Donald Trump’s most dangerous race is not with other Republican candidates, but against the law. In his political match, he faces no serious contest. His victory in the Iowa caucuses results was crushing. But in his legal trials, he is on the run. For Trump, the legal is the political.
The calendars overlap. His overarching strategy is not so much calculated to defeat his feeble Republican opponents but to delay his trials by any gambit necessary. The delays give him space to depict himself as a martyr, taking the slings and arrows for his believers, who are his hope to rescue him.
So long as the band plays, he doesn’t have to face the music. Once it stops, his primary voters are replaced by a jury. He can rant all he likes on his Truth Social account, but the evidence will finally speak for itself. Trump strains to exploit the political campaign as his shield to avoid the day of judgment. Plus, it’s a cash cow.
January 6 is more than the most important issue in the election for Trump and his followers. It is his passion play. His rivals have helpfully acted as his Greek chorus. Rather than develop an alternative strategy, say, to lever college-educated Republicans away from Trump, they have shouted from the wings to amplify his conspiracy theories. “Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” Ron DeSantis tweeted last June. Nikki Haley, for her part, chimed in to denounce the justice system as “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics”. Trump could not have paid for better ringers.
Only Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, erstwhile but remorseful booster, was willing to utter the forbidden, “Too bad, go to jail.” The rest waved their hands at an August debate like eager pupils seeking teacher’s attention that they would pardon Trump. Five days before the Iowa caucuses, polling poorly, Christie dropped out, declaring: “I’m going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again.” He refused to endorse anyone. “No one’s going to tell the truth about him.” On a hot mic, he was caught saying about Haley: “She’s going to get smoked,” and “She’s not up to this.” Stating the obvious was more a shrug than a prophesy. Yet she could not even scratch into second place.
The result of the Iowa caucuses was an easy tale foretold. But it has been significant in revealing the degree to which Trump has consolidated his domination over the shell of the Republican party. At the end of the process that will inexorably nominate him the remnant of the GOP will be subsumed into his cult.
His success in debauching opinion among Republicans is clear in the answer of Iowa Republicans to an exit poll question: “Do you think that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020?” Of the respondents, 65% answered negatively, and of them 69% voted for Trump. For them, the January 6 insurrection is the centerpiece of this election. With Trump, they believe that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers imprisoned for their violent assault on the Capitol are “hostages” who deserve pardons, and that Trump must be vindicated. In their eyes, he is not being prosecuted, but persecuted, just as Trump’s primary opponents have echoed.
Iowa was more than a political event. It was a religious experience for most of the caucus goers, slightly more than half of them evangelical Christian nationalists. Voting for Trump was not a civic exercise but a spiritual crusade to make America into a Christian nation on a divine mission as the founding fathers supposedly intended according to their crackpot history. The first Trump term was just the beginning; the next will be like a second coming. Iowa is the first step towards Trump’s anointment, his deification for a holy war.
In Trump’s first campaign in 2016, he was an outlander, a brash New Yorker from the church of the art of the deal. Iowa Republicans have consistently given their votes to the candidate who was the most fervent evangelical Christian linked to the religious right. In 2000, born-again George W Bush won in a walk; in 2008, it was preacher and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who defeated John McCain; in 2012, rightwing Catholic Rick Santorum trounced Mitt Romney; and in 2016 Ted Cruz of Texas clobbered Trump, who then only won only 21% of the evangelical support.
Within the new dispensation, Trump has been elevated into a double existence. He is both an American incarnation of King Cyrus of ancient Persia, who conquered Babylon, and the godhead himself. Before January 6, Christian nationalists saw him as a flawed vessel sent by God to restore the old kingdom. Many of the January 6 insurrectionists flaunted Christian nationalist signs, flags and slogans. Now, they view Trump as Christ-like, being crucified on their behalf. As Cyrus, Trump is forgiven his sins. As Christ, his crimes are signs of his divinity.
During the 2016 Iowa caucuses, the most prominent evangelical leader of the Christian right in the state, Bob Vander Plaats, endorsed Ted Cruz. This time he backed DeSantis. Trump was so confident of evangelical backing that two days before the caucuses, he laid into him, tweeting: “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years. He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats.”
Trump in Iowa conflated his pressing legal troubles with the imaginary oppression of Christians. “Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before. And also presidents like never before,” Trump said on 19 December. Referring to the mafia kingpin who was finally nailed on income tax evasion, he added: “I always say Al Capone was treated better than I was treated.” Vander Plaats’ grip was broken.
Of all the odd occurrences in the campaign so far, one of the strangest was a stray cogent remark from Ron DeSantis, who has been relentlessly clueless to the point that after his last debate with Nikki Haley he approached the audience from the stage to shake his wife’s hand. In trying to explain why he was failing, without mentioning that he spent more on private jets than on advertising, he blathered into coherence. “It’s all a racket – they’re trying to get clicks, they’re trying to do all this stuff,” he said. “Big causes start out as a movement, end up a business and degenerate into a racket. That’s just human nature.”
Not exactly. DeSantis was paraphrasing a social philosopher on the psychological basis of authoritarian movements. Eric Hoffer was an itinerant longshoreman whose book The True Believer, on the mentality of Naziism and Communism, published in 1951, drew praise from President Dwight Eisenhower in one of his first press conferences. Hoffer described how individuals erased their volition and critical thinking by submerging themselves into movements led by demagogues.
“The fanatic,” Hoffer wrote, “is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.” The demagogue appeals to restoring the good old days. “A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present.” Through propaganda, “people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know’”. Enemies must be identified as the source of decay. “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.” But, Hoffer wrote, it would be a mistake to give too much credence to the ideas of demagogues. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”
Eisenhower, who had led the armies that defeated Hitler, wrote a letter in 1958 warning against authoritarianism. Citing Hoffer, he stated that “dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions”.
DeSantis, who has attempted and failed to supplant Trump by whipping up hysteria against the menace of “wokeness”, more or less got one of Hoffer’s memorable quotes right. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
In Georgia, on 14 August 2023, Trump was indicted on 41 felony counts with 18 co-defendants for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results under the state’s Rico statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
The problem in applying Hoffer’s aphorism to Trump is that with him it was always a racket.
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
