Donald Trump is a liar.
Between his stiffed contractors, duped voters, horrified journalists, friends, and associates he’s thrown under the bus, and the three wives he’s fucked around on postpartum, I may be the half-billionth person to point this out. Doesn’t matter.
But as his second impeachment trial unfolds, I’m starting to think that Trump might have accomplished something incredible. He may have brought on the demise of the engine of bullshit that has powered American government for at least as long as I can remember.
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Trump acted in ways that warranted public embarrassment countless times during his presidency; Congress twice decided that he acted in a way that warranted impeachment. For the first impeachment, prosecutors presented a recording of a phone call where the president of the United States threatened to withhold aid to one of our allies unless that ally agreed to illegally help the president win reelection. At the time, I was pretty riveted by the proceedings. It was very exciting. But it pales in comparison to this week’s treasonous fireworks.
Now, prosecutors have hours of footage of mayhem and disarray, much of it taken by the people who ran amok at the president’s command. It’s clear to any good-faith observer of Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial this week that the former president’s influence over his worshippers was profound: He conducted the violence of January 6 like Leonard Bernstein before a symphony of assholes. And yet, almost the entire Republican caucus is about to again vote to pretend that what happened didn’t actually happen. But this time is different.
Trump, for all his flaws, did accomplish something. Millions of normally-apathetic Americans were scared into political action in 2016. For the last four years, Trump never gave them a reason to disengage. And now, politics as usual won’t work.
Maybe it’s easier to understand this way: One afternoon, several years ago, a few friends and I met at a bar near my apartment in New York. I think it was Bastille Day because the bar down the block had some specific French-themed specials. My friends and I split both a bottle and a magnum of rosé wine, which was too much wine for a group of four people, especially since none of us had eaten much that day. The afternoon turned to evening, and that evening concluded with my arms wrapped around my toilet bowl as I puked up all I’d had to drink plus everything I’d eaten over the 24 hours prior—all the pommes frites, all the moules. I knew that I’d had my fill of pink wine for a while. For years, I couldn’t even stand the smell of rosé.
Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment as president is becoming the rosé that made America puke so much they never wanted anything remotely lie-flavored again for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s ascendency inspired generationally significant levels of political activism. People who mostly ignored politics were suddenly crafting sassy protest signs on tagboards and canvassing swing districts. The women’s march the day after Trump’s inauguration may have been the largest single-day political demonstration in world history, and those people who marched in January 2017 organized and canvased in 2018, when Democrats took the House back against a gerrymandered map. And, in 2020, buoyed by both the residual energy of winning in 2018 and the righteous anger over police mistreatment of Black people, the growing coalition of anti-Trump voters took back the White House and, eventually, the Senate. Could that have happened if Trump had been a boring vessel for Mitch McConnell’s conservative fantasies?
Of course, bullshit powered American democracy before Trump’s ascent. The most cynical political actors would win elections on promises, govern in an extremely half-assed manner, shrug and blame the other side for their failures, and count on those who put them in power to give up before they could be held to account. Then, the cycle could start over again, with a new crop of idealists who believe the promises of the establishment for long enough to promote the continuation of the establishment. Once the idealists gave up and moved onto something else, like Zumba or graduate school, establishment politicians would find a new generation of young people, or people who were jolted out of complacency by a horrifying event like the Newtown shooting, or anybody who embraced an ideology with the fervor of the born-again, only to repeat the cycle.
The entire machine depended on people getting frustrated and giving up, getting bored and disengaging, or giving in and becoming a part of the machine. The worst thing that could happen to failing institutions that rely on wide-scale apathy to continue on their path of mediocrity is for people to collectively decide that they’re going to hold people in power accountable by, at the very least, remembering. When that happens, elected officials either need to govern or come up with new bullshit; too many people paying too close attention for too long means that the old bullshit doesn’t work anymore.
And that’s where now feels different. Back in November, a little more than a week after all of the major networks called the election for President Joe Biden and Trump’s big lie of the stolen election was already getting a lot of play on fringe media like Fox News and Facebook groups for crazy white moms, California Senator Dianne Feinstein publicly praised fellow Judiciary committee member Senator Lindsay Graham for the way he handled himself during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Feinstein even hugged him on camera. Dianne had not read the room.
In a normal year, Feinstein’s Good Game-ing of a small-d democratic travesty would have produced a short spike in the outrage cycle, driven by progressives who understand that this is why the establishment is a problem, followed by the empty bullet-pointing of the bloodless commentary class that understood that viral uproar merited coverage. But after Trump’s loss, Feinstein’s reduction of massive political loss to a game after which one shakes hands with the opponent didn’t work. People were pissed. What are you doing, Dianne? Feinstein, reading the room, announced on November 23 that she was stepping down from her senior post on the Judiciary Committee. She’s still running for reelection in 2024, but: baby steps.
The same thing happened with the Democrats’ COVID relief bill. Many cynically expected (I expected!) Democrats to capitulate to Republican demands like they did while negotiating the 2009 health care bill when they eliminated the public option for no fucking reason. But they didn’t. Senator Chuck Schumer, emboldened by either the majority leader’s gavel or fear that he’s about to be primaried by somebody who New York voters find more appealing, has stood up to Mitch McConnell, stood up to bad faith negotiating by Republicans. What may have been an opportunity for Democrats to blame Republicans for watering down COVID relief became an opportunity for Democrats to show strength.
Predictably, Republicans have renewed their seasonal hand-wringing about debt and deficits that they reserve for times that Democrats are in power. But too many people have been paying attention to their rhetoric for too long for them to count on popular amnesia this time. Republicans had four years to come up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. They didn’t. And, because the Republican presiding over that era was a train wreck, voters remember, because they were watching. We’ve already seen this one.
If, as the old saying goes, Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, politics as a game—and maybe, if I’m being generous, as a craft—was prizefighting for the tedious, sanctimony for the privileged. It was a way for the fortunate to try on the struggles of the disenfranchised like a wacky '90s prom dress at a thrift store. Elected representatives knew that they were nothing like the people they represented, and we knew that they were so disconnected from the problems of regular people that when they talked about us, they might as well have been talking about fictional characters.
But maybe, maybe that’s coming to an end. At the very least, it will force the people whose income is paid by taxes to be a little less lazy.
