No Clean Endings in Politics

D onald Trump’s effect on the minds of certain people was to plunge them into a heroic story. For QAnon and other hard-core Trumpers, the November election and the days leading up to the January 6 riot at the Capitol were the downbeat in the story before the glorious finale. If you read “Save the Cat!” — the screenwriter’s cheat sheet for story beats — you know that every great Hollywood epic has these moments before the end, the moment when “All Hope Is Lost,” and our hero faces his Dark Night of the Soul. By January 5, Mike Pence was transformed in their eyes into a character like Professor Snape from the Harry Potter books — the one character who could make a final choice between the Evil Establishment and our Hero.

In the end, Trump would issue a series of confusing statements and half-concessions, half-abandoning the people who thought they were a new American Revolution. The shirtless guy with the horns on his head had no idea what to do in Congress once he got into the Senate Chamber. A Trump supporter was shot and killed. And now, Trump has his own personal version of Twitter, where he issues opinions on his enemies. He still polls well among Republicans.

But it wasn’t just Trump’s supporters who were plunged into a story. His antagonists built up a quixotic “Resistance movement” based on the premise that Trump was an urgent and real threat to American democracy. Because some of them have the literacy of stunted tween dweebs, they called themselves “Dumbledore’s Army.” They made a temporary hero of Michael Avenatti. Some among them truly went mad. What happened to Louise Mensch, anyway?

Many prepared for a kind of Color Revolution in case Trump won. That’s what last year’s summer riots were really about. Taking and occupying the space in cities. They dreamed of a final confrontation in which Trump would be “toppled” rather than just beaten at the voting booth. They declared that the GOP had indulged him too much — plausible. And that the party was now effectively an authoritarian one at heart — hard to square with the reality that Republicans who could give anything more than symbolic or rhetorical aid to Trump’s claims simply refused to do so.

But Trump was beaten in an election. And even if Trump did cast off all pretense on January 6, there was no great and final repudiation to bring the story to a close.

That hope for clear repudiation and closure is understandable. And one can glimpse this hope in the Liz Cheney fan fiction emerging among Trump’s critics, on center and the right.

If we go back to “Save the Cat’s” story formula, Cheney’s removal from Republican leadership is the “catalyst” moment in the great screenplay story being drafted by her biggest fans. She’ll clearly have to fight the bad Trumpist boss in some later segment.

But politics — especially democratic politics — doesn’t really work like a screenplay. I once imagined it might. I had viewed the presidency of George W. Bush as an unmitigated disaster for conservatism and the country. I had hoped for some grand repudiation. But it never came. And it never will. Candidates in future elections sometimes took positions the very opposite of George W. Bush’s — but they did not make their campaign about George W. Bush, or about repudiating him. They could have talked up what a danger it was to democracy to “stovepipe” intelligence. Or that his embrace of a certain ideologically crusading politics abroad would lead to instability at home. But, understandably, they did not want to demoralize and divide the party they were running in. They wanted their campaigns to be their own.

Nixon too had a presidency end in scandal and ignominy. But future Republican presidents did not run against him, and they were supporters of Nixon during his presidency. Each of them was different from Nixon — ideologically and temperamentally.

Cheney could be right that Donald Trump himself may lead the Republican Party into another avoidable disaster and disgrace. She may be proved right that Republicans will regret not doing more to diminish his say over the party in the future. But the party was as capable of steering and misdirecting Trump as he was of steering and misdirecting it. The efforts to change electoral laws in GOP states may look like a capitulation to Trump, but by delivering vote counts faster and more transparently, they will make electoral-fraud claims even harder to sustain. Trump lost to Biden — that’s about as satisfying an outcome as will be available to those who thought Trump a unique danger to our Constitution. As conservatives learn to resist Biden, they are likelier to long for a champion who did not lose to him. It’s not satisfying for people who experienced the Trump era as a moral stain and will treat the present as a moral emergency until it is washed away. But in this vale of tears, we rarely get that kind of satisfaction.