One classic way to view the Trump era is as a series of outrages followed by dashed hopes among opponents of the president that THIS OUTRAGE will finally turn the tide against him, and lead to his disgraceful downfall and exit from the political stage upon which he has strutted and shit for too long now. I won’t pretend I haven’t been one of these frequently dashed hopers; it takes one to know one, as they say. But as the outrages have come with increasing frequency — we could say without too much exaggeration that they are now more or less constant — the general feeling that either this one or the next would do in the president seems to have gradually faded. In part, this hope has been beaten down by reality: get disappointed enough times, and you finally internalize the lesson.
But I’d also like to think it’s faded as a certain related belief has faded - that we can rely on either the GOP or Trump supporters to reach a breaking point at which they desert the president en masse. It’s gradually dawned on Democrats and others that what count as catastrophes to us count as cool moves to many in the GOP and the president’s base, from his blaming of immigrants for the bulk of our economic challenges to putting a frat boy sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court. (The president’s survival should also have discredited the hope that a vaguely-defined notion of “decency” will somehow sway enough supporters of the president to move out of his camp. Those who are moved by considerations of decency would never have supported the president in the first place.)
And yet: the discouragement we have felt so far, and the growing faith that Trump’s supporters and fellow GOP politicians will never abandon him, may have led us to be overly pessimistic about possible circumstances under which the Republican Party might actually turn on Trump. I am thinking about this today because I do think we are seeing a meltdown in this presidency that likely will accelerate in the coming months. (I say “presidency” rather than “president” because it is not just that Trump himself has become more self-absorbed in his pronouncements, erratic in his behavior, and virulent in his hate in recent weeks, but to recognize that this behavior is accompanied by diminishing evidence that any of his advisors, or the greater bureaucracy of the executive branch, can act as a shield against his worst impulses.) This particular meltdown comes in two forms: psychological, in terms of Trump’s mental health, and economic, in terms of Trump’s stewardship of the economy.
Over the past several weeks, the president seems to have been experiencing an accelerating mental health crisis, in which anger, delusions of grandeur, and panic at a potentially deteriorating economy seem to have pushed the man ever further into a downward spiral. Need we really say more than the single word “Greenland”? And with his escalation of trade wars and the resulting harm to the U.S. economy, it seems well within the realm of possibility that he will steer the country into a recession. Either factor — the president’s psychological collapse or the tanking of the American economy — could well be enough to stir Republicans into significant, if not mass opposition, to this presidency. But in combination, we behold the spectacle of a president who is clearly flailing, flustered, and self-deluded in the face of his own bad economic decisions, unable to admit a mistake; this seriously undermines any claims to strong leadership, presenting instead the image (and reality) of an incompetent man endangering both the GOP’s future prospects and voters’ livelihoods.
The past several weeks have dramatically raised the possibility that the end may come more quickly than opponents of Trump have dared dream — not because of the Democrats’ opposition, which has been sadly far from implacable, but because Republican politicians fear both his clear mental instability and his failing political acumen, and because segments of his base wish to avoid the economic shitstorm he seems determined to unleash upon the nation, whether it’s country club Republicans who’ve had enough (as Matthew Yglesias speculates here) or blue collar women who are already beginning to turn on him and so destroy the “Red Wall” of his working-class base. At some point, the Republicans may have an overwhelming interest in making Trump the solitary scapegoat of the economic poison he has forced the country to drink, as a way of preventing an electoral wipeout in 2020 and real economic harm: and it is not hard to see his mental unfitness as providing the rationale to remove him, either by invocation of the 25th amendment or forcing his resignation.
There is a right way and a wrong way for this presidency to end: the worst possible way would be for the Republicans to claim full credit for his removal, to propound a story that everything was going great until the president had a mental breakdown because of all the difficult Making America Great Again Work he was doing, a martyr to the “conservative” cause. This isn’t to say this would be a great outcome for the GOP — many millions of Americans would see through their bullshit — but it would be far less than the apocalyptic reckoning the Republican Party deserves, and would raise serious doubts about the Democrats’ understanding that there is no way forward that doesn’t include discrediting the GOP wholesale. First and foremost, saying the president is breaking down mentally threatens to excuse the very real autocratic, racist, and anti-semitic ideas he embraces and propagates. This confusion of authoritarian intent and mental erraticism can be found in much commentary: as just one example out of many, here’s CNN’s Brian Stelter making the case for Trump’s increasing erratic behavior:
The list includes Trump making racist comments about Baltimore and Democratic lawmakers; repeating ridiculous claims about voter fraud; retweeting conspiracy theories; bragging about his visits to hospitals in Dayton and El Paso; and denying things everyone heard him say. At one point he called Meghan Markle nasty on tape, then claimed he never said it.
Yet it is also possible — indeed, it is correct — to read this list and see Trump simply doubling down on the white supremacist, anti-democratic attitudes that form the core of his political identity. The president may or may not be personally deranged, but the fact of the matter is that his politics are unquestionably so. From declaring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to be “evil,” to telling Democratic congresswomen to go back their countries of origin, to telling American Jews that they are “disloyal” if they vote for Democrats, the president’s politics are beneath contempt, the stuff of dictators and the Ku Klux Klan. In the face of this evidence, arguing that the president is unfit for office because of his mental incompetence suggests that we not take seriously his vile beliefs, as if they are simply the emanations of a befuddled mind.
Unforgivably, this tack provides unwarranted cover to all those who support both his vile beliefs and his actual war on American democracy. As dangerous as Donald Trump is, personally, to our country and to the world, any politics that purposely or incidentally detaches him from the larger right-wing movement centered on a Republican Party that both shares and has supplied him with so many of his noxious ideas, and that has supported him wholeheartedly through his descent into authoritarian, racist rule, is catastrophically misguided and short-sighted. As Donald Trump founders, the only rational political approach is to ensure that he takes down as much of the Republican Party as possible; that we do not simply label him as unfit for office on grounds of mental incompetence, but that we label his ideas, and those of the equally noxious GOP, as having no place in American democracy.