Prebut Donald Trump
No more inside voice, or inside game. Just beat him to the punch for once.
The only thing I know with complete certainty about Donald Trump’s second inaugural address is that it won’t be sincere.
Trump is incapable of sincerity, at least in public life—or at least in realms of public life that don’t touch on the fate of Harambe, the deceased gorilla, RIP.
Yet despite Trump’s insincerity, he is able to convince many people, even people who aren’t terribly fond of him, of a lot of nonsense. At a minimum, he’s able to convince them that simple truths are hard to ascertain.
That’s the big problem any time Trump has access to a sizable audience. But there’s a decent workaround.
I can’t know exactly what Trump will say on Monday and neither can Democrats, but the certainty that it won’t contain a sincere assessment of life in America, or of how he plans to govern, drastically limits the element of surprise. It allows us to anticipate broad themes he might adopt, and increases the urgency of refuting or repudiating them in advance. The best way to inoculate people to deception is to give them the tools they need to detect it.
And so I am pleading with Democrats: Enough post-election chastening and consensus rituals, and enough pretending Trump has earned the benefit of the doubt. Instead, prime Americans for the lies he’s likely to tell, and make it clear why he isn’t to be trusted.
DOG THAT CAUGHT THE CARNAGE
Without making any predictions, I’m confident that Trump will take one of two tacks in his address, or perhaps a hybrid of both:
Fire and brimstone—that is, a reprise of his 2017 inaugural;
Feigned magnanimity.
A second “American Carnage”-style speech, filled with lies about crime and immigration and economic misery, would most easily allow him to claim credit, days or weeks down the line, for the stable nation he’ll inherit on Monday. That’s like the null hypothesis: Trump will be Trump.
Insincere grace, by contrast, is the device that would allow him to extend the undeserved honeymoon he’s enjoyed the past two months—though it doesn’t come easily to a man of Trump’s temperament. Credulous reporters would marvel, credulous commentators would swoon, Trump would finally become president. Then he’d exploit his ill-gotten good will in familiar, predatory fashion.
Both approaches are fundamentally deceptive, and anyone who wasn’t born yesterday, or who can read a chart, can say so without fear or favor. Trump doesn’t feel magnanimity as a human impulse, and doesn’t respect it when he sees it in others. It would behoove everyone who watches his inauguration Monday to have that in mind, on the chance he pretends otherwise.
If he gets touched by an angel before Monday afternoon, he can prove it by actually being magnanimous. He can withdraw his worst cabinet nominees, and replace them with credible, honest public servants. He can stop lying about the 2020 election, and smearing and threatening the people who sought justice for it. He can stop scapegoating the powerless.
But he won’t.
Trump is also not set to inherit American carnage. He’s set, once again, to inherit a strong economy and social peace threatened almost exclusively by his fellow travelers. He’s also set to pretend otherwise.
And so my plea to Democrats is to put just a little effort into limiting the number of people Trump will fool with whichever deceptive course he chooses. Assign someone, anyone capable of delivering remarks competently, to pick some platform, any platform, and say what’s true: Despite a campaign season worth of lies and agitprop, Joe Biden built an economy stronger than any in decades; when Trump predictably declares he inherited and reversed a disaster, it will be a lie. If and when he wrecks the economy again, it will be his fault. Joe Biden inherited a crime wave from Donald Trump and returned crime to below its pre-Trump levels. He inherited a depressed economy, and delivered full employment. Biden conducted his presidency with actual magnanimity—or, at least, without malice—and we’re about to be reminded why we voted him into office in the first place.
CABINET IN THE WOODS
I don’t expect this to happen, but if any elected Democrats are looking to be convinced, I’d ask them to consider the effectiveness of the strategy they adopted after Trump announced his cabinet.
Democrats are not to blame for the fact that Republicans appear poised to confirm Pete Hegseth, a lying, drunk, unseasoned sex pest, to run the U.S. military, or Pam Bondi, who supported Trump’s procedural coup in 2020, to run the Justice Department. Senate GOP complicity in Trump’s corruption is an old story, and the conference hasn’t grown braver or less fascism-curious over the past four years.
But that just raises the question of why Senate Democrats decided to spend the last 10 weeks in a pose of strategic silence. Why they though they’d have better luck this time letting the press do their work for them, while they pleaded with their GOP colleagues to do the right thing behind the scenes.
There was a brief opportunity to draw some reasonable lines: No Democratic votes for loyalty-tested Republicans. No Democratic votes for insurrectionists. No Democratic votes for people who don’t renounce the Big Lie, or who simply have no business running major bureaucracies. There are only a few days left to warn Republicans: we won’t spare you from a reckoning over the calamities you unleash; the consequences of your votes will be in front of you, not behind you.
But there’s no way to go back in time, to aggressively litigate the fitness or character of these nominees in public, and Democrats don’t seem inclined to change tacks going forward anyhow. I’m not even convinced Democrats will vote as a bloc against Bondi.
If there’s an appetite for trying another approach, it’s probably easier at this point to begin where we are, on the eve of inauguration, rather than where we were before Thanksgiving. But such an approach would be new, and unsanctioned by the leadership.
When Trump belched that he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico, Chuck Schumer offered this in response. “Renaming the Gulf of Mexico may be a zany new idea, but it isn’t going to help people save money at the grocery store…. If Donald Trump wants to rename a gulf to sound more patriotic, I’d say we will help him on one condition and only one condition: let’s come up with a real plan first – not a concept of a plan – to lower prices for Americans.”
I’m all for mocking Trump, and applaud the instinct. But this tells me something else, too. Democratic leaders really do think that prices, per se, are why Trump won the election, and that if he fails to lower prices, they’ll drag him down just like they dragged down Biden, then Kamala Harris. Schumer seems unaware that, on our current course, the economy and prices will soon vanish as a point of contention in American political discourse. Economic sentiment is already inverting as Republican voters demonstrate (once again) that their views on the economy are rooted deep in partisanship. Since the election, and with no change to the macroeconomy, the plurality has flipped from people who say they were better off five years ago than they are today, to people who say they’re better off today than they were five years ago. It will likely become an outright majority before the end of winter. Republican media will stop complaining about the economy and start celebrating it.
Trump could obviously harm himself by creating a new burst of inflation or causing a recession. But he’s not going to “come up with a real plan” to “lower prices” because he knows he doesn’t have to. All he has to do is claim victory, a task simplified by the fact that Democratic leaders like Schumer refuse to claim it for their own party.
Democrats can’t beat Trump to the punch if their official line is “sorry we left you with such high prices.” But there’s still a passing chance to wrongfoot him, and that’s before he spews poison to tens of millions of American viewers. Democrats know who this man is, and that makes it their responsibility to limit the spread of his lies, so they don’t corrupt us, as a people, more than they have to.
I have no intention of watching or reading about the inauguration. He is an illegitimate candidate backed by corrupt judges, the SCOTUS 6 and little miss Loose Cannon.
History will not be kind and I will not recognize this puppet government.i can only hope we get through the next four years in tact and there will be another election. There’s no guarantee there will be.
People had to Google oligarchy? No wonder Harris lost.
What you probably exposed without realizing it here is the real reason Democrats fail to exploit the power given to them; weak leadership. Schumer is especially weak, he frequently got outplayed by the minority in the Senate. Pelosi refusing to hand over the reigns to younger, more capable, Democrats will continue to enable the autocratic rise.
At the end of the day it's best to remind ourselves that Trump says things, most of them are meant to incite reaction. Don't react, the attention from reacting to the things he says is what drives and sustains him. Instead, we should ignore what he says and focus on what he and his cabinet actually does.
Actions speak louder than words. For a narcissist, their words are their foil and they are where they hide from their deeds.