Trump Reaches A Fateful Crossroads

We should welcome it, but acknowledge the peril

CHOP! (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

About 24 hours before the House of Representatives deposed Kevin McCarthy, I caught a clip of Donald Trump, frothing mad in a New York courthouse, where he stands accused fraud. He prattled on for eight minutes of his signature invective, about as angry as I’ve ever seen him, before encouraging no one in particular (but we all know who) to “go after” New York Attorney General Letitia James. 

Trump quickly found himself under a gag order, but not for that. It was for a different outburst, and the order was limited: Trump had separately attacked the clerk of the same court, and the judge overseeing the case limited himself to prohibiting Trump from further disparaging court staff. 

That decision was typical of the gun-shy accountability Trump typically faces, when he faces any at all—enough to notice, much less than warranted. But in thinking back on the eight-minute screed it dawned on me that the gun-shy approach is probably nearing the end of its viability, and Trump is lashing out so angrily in part because he knows it. 

And if that’s true, it means any number of weird, satisfying, or unsettling developments may be upon us; the air is only just becoming turbulent, and we have little time to brace or reflect. 

Trump’s rage on Monday struck me as the most genuine I’ve seen from him since January 6, and maybe ever. He was not, in my assessment, posturing and playing victim for votes. Something real, something he genuinely cares about, is at stake, and he senses it’s all but lost. It was his primal response to real accountability, raw and joyless because he’s never really experienced anything like this before. The E. Jean Carroll judgment was, of course, real—but it was also, to someone with Trump’s access to money, a minor irritant. The New York civil-fraud case is a much bigger threat to his wealth, legacy, and sense of prestige. 

I think it’s very likely more is coming, and not just in the New York trial. Trump is poised to lose his money and eventually his freedom, and in this anger-stage of grief, he is doing and saying things that will make gun-shy accountability untenable. There is a reasonable chance Trump will end up in jail or otherwise confined for violating the terms of his bond well before he ever faces a jury verdict.

If I were more conspiracy minded, I’d assume, rather than merely suspect, that Trump’s rising desperation explains why he did nothing to help rescue McCarthy from decapitation, and why he publicly flirted with the possibility of being elected House speaker himself, before ultimately endorsing Jim Jordan, his muscle in Congress, for the job. 

The first part was McCarthy’s punishment for not intentionally shutting down the government—an act of maladministration Trump believes might have thwarted or stalled his federal criminal trials. The second is about ensuring McCarthy’s successor won’t make the same mistake. 

Let me interject here to note a couple things: 

1. If Trump saw a path to the speakership for himself, he would have taken it.
   

2. Even with his endorsement of Jordan, I don’t rule out a Trump-for-Speaker revival candidacy, if and when it turns out Jordan also doesn’t have the votes, and House Republicans find themselves unable to elect a different speaker from their own conference.
   

3. If that happens, I still think Trump will lose (are there any Republicans in Congress who’d refuse to promote Jim Jordan to the speakership but would give Trump the nod? I’d guess there are not.)  

But while from Trump’s perspective, holding the office of speaker directly might come with some tactical advantages over elevating a proxy like Jordan, it’s a distinction without a difference for rank-and-file Republicans. 

These trial balloons aren’t aloft because of Jordan’s reputation as a consensus builder, or Trump’s abiding respect for the institution of the House. They’re demanding the ultimate expression of complicity from the party. Obviously Republicans have abetted Trump repeatedly over the years, but almost always in ways that leave them a berth of plausible deniability. Making Jordan speaker would require near unanimity, and complete buy-in. Every Republican who voted yes would be voting for Trump’s immunity from the law, for his right to do everything from revealing state secrets to fomenting insurrection, for the proposition that the January 6 rioters were martyrs, for terminating the Constitution, for handing Ukraine to Russia.

Again, I don’t think it will happen. But the fact that it is plausible at all reflects a growing desperation within MAGA, and within Trump’s own psyche, to force this snowballing accountability to an end. And anyone willing to go along with it is in effect saying they’d bring the whole system down with them if they thought it might buy Trump an increment of time. 

In light of all this madness, some liberals may give in to buyer’s remorse: maybe we should have bailed out McCarthy, maybe we poked the bear too hard.

That’s loser talk. That’s a recipe for playing patsy to Republicans and their threats and abuses forever. 

The only dignified response from liberals is: Bring it. Nobody should want Jim Jordan to be speaker, to say nothing of Trump himself, but these are decisions Republicans have to make about how faithfully they want to represent themselves to the public, and whether they think the public will like it. Democrats will have a much harder time defeating MAGA-style authoritarianism if they intervene (out of fear of the unknown or to protect the institution of the House) to install McCarthy-style apparatchiks without receiving any concessions. What Democrats can offer is votes for a speaker who would have to be limited in his or her partisanship to keep the job. Republicans seem completely disinclined at the moment to accept an offer like that. 

So be it, and so far, so good. 

In addition to unifying the caucus to oppose McCarthy, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House leader, also justified the party position eloquently, citing the GOP’s “unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner.” Democrats should now follow that logic to its endpoint: That is, to unanimously opposing any speaker who doesn’t acknowledge (or hasn’t acknowledged) that Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square and has been lying about it ever since. 

Add it all up and you have a bracing but unsettlingly combustible situation. Trump might lose a big chunk of his business. He might be jailed or otherwise gagged and confined. The House Republican majority might collapse under the weight of the Big Lie. These would all be developments to celebrate. But Republicans might also line up behind Jim Jordan and shut down the government indefinitely. (Would the frontline members who just made him speaker then turn on him? We can’t know—but as President Biden noted last week in his remarks on internal threats to democracy, their silence is deafening.) Trump’s most loyal and violent supporters could and probably will engage in more frequent acts of political terrorism. You could even imagine Trump—with his business broken and his freedom on the line—trying to make a break for it, maybe in exchange for state secrets. (Think that’s just extreme hyperbole? Read this.)   

As the turbulence becomes more intense, I suspect there will be a lot of second guessing, both on the left, and across the political spectrum. Most acutely, Senate Republicans who voted to acquit Trump at trial after January 6 will know in their hearts that they’re the authors of everything that’s happened since. But others will have to wonder, too: the political leaders who tried to avoid direct confrontation with Trump whenever possible; the business and civil-society leaders who played nice from time to time thinking they could get something out of him; the prosecutors who cabined investigations and overlooked wrongdoing and tread lightly, summing to a lengthy delay in accountability; the judges who have been exceptionally tolerant of Trump’s conduct long since enough became enough.

But if on the other side of that turbulence Trump is out of options and his faction in the House is discredited, we’ll be in a better place. We’ll see we were wrong to ever be gun shy, and that we should have hastened this moment from the get go.