“It’ll begin to end when the act gets tired and the audience starts walking out,” Warren Beatty, a perspicacious observer, told me eight years ago, in the early summer of 2016, when Donald Trump had just secured the Republican nomination.
At the time, Trump was calling in for hours to enraptured TV talk show hosts jacking up their ratings. It was a cocaine trade. In return he snorted $5bn in free media – more than all the other candidates combined. When Trump launched The Apprentice in 2004, a tightly edited fantasy of the six-time bankrupt as king of the heap, he had long been dismissed as a loser and bore in New York. His charade was popcorn fare for out-of-towners. Who knew that the fake reality show’s ultimate winner, announced years after its cancellation, would be JD Vance?
But, in 2016, Trump’s pastiche of fast-talking narcissism, unapologetic insults and brazen lies was eagerly amplified by many of the “leftwing radical media elites” he stuck pins in while the “poorly educated” he claimed to “love” were living the vicarious dream of owning the libs. The shtick was taken as an authentic novelty rather than the rehearsed patter of “John Barron”, his transparent former pseudo-identity as his own huckster. JD Vance, aka Jimmy Bowman, aka James Hamel, isn’t the only one on the Republican ticket with multiple personalities.
Trump’s routine was attributed to personal magic that levitated him to become seemingly inevitable. Yet Trump survived time and again, not because he ever won a popularity contest, but through the intercession of others, taken by his true believers to be divine intervention and proof of his higher election. His luck that an odd range of people with motives of their own happened to rescue him from his self-created messes built his mystique, even after he lost.
The billionaire grabbing the mic as a stand-up comedian when he came down the escalator was laughing gas for many in the media. But the billionaire part itself was an act, since he wasn’t a billionaire, but scamming loans. “You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it,” Trump thanked popular TV hosts for giving him free access on 10 February 2016. “And not necessarily supporters, but at least believers. You said there’s some potential there.” He carried a grievance that he never won an Emmy for his shambolic boss-man routine on The Apprentice. Now, he gloried in the kudos for his performance. He had finally made it, phoning in to talk shows – his art form. His heartfelt racism, misogyny and nativism were mainly excused as the joker’s tradecraft. When the TV talkers called him out, he called them “dumb”, suffering “mental breakdown”, “low IQ”, “crazy”, “psycho”. Yet those taunts were seen as something new and exciting, too. That’s entertainment.
Trump had gotten a pass in the city for decades for his fraudulent business practices. “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is,” said his sage mentor Roy Cohn – or the high-minded district attorney and how to grease his favorite philanthropy. But after the spoiled ne’er-do-well squandered nearly a half-billion dollars of his father’s fortune on casinos, yachts and planes, the New York banks cut him off. He waved his Page Six clippings about his sexual prowess, stories he had invented himself, but the bankers weren’t distracted by his flimsy celebrity. No one has accounted since for the flow of foreign funds through Deutsche Bank and other sources. Many in the media remained mesmerized by the song-and-dance.
As the shock president, Trump would supposedly be reined in by the fabled adults in the room. His entourage of misfits couldn’t staff a government. He would be contained by the responsible grown-ups, his administration pressed into the mold of a sort of fourth Bush term, with Trump as the headliner to keep the customers chortling, while the serious business was done in the backroom. The theory was the Oval Office as day care center. The Federalist Society-types squeezed every drop they could out of him – the judges and justices – but the others became his chumps. They beguiled themselves with the illusion that he was their frontman. They hadn’t reckoned that he was a career criminal, not a juvenile delinquent. Eventually it would occur to them, but they kept what they thought was secret knowledge to themselves. Publicly admitting it would pull back the curtain on their embarrassment. Over time, he gratified his sadism by humiliating them one after another, his most personal kind of entertainment. You’re fired!
Magnetic attraction was attributed to Trump in defiance of his granitic unpopularity and greater repellence. He never won the popular vote. He lost it by 2.5m in 2016 and 7m in 2020. Throughout his entire presidency, he never crossed the threshold of 50% approval in the Gallup Poll. He finished with the historically lowest approval rating for a president since polls were first taken.
Trump was headed for defeat in 2016 after his final debate with Hillary Clinton on 19 October; four days later, CNN reported their poll showing she held a 13-point lead over him. Five days later, on 28 October, 10 days before the election, the deus ex machina in the form of FBI director James Comey intervened, in violation of justice department guidelines, to reopen an investigation into Clinton’s emails, to probe whether classified material was on her aide’s husband’s computer, which eight days later, two days before the election, he declared was not there. Two subsequent state department inquiries under the Trump administration would find she never held any classified material on a private email server.
Comey’s interference, more than anything else, inspired the myth of Trump’s invincibility. Comey would be one of Trump’s first adult-in-the-room victims when he would not submit the FBI to serve Trump’s direct political orders. Having singularly elevated Trump, his sanctimony could not shield him from his defenestration.
In 2020, Trump’s utter incompetence in handling the Covid pandemic cost him re-election. He told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that at its start, “I wanted to always play it down.” When Woodward published Trump’s coldly neglectful remarks, Trump slammed Woodward’s report as “FAKE”. Woodward produced the tapes.
Anticipating defeat, Trump called the election “rigged”, organized the scheme to stop the constitutional counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Hang Mike Pence!
Supposedly, Trump was done again. The consensus stretching from Mitch McConnell to Joe Biden to Merrick Garland was that he would be left by the wayside at Mar-a-Lago to disappear while regular order returned. McConnell had intervened to save Trump twice from removal after impeachments. Garland did nothing to probe Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection for 18 months. The lapse was critical to Trump’s ability to mount another presidential campaign.
No outside force could halt Trump’s trial in New York for his 34 felony counts paying hush money to an adult film star to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election. But in the case of his theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice, a federal judge he had appointed, Aileen Cannon, threw monkey wrenches into the process to ensure he would not face justice before the election. In the January 6 case, originally scheduled for 4 March, he appealed to the supreme court, whose conservative majority ruled on 1 July to grant him absolute immunity for his “official actions”. In order to protect him and his candidacy, the court fundamentally twisted the constitution to set the president above the law. The founding fathers and originalism went out the window. If their decision had been in effect during Watergate, Nixon would have walked scot-free. Trump had been rescued from facing the music in the nick of time. “Tell me who the judge is.”
Biden demanded an early debate to dispel his age issue. He imploded on 27 June. Trump was saved. The immunity decision, coming three days later, seemed the ratification of his invulnerability.
Fate intervened yet again. On 13 July, an assassin fitting the profile of a school shooter missed him. Trump arose streaked with blood with an upraised fist. His followers proclaimed his divine salvation. In the rush of triumphalism, he named as his running mate JD Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, lately incarnated as a crusader in the Maga kulturkampf. Finally, on 21 July, Biden recognized his hopelessness and withdrew from the race.
Circumstances had conspired to coronate Trump the once and future king, invested with the powers of a “dictator on day one” by the supreme court. But at the height of his hubris his nemesis appeared.
The bullet that grazed Trump hit Biden. He had been Trump’s perfect foil, a lifelong politician appearing more fossilized than himself. The jack-in-the-box that jumped out was the 19 years younger, vital and unhesitatingly articulate Kamala Harris, whose very appearance unified the Democratic party that seemed about to burst at its seams. The inevitable and invulnerable Trump sank into his old and embittered persona. His close encounter gave him no pause; he underwent no character development. Vance flopped, his numbers the worst of any vice-presidential candidate since Thomas Eagleton dropped out as George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 after the revelation of his electro-shock therapy. Trump was aggrieved at the reversal of roles and the reversal of fortunes.
Worse, Trump had worn out his material. His rally on 22 July, the day after Biden left the race, was a concert of golden oldies. There was his story about whether he should be electrocuted by a battery-supplied boat or eaten by sharks, the Hannibal Lecter joke, the Al Capone self-reference, Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy”, “low IQ” and still running against “Crooked Joe Biden.”
Worse than that, he acknowledged his fear that his material was stale. He was filled with performance anxiety. He opened his monologue with an enigmatic: “Whenever I imitate him…” Suddenly, he brought up Melania. “She looked great the other night. She made that entrance. She made a lot of entrances. She’s just something. But she walked in. But I told her the other night, I said, ‘How good was I? How good?’ This was at a rally a couple of weeks ago. ‘How good was I?’ ‘Well, you were really good, but not great.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, it showed that you didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ Well, I was imitating Biden. So, what they do is they show the imitation of Biden. They said, ‘Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ That’s our fake news.”
Trump’s stream of consciousness disclosed his worry over his wife’s censorious judgment. He was needy for her praise. She hedged. Her withholding of unreserved flattery sent him spiraling. She suggested he was becoming Biden, someone having trouble selling his act, but Trump protected himself by casting the blame on the media. His awareness of danger to his image provoked an instinctive recoil. Showing him as Willy Loman was the true phoniness.
His campaign grasped to find a thread to pull on Harris to unravel her, the equivalent of Biden’s age or Hillary’s emails. They decided to tar her as some kind of leftwinger, but it was the generic Republican negative campaign with risible additions. “Wants To Limit Red Meat Consumption”, Trump posted. He orders his steak burnt and douses it with ketchup. “More Liberal Than Bernie Sanders.” Yawn.
Harris was rising, Trump struggling. His young sidekick hired to be his warm-up act, JD Vance, bombed on delivery. Trump was thrown back on himself. His predicament was reminiscent of the flailing music-hall hoofer played by Laurence Olivier in the grim 1960 film, The Entertainer, desperately trying to float his act, shamelessly manipulating and trampling everybody, but incapable of performing anything but the old numbers before a bored audience.
So, Trump reached to the bottom of his repertoire. On 31 July, he calculatingly accepted to be interviewed at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, an ideal forum to serve as his backdrop. “I come in good spirits,” he lied. “I was the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Then he launched his attack on Harris: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? … All of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person … And I think someone should look into that, too.”
Trump’s race-baiting is the hoariest of his riffs. He introduced his minstrel show 35 years ago when he took out full-page newspaper advertisements to demand capital punishment for five young Black men who were convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a white female jogger. The Central Park Five, as they became known, served years in prison, but had been falsely accused and were exonerated.
Trump comes by his bigotry naturally. According to his nephew, Fred Trump III, in a new memoir, All In The Family, his uncle used the N-word to blame Black people for a car scratch: “Look what the n-----s did.” A producer for The Apprentice said Trump used the N-word to describe a finalist: “I mean, would America buy a n----- winning?” Trump laid the groundwork for his 2016 presidential run by promoting the birtherism fraud against Barack Obama that he was not born in the United States. As president, Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”, And, so on and on. “The same old show,” remarked Harris.
“I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” Trump stated in 2016, when asked about his birther campaign. In attacking Harris’s “roots”, Trump returned to his.
Two days after his appearance at the NABJ, Trump “retruthed” a post on his Truth Social network from Laura Loomer, a fringe character in Maga circles notorious for her ethnic slurs, and labeled “disgusting” by the Anti-Defamation League. “I have a copy of Kamala Harris’s birth certificate,” she wrote. “Nowhere on her birth certificate does it say that she is BLACK OR AFRICAN. @KamalaHQ is a liar. Donald Trump is correct. Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been.”
Then, on 3 August, Trump backed out of a scheduled ABC News debate, proposing one on Fox News instead, issued insults that were obvious projections that Harris “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL debate against me”, that she was “afraid”, and that she and Biden are “two Low IQ individuals”. He offered as proof of her fear, that she could never “justify”, among other things, “her years long fight to stop the words, ‘Merry Christmas’.”
The Entertainer, frantic to hold the crowd’s attention, is hamming it up with his cake walk. But the minstrel show that had once packed them in at the Hippodrome has descended into burlesque. He won’t listen to Melania. “Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.”
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist
