied to Joe Biden.
The part about Trump was right, though, and Longwell’s Theory seems to affirm that. It also seems to affirm another of my arguments here at the Editorial Board – that Trump is the “affirmative action” candidate.
His approval rating increases when his time in public decreases. So his success isn’t because of him. It’s in spite of him. Something is pushing those numbers up, of course, namely the Republicans, the rightwing media apparatus, the billionaire class and a Washington press corps generally oriented toward the preferences of white people. Trump doesn’t earn ratings. They are given to him. If we accept the illiberal view of affirmative action – it rewards the undeserving – that’s him.
Being the “affirmative action” candidate isn’t all sunshine, though. Like many a rich man’s son, Trump doesn’t believe he has been given his success. He believes he has earned it, and he has earned it by means familiar to many a rich man’s son – by dominating people, usually through some combination of breaking the law and daring authorities to enforce it. And it’s this belief that he has earned his success through domination that’s putting this rich man’s son in a pickle. The more he feels the urge to dominate people’s minds, the less people want, and the less people want, the less likely he is going to win the election.
Remember the difference between need and want. Vice President Kamala Harris wants to be president. She wants your attention for the purpose of achieving that objective. (If Harris loses, she will go back to her own life, a pretty good one, I’d say.) Trump, however, doesn’t want your attention. He needs it. He must have it, the way an addict must have a fix. And not getting what he must have is an offense, indeed a serious injustice, practically a crime worthy of any reaction, up to and including the attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government. (If he loses this election, he’s probably going to die.)
And because he must have it, he can’t understand why others don’t. I suspect his world fell to pieces the day Biden dropped out. He really believes Biden can’t possibly believe anything he ever says, because Trump never believes anything he ever says. For Trump, men in power do not willingly give it up. Yet the president did, and now, in addition to facing a landscape permanently changed by his departure, Trump must face the stone-cold reality of being wrong about everything.
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He’ll never admit it, of course, and such denial is why Trump said, during today’s presser, that he hasn’t “recalibrated” his campaign to accommodate a landscape permanently changed by Biden’s departure. Such denial is also why he said, at today’s presser, that it was virtually unconstitutional for him to face Harris, instead of the man he’s been campaigning against for the last five years. Not only does he deserve your attention, he deserves things to stay as they were, and if this rich man’s son doesn’t get what he deserves, there’s going to be hell to pay.
Which is probably what Sarah Longwell was talking about when she said voters, when they see more of Trump than they would like to see, see his “decomposition.” They are seeing what they could not see as long as the president was in the running, and they could not see Trump’s “decomposition,” because the press corps did not see it. These same people saw The Disaster Debate, too. They saw Trump’s habitual incoherence. Yet no one, virtually no one, called on him to drop out.
Perhaps today’s press conference will be for Trump what The Disaster Debate was for Biden. Biden hoped to ease concerns about his age with a knockout performance. Trump may have hoped to quell concerns about him after “decomposing” at last week’s convention of National Association of Black Journalists. He’s always been a joke, but rarely have people laughed at him, as they did at the NABJ. He believes himself the greatest of all time, but after that, he was reduced to a mere goat. The question is whether the Washington press and pundits corps will do for Trump what they did for Biden, by which I mean ha ha, just kidding.
Even so, today everyone could see Trump is a man who can’t adjust, won’t adjust, because to do so would mean changing a lifetime of habits, including the urge to rush toward television cameras to dominate people’s minds, thus accelerating the pickle he’s in, even as he believes he’s taking, not what he’s been given, but what he deserves.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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