The first time Donald Trump was supposed to be finished was the day he launched his 2016 presidential campaign. After descending Trump Tower’s golden escalator, the newly minted candidate promptly attacked Mexican immigrants by declaring, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” Horrified by this racist spectacle, the political cognoscenti labeled him radioactive and waited for his support to vanish. It didn’t. It only grew.
It took a while longer for the realization to settle in among pols and journalists that Trump, through some strange alchemy of personal force, simply isn’t subject to the same laws of political gravity as other politicians. He’s “Teflon Don.” Scandals that would quickly end other careers didn’t end his. The sheer number of such moments is staggering. Experts declared him finished when he impugned the wartime heroism of John McCain. He wasn’t. People demanded he apologize for attacking the Muslim family of a slain US soldier. He didn’t. Republicans abandoned him when the Access Hollywood tape leaked, expecting he’d be forced to drop out. He stayed in the race. And won.
Trump is like the star of a 1980s horror movie franchise. Like Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street or Michael Myers from Halloween, it’s impossible to do away with him. And there’s always another sequel in the works, eagerly anticipated by legions of fans. Impeach him, he comes back. Impeach him again—still here. Vote him out of office? He launched an insurrection and attempted to stay put by force.
When that didn’t work, Trump wasn’t deterred. He didn’t retire to the golf course. He didn’t go away, at least not for long. He simply filed to run for president again. And now here he is, back in the familiar position of being Republicans’ favorite politician and leading the presidential primary polls over a group of anxious also-rans who all seem to sense—even though they’d never say so—that Trump is inevitable, and he’s never going away.
If there’s one group even more eager to be done with Trump than his weary co-partisans, it’s Democrats. They all cheered last week when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted the former president on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels—another supposedly career-ending political scandal that proved to be barely a speed bump when news of the affair broke in October 2016. (Trump denies having sex with Daniels and pleaded not guilty to Bragg’s charges.)
But once more, Trump didn’t retreat or go away. Instead, he did what he always does when his actions land him in hot water: He gave an angry, defiant, self-pitying speech that seized cable news airtime and newspaper front pages. His campaign says it raised $12 million in the days after the indictment. And his lead in GOP presidential primary polls expanded.
Whatever consequences Trump may someday have to face because of his legal travails, a decline in his political popularity with Republicans doesn’t appear to be one of them. On the contrary, they have only further amplified his ubiquitous presence. There’s a good chance that prosecutors are far from finished with Trump and that additional charges against him may be in the works—in Georgia, where a prosecutor is considering racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and at the US Department of Justice, where a special prosecutor is overseeing two federal investigations of Trump, one for his handling of classified documents and the other for his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
That should be enough to ensure that Trump will be burrowed into everybody’s frontal cortex for the foreseeable future. Of course, if he reclaims the presidency, it’ll be four more years of Trump-fueled drama. If he loses—well, one way or another, it’ll probably be the same thing.Read next: Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital Was Spiraling, and Then Came FTX
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