Who Will We Be Without Donald Trump?
He
lost. We’ll have to stop obsessing about him.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 21, 2020
A friend was all worked up about the
possibility of Trump 2024.
“I can’t go through this again!” she
cried. But what I heard was that she couldn’t stop going through
this. Her contempt for Donald Trump is too finely honed at this point, too
essential a part of her psyche. Who would she be — conversationally,
politically — without it?
Another friend sent me an email in
which he’d worked out the economics of a web-only Trump news channel of the
kind that Trump may — or may not — start. With minimal investment, Trump could
rake in millions and millions!
We were supposed to be breathing a huge
sigh of relief about Joe Biden’s victory. But instead he was finding a fresh
source of outrage about Trump.
And here I am writing
about Trump — again. It’s a tic, not one I’m proud of. But I’m surrendering to
it now to acknowledge that I can’t continue doing so. None of us can.
I’m not talking just about journalists.
An obsession with Trump as the brute of all evil extends far beyond us. It has
been an animating, organizing principle for the Democratic Party, a
bond among civic-minded people of otherwise divergent persuasions and a pillar
of many Americans’ political identity. It turned his rise and reign into an
all-consuming international soap opera with ratings not just through the roof
but also through the stratosphere. No public figure in my lifetime has made
such a monopolizing claim on our attention, even our souls.
On Jan. 20 — praise be! — his presidency will be
over. But his hold on us may not end as quickly and cleanly. And his departure
from the White House will be more disorienting than some of us realize, posing
its own challenges: for Democrats, for news organizations, for anyone who has
grown accustomed over these past four years to an apocalyptic churn of events
and emotions.
“Donald Trump is still coursing through
your veins, isn’t he?” asked John Harris in a column in
Politico published on Tuesday, likening him to an addiction from which there
must be a meticulously plotted recovery.
Actually, Democratic
lawmakers seem to be moving on from him — and revealing, in the process, what a
potent glue he was. He united the party’s left and center by giving them
the same top priority: Dump Trump. No sooner was he dumped than the glue
dissolved.
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York progressive,
and Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania moderate, began trading
recriminations about where Democrats went right, where they went wrong and
where they should go from here. So did Representatives
Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia moderate, and Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan
progressive.
In a column published in The Times on Monday evening,
my colleague Michelle Goldberg implored Democrats to tone it down and keep it
together. In a column published on Wednesday morning, my
colleague Thomas Edsall asked whether they could. This one-two punch wasn’t
overkill. It was a 20-20 glimpse of life beyond 2020.
Policy differences between progressives
and moderates may be solved by Mitch McConnell: If Republicans win at least one
of the two runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5 and hold on to their
Senate majority, McConnell, as the majority leader, will be the grim reaper of any transformative legislation.
But that still leaves room for arguments
about the issues that Democrats should emphasize and the tone that they should
strike for the 2022 midterms. Especially with Trump out of office, those
disputes could be heated.
And there will be plenty of political
friction to go around. Up until Nov. 3, Never Trump Republicans were heroes to
many Democrats — ultimate proof that the ruler was rotten. But that love affair
can’t survive Trump’s defeat, a reality evident in a few progressives’ fierce
attacks on the Lincoln Project — an anti-Trump super PAC founded by Republicans
— since Election Day.
And what happens to those Republicans?
The more than 73 million ballots cast for Trump in 2020 — giving him about 47
percent of the popular vote, up from 46 percent four years ago — prove that the
party didn’t come around to them and isn’t about to cue up Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited.” They’re paradigmatic, emblematic: When
you’ve shaped yourself almost entirely in opposition to someone who has been
vanquished, are you free or formless?
The test for the
mainstream media is our ability to turn away from Trump even if he remains a
potent audience draw. It’s not certain that he will be: When Trump and Biden
appeared at rival town halls on the same night in October, Biden drew more television viewers. And the much-discussed “Trump
bump” that cable news channels and newspapers experienced in and right after
2016 faded over
time.
But there’s no doubt that chronicling
and commenting on how bad Trump is for democracy has been good for business. It also made virtuous sense: His
station and power justified coverage of every tweet and bleat. His attempt to
steal the election demands exactly the scrutiny it’s getting, as does the
assent of his base and most of his fellow Republicans.
The situation, however, will soon grow
complicated. Unlike his more dignified predecessors, he won’t maintain a
relatively low post-presidency profile; he’ll keep whipping up passions on the
right. And there will surely be a laudable journalistic excavation of Trump
administration misdeeds that he and his aides successfully buried. Suffice it
to say that Trump won’t exit the news.
But he also won’t be nearly as relevant
as he is now, and that compels news organizations to ratchet down his presence
in a huge way, potentially turning our backs on easy stories that would have
been raptly consumed by readers and viewers still consumed by their disgust
with him. I worry about our resolve.
“With Biden you’re not going to have
these wild rallies,” Jim VandeHei, a co-founder of Axios, told Bloomberg recently.
“You’re going to have speeches on budget reconciliation. I don’t think that’s
going to light people’s hearts afire.” He added that “there’s no way you’re not
going to see lower cable ratings and some reduction in traffic to websites.”
I also worry that in the wake of
Trump’s presidency, which both reflected and intensified the furious pitch of
American politics, melodrama may be the new normal. I worry that while
Americans are exhausted by it, we’re also habituated to it; that we’ll
manufacture it where it doesn’t exist; that hearings in a Republican-controlled
Senate will turn Hunter Biden into the new Benghazi; and that we’ll hear no
less from the likes of Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani next year than we did
this one, because no reality show would cast off cast members that juicy.
I worry that my worry is part of the
problem — that it’s not so much epiphany as muscle memory. It has gotten a hell
of a workout since 2016.
