I’m used to Donald Trump being painfully loud, proudly obnoxious and, well, sort of bonkers. I’m used to alligators-on-the-border Trump, sharks-in-the-water Trump, Hannibal Lecter Trump.
I’m not used to the Trump of the past two weeks, who has held back almost as much as he has held forth, stripping the Republican Party platform of several extremist flourishes and distancing himself (for now) from the Heritage Foundation’s designs for a quasi-autocratic, demi-theocratic America.
And this loosely hinged version of Trump scares me much, much more than the utterly unhinged one.
It tells me that he understands what a turning point the June 27 debate was, realizes the virtue of stepping back while pundits pummel Biden and the Democratic Party reels, and can sporadically muster the discipline to do so. He smells victory in November in a way he’s never really smelled it before, and his nose isn’t off. As I said: terrifying.
It also tells me that he or at least some of his most influential advisers are open-eyed about his vulnerabilities and about key constituencies and are focused on both. What they did with the platform, just before next week’s Republican National Convention, was soften its anti-abortion stance and tone down the homophobia. Yoo-hoo, suburban women, you can safely park your votes here!
It’s a lie, but Trump is excellent at those. It’s also a warning. Biden’s theory of victory as he dismisses qualms about his candidacy, lashes out at critics and puts his legacy — and the nation’s future — in serious jeopardy is that Trump’s irrationality trumps any infirmity, and that as Election Day nears and voters start really paying attention, they’ll get fresh glimpses of what an erratic, cruel and ignorant despot Trump is.
But what if Trump shows them something else? Puts on sheep’s clothing or at least a few fleecy tufts here and there? What does that do to Democrats’ odds of keeping him out of the White House and American democracy intact?
I’m not sure Trump is capable of a costume change at this point — at least not a sustained one. He was hardly a subdued statesman at a rally in Florida on Tuesday, when he savaged Biden’s looks (Chris Christie’s, too) and mocked the casualties of drug addiction. His account of the debate went so far beyond boasting and gloating that we need a whole new vocabulary of self-adoration to describe it.
“Even CNN said, as I walked off the stage, that it was one of the greatest performances they’ve ever seen,” he told his supporters. He’s confusing himself with Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” and Jake Tapper and Dana Bash with Oscar voters. He also claimed that the debate “was one of the highest-rated shows ever on television.” Not in the same galaxy as the truth, though I’m sure J.D. Vance sweetly whispered some nonsense like that in Trump’s ear, only for Marco Rubio to muscle Vance aside and tell Trump that all the founding fathers combined lacked the political wisdom that radiated from his lectern that night.
But Trump is relying on more than obscene hyperbole as he looks to Election Day. Any Democrat who doesn’t realize and worry about that is criminally negligent.
In Axios on Wednesday morning, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported on Trump’s personal, Sharpie-armed edits of his party’s platform, on his advisers’ successful urging of him not to vow political retribution or launder the Jan. 6 rioting during the debate, and on his and their microtargeting of crucial groups of voters in pivotal states.
In The Atlantic later on Wednesday, Tim Alberta profiled two principal architects of Trump’s presidential bid, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, remarking on the work they’d done to “eliminate the havoc and guesswork that defined Trump’s previous two campaigns for the presidency.” He wrote that “they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections.” The article’s headline: “Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win.”
There’s Trumpworld strategy to match Trump’s bluster. And that informs the doubts that many of us have expressed about Biden’s ability to prevail. We’re not carelessly and causelessly demeaning him, and we’re certainly not equating his shortcomings with Trump’s, not even close. We’re making sure not to underestimate Trump, not with stakes this high. We’re recognizing the plausibility — maybe even the probability — of a Trump victory.
And we’re desperately rooting for a response from Democratic leaders that recognizes it as well. The polls aren’t meaningless. It’s not just pundits but also voters who have apprehensions, deep ones, about Biden’s fitness. Those misgivings reflect what we can all see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. They can’t simply be wished and spun away. They’ll continue to command a degree of attention that redounds to Trump’s benefit.
Trump, for his part, may use that distraction to regroup and — to the very limited but potentially consequential extent possible — reintroduce himself to fitfully engaged voters as someone who doesn’t see a moat filled with reptiles as the answer to illegal immigration, whose real-world preoccupations don’t mimic the reel-world plots of “Jaws” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” who needn’t be the flamboyant center of attention every single minute of every single hour of every single day.
Of course he’s even worse and wackier than that — which is why Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s decisions over the coming days matter so immeasurably much.
For the Love of Sentences
On Substack, Tim Kreider wrote: “This upcoming election is what science fiction writers call a Jonbar hinge — one of those pivotal points in history when the timelines diverge, leading to two radically different futures. Neither is ideal: One is a continuation of the same failing geriatric corporatocracy we’ve discontentedly lived in our whole lives; the other, a fascist theocracy with a vindictive toddler-god as figurehead.” (Thanks to Min Liao of Staten Island for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri responded to Biden’s remark in an ABC News interview that if he ultimately lost to Trump, he’d be consoled by having tried his hardest: “You can tell your Little League team that what counts is that they left it all on the field, because if they do not win, the other team is not going to pillage their city.” Her column’s headline? “Don’t worry about the plane landing. The pilot will give it his all.” (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)
In The Richmond Times-Dispatch: Michael Paul Williams praised Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting Supreme Court opinion about presidential immunity: “For Chief Justice John Roberts to dismiss Sotomayor’s concerns is like a police officer shouting, ‘Move along, nothing to see here,’ as we catch a glimpse of a chalk outline in the shape of America.” (Katherine Calos, Richmond, Va.)
In The Guardian, Marina Hyde analyzed the recent election in Britain that toppled Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Sunak’s campaign was conducted like a gender-reveal party where the device that’s meant to release the puff of blue smoke accidentally functions as a pipe bomb and burns the house down.” She was also rattled to see a certain right-wing politician win a seat in the British Parliament. “It’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage,” she observed. “Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.” She added: “Farage is the horror version of ‘Inside Out,’ where Mendacity is only just holding off Racism at the control console.” (Paul Tacon, Chester, England, and Michael Park, Uxbridge, Ontario, among others)
In Newsweek, Aron Solomon assessed the sudden humbling of the right and comeback of the left in another country: “For those looking for an American analogy for Sunday in France, there simply isn’t one. The best I’ve got is that while Lucy was about to pull away the football as Charlie Brown kicked it, a jaguar ate them both and the ball rolled to Snoopy, who realized it was made of solid gold.” (Susie Coliver, San Francisco)
In his coverage of the Euro 2024 soccer tournament in The Irish Times, Ken Early recounted England’s underwhelming if successful effort to overcome Slovakia’s one-goal lead: “They were knocking on the door, not with the insistent menacing tone of the secret police who come to take you away at five in the morning, but like a man who realizes he has lost his keys in the pub and might soon give up and sleep on the step.” (Catherine Hopkins, Portland, Ore.)
And in The New York Times, Ezra Klein argued against Democrats’ worries about the messiness of figuring out a nominee other than President Biden: “A fear of disorder can become a pathology all its own. Some problems cannot be solved without opening yourself to uncertainty. Some information cannot be surfaced without a bit of chaos and conflict. We have all had seasons in our lives in which we lost control, only to discover new strengths and possibilities. As it is for people, so it is for parties.” (Frank Bruni, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Watching and Reading
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Apparently five years is all it takes — for me, at least — to forget enough of something I watched, even something I treasured, to go back to it and be surprised, delighted and deeply moved by it all over again. I recently revisited the Phoebe Waller-Bridge comedy-drama “Fleabag,” both the first season (2016) and the second (2019), and while some of it was instantly familiar, much wasn’t. And my memory of it was utterly flawed in this regard: I somehow recalled that the second of its six-episode seasons didn’t live up to the first, and that’s not true at all.
The first season, which introduces a scarred and sarcastic young London woman who’s looking for so much more than sex or even love, is a work of sharp wit. The second season is a work of art — an exquisitely written, heartbreaking portrait of someone sloughing off a carapace of studied jadedness to reveal the deep yearning within. And that fox! If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, you have pleasures ahead of you. And if you pursue them and find Season 1 a bit draggy and indulgent, I understand and encourage you to push through and turn the corner into Season 2. But if, from the get-go, the tone of “Fleabag” leaves you cold? Then it’s not for you. Abandon the project. Different jokes for different folks.
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Speaking of resurfacing: The New Yorker does an especially fine job of pulling articles from its archives and showcasing them anew, at least digitally, for subscribers, and it did so recently with the critic David Denby’s 2010 reappraisal of the actress Joan Crawford’s turbulent career. Several newsletter readers sent me favorite sentences from it, after which I found myself reading it from start to finish. It’s excellent, not just for its artful prose but also for its generous, layered look at a Hollywood performer reduced to caricature by Faye Dunaway’s overwrought pantomime of her in the “sensationally vindictive” (Denby’s apt description) movie “Mommie Dearest,” released in 1981.
On a Personal (by Which I Mean Regan) Note
I don’t have people over all that often, partly because I find it stressful — what if I screw up the food or they disapprove of my paint colors or they hate my playlist? — and partly because I pour enough effort into my actual obligations that there’s not a whole lot left over for host duties. So when, as happened recently, friends gather at my house on several evenings of the same week, Regan is out of sorts.
She’s excited when guests arrive — when they coo at her and pet her and bring all these stimulating new scents and voices into her world — but then she paces. She moves from one room to another, she goes off somewhere to hide, she reappears, she finds some old bone in a crevice of one of her dog beds and gnaws on it, as if burning off nervous energy.
And then, sometime around 8 p.m., my guests and I look up to find her standing several feet away, pointed in my direction, glaring at me. Doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t blink. Just glares.
The hour is the tell. It’s the point by which she and I, on our own, are almost always upstairs, and she takes her place at the foot of the bed as I stretch out to read or watch something on my iPad. She is so attuned to that timing, so accustomed to that schedule, that she doesn’t know what to do with its disruption. Other than give me that chiding, accusatory look.
It’s a reminder that dogs are quintessential creatures of habit, and it’s a prompt to reflect on why. I think they have one want that transcends and ties together all the others: security. And when the rules of their world are suddenly violated — when its metabolism abruptly shifts — they’re disoriented and at least slightly distressed. They’re insecure. Unpredictability has crept in. Who knows what could join it?
As it is with my four-legged companion, so it is with many of my two-legged ones. Maybe it’s mammalian, this clinging to rituals and rhythms. What creature doesn’t feel safer knowing what the hours ahead hold?
The post This Is How You Know Trump Smells Victory appeared first on New York Times.
