In the weeks since the election, it’s been tough to describe Donald Trump’s coup attempt as such, because it’s been a fumbling and shambling mess. He’s posting skeins of bizarrely punctuated tweets that are basically “I WON THE ELECTION” followed by “If I kill myself, no one would even care!” Trump has gnarled into a bratty sociopathic dunce because of his financial privilege and because of America’s reflexive deference toward those who have been born into it. This simp-like reverence for wealth and power has not just coddled but cultivated his every poisonous whim, so he’s been lobbing cartoon bombs at the pillars of democratic legitimacy since he lost the presidency to the most mentally decimated candidate the Democrats could’ve run.
As all things Trump-related, this wild-eyed speedrun through disbelief has been both hilarious and grotesque. The public life of clammy end-stage Rudy Giuliani has somehow gotten even weirder since his cameo in Borat: He did a press conference thing with soy sauce snaking down the side of his face, had a noticeable outrage pwomp in front of the Michigan State Legislature, and prodded an Indian woman to say “all Chinese look alike” in court to prove some weird point about voter fraud. Tucker Carlson was accused of being a member of the Pizzagate pedophile ring simply because he asked for any evidence of “massive electoral fraud.” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany held various stilted press conferences in which she blinked rapidly and spoke in vague and heated terms about all the many serious things the Trump Administration would soon be looking into very strongly. Trump’s crack B-team of vampires resembled a federal jobs program for anyone who’s ever complimented him on Twitter, and these rafts of clammy lawsuits would be spearheaded by Sidney Powell, whose idea of a fancy lawyer outfit is a leopard-printed cardigan. This whimsical lawfare has been more or less a series of haphazard sloganeering and strongly worded nuh-uhs pitched to convince a federal judge that Trump is normal.
All these endlessly breathed breakthroughs-to-come and all that clock-killing bluster eventually collapsed into a defiant and incoherent cacophony of bullshit. This is not a compliment by any stretch, but there isn’t a president whose life has changed less for having assumed the responsibilities and gravity of the most powerful office on earth. And since he spent the bulk of those days scowling into a television that reflects his delusional monomania back to him, the resulting peevy grievances and gilded claustrophobia are now a matter of national concern. The Washington Post leaked a tape of an hour-long phone call that involved Trump trying to Fat Tony Georgia’s secretary of state into finding 11,000 votes to flip the state’s electoral results. The call quickly turned into an unknowable and unanswerable dispute, like watching a fat housecat trying to draw through a maze.
But for all the grim precedent-busting that the last five years have delivered, it’s difficult to overstate the significance of a horde of MAGA chuds storming Capitol Hill as Congress was certifying the presidential election results. It was Trump’s opinion that he won by ten or so million more votes than he’d actually received, going as far as triumphantly calling it “a sacred landslide.” Since Trump didn’t have a plan for losing the election, he expected the people under him—that is, the entire U.S. government—to find a way to stop the election that he lost, but he had no sense of how that would work. So the result was a flailing temper tantrum that could be described as Comic-Con on crack. Despite the goofy-vile aesthetics, this was still an unprecedented attack on America’s electoral integrity and peaceful transfer of power, all on behalf of the personal ego trip of an insane game show host. The aftermath played out much like every other major Trump controversy that has led to this, beginning with a trademark stretch of ignominious silence before pivoting to a monstrous and indefensible public statement.
In the most myopic interpretation, this Capitol Hill Putsch stemmed from months of Trump’s anti-democratic antics and subsequent refusal to concede, while high-profile Republican politicians turned into the Pointing Spiderman meme, either wholeheartedly endorsing falsifiable election fraud claims or gesturing at solidarity with the president. The GOP tried to harness the energy of their perpetually aggrieved base to win the Georgia runoffs, so they indulged Trump’s bungling flirtations with authoritarianism, hoping he’d tucker out and go to bed after being afforded one more scoop of ice cream.
In the days after Trump began his quest to reclaim his rightful second term, a “senior Republican official” told The Washington Post:
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
The vestigial rot in America’s political system is now gold-plated, and the GOP submitted itself to a crude, shoddy, bizarre, erratic pussy-grabber whose most consequential pre-presidential decision was firing Meatloaf on live TV. Trump has been too incompetent to do anything with his presidency beyond some cheesy venality, because there was never anything more to Trumpism outside of personal gratification and self-dealing. Trump was only ever interested in whatever got and kept him on TV — and, in turn, whatever got and kept him in power — and this, of course, corresponds with many Republican strategies for various cynical reasons. Republican politicians have deanchored themselves from the norms of majority rule and political equality, and it has degraded the American government into the kind of manifestly unworkable and multiply leveraged trainwreck that Trump has dumped into Atlantic City. The Orange One was an egregiously undignified conduit to tax cuts and Federalist Society SCOTUS nominations—he has no real friends or allies, and his inner circle is split between scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless opportunists. His outer orbit is a cadre of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy blowhards. So it was fairly obvious that once there was a conflict between keeping this dope in the Oval Office and maintaining a decades-long conservative project, Republicans would cut bait. When this moment would arrive, however, was a bit more uncertain.
It’s not quite fair to conclude that Trump lacks any core beliefs, but to the extent that they can be analyzed, they mostly amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be On Television More. Given this context, it has been difficult to label the Trump Administration as fascist, in part because the word has served as a blithe colloquial metonym for things I don’t like. But historian Robert Paxton observes several phases of fascism: It arises from the grinding deadlock of constitutional government, a weak liberal opposition, a blunderingly vicious base that wants things to stay the same by tearing down the establishment, and unprincipled or dishonest opportunists leveraging this sentiment into a power grab. “Trump is not essentially a conservative,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Trump is an anti-liberal. They’re not the same phenomenon. But he may be the most effective uprooter of liberalism in my lifetime.” Conservative elites who refuse to work with their political opposition collaborate with fascists because they feel unable to govern without further reinforcement.
In a more specifically American context, this is an ideology that places a primacy on the rule of big money, militarism, narrow forms of patriotism, and scapegoating the most vulnerable. It is tied to a misdirected sense of catastrophe and frontier myths about moral regeneration through violence. This sounds a lot like the Republican Party and the most schizophrenic quarters of its base. But really, the pockmark of America’s civilizational decline is the overall lack of courage to push back against these forces. E.O. Matthiessen once quipped that America was the only nation to move from innocence to corruption without a mediating stage of maturity.
This whole nation is trapped in Trump’s idle spite and childish tantrums, but in the longer shots, it’s easier to see that a fascist threat exists beyond the treacherous spectacle of a deeply stupid man. As of December 2020, 87 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s job, even months after his unconscionable and incompetent response to a pandemic that killed over a million Americans. Donald Trump did not become president of a nation by accident, even if there’s a slapstick element to it. A nation would have to be depraved enough to produce someone like Donald Trump, sick enough to allow someone like Donald Trump to seize power, distracted and deluded enough to justify his casual public defilements, and defeated enough to almost run it back again.
This threat looms beyond the bad actors. This is a shitty reality TV show.
