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Donald Trump often takes the breath away with his defiance of the basic norms of American public life. (See: January 6th.) But sometimes it’s the smaller encroachments on decency that serve as a reminder of how far outside the bounds he operates. “Can you control your client?” Judge Arthur Engoron demanded of Trump’s lawyer, during the former President’s testimony on Monday in Manhattan, where he stands accused of running a fraudulent business in the state of New York. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.” Later, after yet another Trump soliloquy in response to a yes-or-no question, Engoron repeated his entreaty. “I beseech you,” the judge said, “to control him if you can.”
Of course, seven years and five months into Trump’s political career, we know by now that there is no controlling Trump. And yet, exactly a year before Election Day, that rogue defendant in the dock is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but running in a dead heat with Joe Biden nationally and, if the shock poll that came out in the Times a day before Trump’s testimony is to be believed, ahead of him in five of six must-win battleground states. Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise even bragged about this in Engoron’s courtroom, citing the poll as he referred to his client as “the future President of the United States.” The poll’s release quickly sent Democratic Washington into a vaporous state of preëmptive blame-gaming about the status of the race: It’s Biden’s age. It’s his campaign. It’s the media’s fault. It’s all of the above. One anonymous sniper told NBC News that the campaign needed a “defibrillator.” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod even kinda, sorta, maybe suggested that Biden should consider stepping aside as the Party’s 2024 standard-bearer. The White House sought to downplay the fuss as the inevitable outcry from the Party’s large class of professional “bed wetters.” Perhaps, one Democratic strategist insisted, albeit anonymously, to the Washington Post, some bed-wetting was in order: “We should be terrified about what might happen.”
The panicky news cycle was interrupted when Tuesday’s off-year election results came in: a big win for abortion rights in the increasingly red state of Ohio; a victory for the incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, in the solidly red state of Kentucky; a Democratic state House pickup in Virginia that looked to spoil the national aspirations of its Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. Inevitably, team Biden claimed vindication. “Across the country tonight, democracy won and MAGA lost,” the President posted on social media. “Voters vote. Polls don’t.”
Days later, though, I’m still struggling to understand the chill-out, everything’s-going-according-to-the-plan spin. I know that the spinners have a job to do and that some amount of self-soothing is required in these stressful times. But still, whichever individual poll you choose to believe or not, the data point overwhelmingly to Biden sitting at near-historic lows in popularity and being essentially tied with Trump, a man who is running on an explicit platform of revenge, retribution, and Constitution-termination. As for the predictive power of off-year elections, it’s best to remember that the big victory in Virginia amounted to Democrats narrowly holding onto the state Senate—they actually lost a seat—and gaining the state House with a net pickup of three seats, in a state that Biden won against Trump in 2020 by more than ten points. If Democrats had received nineteen hundred fewer votes in a single Virginia Senate district and eight hundred fewer in a single Virginia House district, they wouldn’t have won full control of either chamber. That’s hardly the reassurance that the Party craves looking ahead to 2024.
Besides, Biden is up against not just electoral math but human psychology. There were plenty of reasonable theories of how and why Trump’s appeal would fade once he left the White House and the full folly of his unprecedented effort to block the 2020 election results was revealed. But those theories have not panned out. Instead, Trump has, after four criminal indictments and multiple civil proceedings, such as the trial in New York, opened up such a wide lead against his G.O.P. opponents that watching Wednesday night’s debate among the also-rans seemed like an incredible waste of time for any but the most masochistic of Republican viewers. I watched; it was eminently skippable. The short version is that Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who served as Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, continued to embarrass her rivals with sharp retorts, offering voters an almost anachronistic attachment to the hawkish foreign policy of the pre-Trump G.O.P. and a reluctance to fully disavow the ex-President she is ostensibly running against. It said everything about this Republican field that, when invited to condemn Trump in the debate’s opening question, four of the five candidates onstage offered varying critiques of his electability and conservative record without getting to the heart of the matter. Ron DeSantis complained about Trump not building his wall. Tim Scott lamented his lack of appeal to independents. Haley said Trump wasn’t the right President for our political moment. And then there was Vivek Ramaswamy, who demanded that the moderator apologize for even asking such a question.
More revealing—and far more relevant, given where the race stands—was Trump’s own rally that evening, in Hialeah, Florida, which took place as his latest act of counterprogramming during the Republican debate. While talking for well more than an hour, he fulminated about 2024 in nearly apocalyptic terms (“our final battle”) and added a gruesome note that I hadn’t heard before about the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. He portrayed himself—and his followers—as victims of a “police state.” (Consistency is never a hallmark of Trump’s attacks; he also called Biden’s government a feckless “banana republic.”) And he offered plenty of additional fodder to those who think that he, not Biden, has aged out of the Presidency, like when he praised Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictatorial leader, and mixed up the population size of North Korea with that of China.
On Thursday, in an interview with Univision, Trump again made explicit what is often implicit in his vengeance-fuelled campaign: his willingness to use the justice system to go after his opponents if he is returned to the White House. Any other prospective President would have denied with all possible force a recent Washington Post report that Trump has already demanded that his aides make plans to target some former advisers who have become public critics, including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Instead, Trump all but confirmed the story when he told the Spanish-language network that he would use the courts against his political rivals. “If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’ ” Trump told Univision. “They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”
There should be no surprise in this, of course. When Trump ran in 2016, he promised to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and laughed and cheered and egged on his crowds when they chanted, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
In an appearance this week on “The View,” Clinton compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, who was, she noted, “duly elected” before he dismantled Germany’s democracy and turned himself into a dictator. Her main point—and it bears endless repetition between now and whatever awaits us next November—is that Trump has clearly spelled out exactly how he plans to go after core tenets of American democracy. There is no mystery here. “Trump is telling us what he intends to do,” Clinton said. “Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values.”
It’s worth noting that Clinton made those comments before Trump’s incendiary interview. He’s said it all before; he’ll say it all again. The question, with one year left on the clock, is: Who’s listening? ♦
