After the election Trump, who during the campaign had been pilloried with the same look-at-this-idiot routine (he doesn’t even know how to start a land war in the Middle East right), found himself suddenly transformed into an evil mastermind. Trump was a fascist, carefully plotting his consolidation of power. Shadowy counselors like genius Steve Bannon (who was once seen reading a whole book in an airport) were plotting to bring America to its knees with post-Leninist theory. The whole scheme was being orchestrated by the Russians, our classically devious foe. When the White House announced the sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, liberal pundit Chris Hayes tweeted, “The White House has made the calculation that however bad this looks, it’s better than letting Comey continue to supervise the investigation.” The story has been the same all year: everywhere, Trump’s White House is staying one step ahead of the best sleuths in the business, setting up back channels and secret deals, making astute calculations like cackling laser villains in a James Bond movie.
This is a curious development, mainly because Trump really is a dumbass. He is profoundly stupid. This is obvious. He is as stupid as liberals pretended George Bush to be, probably even dumber than that. He appears before us on a million television screens as a sputtering child, choking half-remembered words out from a drooping chin asphyxiated by daddy’s tie. He has spent his whole life being stupid, failing upward through a business world that celebrates the terminally idiotic, unable-to-distinguish anymore between himself and the man he has played in so many versions on television. The trouble is not that he doesn’t read white papers, it’s that he has spent his entire life belching the alphabet and if it worked, and it did work, he’s as shocked as anyone. “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” the president told Reuters last month, “This is more work than my previous life. I thought it would be easier.” If Trump is a wise man, he is only wise in the Socratic sense: he keeps telling us he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and nobody, it seems, will listen.
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For 30 years, the Democratic Party sold itself as the last bulwark against slightly dumber managers of our imperial decline. Now, faced with a real incarnation of that fantasy, a Republican leader who even Aaron Sorkin would rewrite for lack of subtlety, they have transformed themselves into underdogs, racing to save the world from an evil genius.
The reasons for all of this become far clearer when you recall that, of course, nobody in a position of power in Washington really gives a shit about the Russians. They really don’t. Beyond vague feelings that undefined tampering in our elections is bad, nobody can tell you what, precisely, Trump has done or even could do on the level of material policy that benefits Vladimir Putin, except those things that the Republican Party was going to do anyway. He hasn’t even lived up to expectations. We’re bombing Syria. NATO is “good” again. Yes, rolling back environmental protections is excellent for a petro-state, but it’s difficult to imagine President Jeb! Bush throwing his full weight behind the Paris Treaty.
The objection, after all, cannot be to outside electoral influence in principle. Powerful entities have always had interests that run contrary to those of the American people, and those entities have routinely used their financial power or public relations outfits to meddle in our electoral process. It’s only that these entities are ordinarily multinational corporation, and the principle difference between the meddling of a multinational corporation and the meddling of Russia is that I can tell you precisely what a multinational corporation gets in policy concessions and regulatory kickbacks when they help elect an unpopular political candidate. And this really, is where this whole strange Democratic shift starts to becomes clear: This was supposed to be their game.
When the Democrats began their transformation into the part of smarter, kinder reactionaries, they abandoned what flimsy claim they had left to a natural base within the country. The savagery of the G.O.P. helped a bit, but the smarter-manager pitch was never meant to appeal to voters. It was meant to appeal to money. For decades, the Republican Party had been plied its advantage with our financial masters, losing the more populist House but winning nearly every presidential election in the second half of the 20th century by aligning itself with the true source of American power. The Democrats upended this with a simple plea: We’ll do your bidding, but we’ll do it better. We’ll sigh while we vote to authorize the next war, we’ll shake our head over what a shame it is that we must destroy the welfare state. The planet will shriek and howl in pain, and we will promise market-based solutions, based on the latest research, with all indications suggesting that nothing significant will have to change for your grandchildren to be obscenely wealthy too. The ploy worked. When Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton managed to capture the advantage in Wall Street money and support, Democrats celebrated their success.
Now Trump, who knows nothing, has stolen the cynical con right out from under them. In their hearts, they know he didn’t even try — Vladimir Putin, the probable richest man on Earth, just stepped in and did it for him. Game recognizes game. Trump didn’t even have to sell his platform or his soul. Democrats wanted to fight the idiot Republican Party, the one that chased rubes in the country. But the new Republican Party, with its choking, spitting figurehead, has beat the best number-crunching managers of hell at their own game. My God. He must be some kind of genius.
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