politics

Trump 2024?

Editor, Modern Age
The Week
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
January 19th, 2022
Daniel McCarthy displays no hesitation in making his case for a Donald Trump reboot in 2024. His presidency was a smashing success, McCarthy asserts. On top of that, Trump nearly won reelection, his successor is already a horrible failure, and no other Republican can do a better job than Trump himself of selling a Trumpian policy agenda, which is what’s best for both the GOP and the country.
Hence the need for Trump 2.0.
To me, the most interesting thing in McCarthy’s essay is what’s missing from it — namely, any serious reckoning with Trump’s words and deeds following his loss on Nov. 2, 2020.
The weeks leading up to Jan. 6 are the most crucial of Trump’s presidency because they confirmed the man’s singular unfitness for the office of the presidency. For two straight months, beginning in the middle of the night following Election Day, Trump lied to the country, claiming the election had been stolen from him through an act of systematic fraud for which he never provided a shred of verifiable evidence. It was these baseless lies that inspired thousands of Trump supporters to travel to the nation’s capital to disrupt certification of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6, leading directly to the insurrectionary violence that afternoon on Capitol Hill.
This sequence of events should be considered disqualifying because they demonstrate incontrovertibly that Donald Trump is exactly what he appeared to be from the very beginning of his turn to politics: a demagogue. As conservative political philosopher Harvey Mansfield explains in a recent podcast discussion with Persuasion’s Yascha Mounk, a demagogue in the classical sense is someone who flatters and manipulates the prejudices of the people, not in order to achieve any particular public end, but for the purpose of satisfying his own bottomless craving for approval and adulation.
Trump behaved like a demagogue throughout his four years in office, regularly spewing self-aggrandizing lies, demonizing his many enemies in rallies and tweets, and displaying a mixture of indifference, ignorance, and impetuosity toward policy and governance. But he was never more demagogic than when he fled from his inability to accept the truth of his rejection by the electorate into an alternative reality in which he had never been rejected at all. Trump fully withdrew into that fantasy, and millions of his supporters joined him there. Many of them, including the former president himself, remain there still.
How this could be a matter of indifference to anyone with a knowledge of history and an awareness of the long philosophical tradition of reflection on the distinctive dangers confronting republican government is beyond me. Two months of peddling incendiary delusions incited an attack on the national legislature. What would many months of a presidential campaign followed by four more years of civically toxic demagoguery emanating from the Oval Office produce?
Daniel McCarthy appears eager to find out. That makes one of us.
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