Seven Years Later, Still Surreal

L ike many people, I wake up some mornings and remind myself, “Donald Trump was actually the president of the United States.” Consider those educational displays in American social-studies classes. I already thought that the photographs of grinning Bill Clinton and George W. Bush looked a little silly, sitting below the paintings of John Adams and James Monroe looking so solemn and august. And now, just before the Skeletor version of Joe Biden, there’s the guy from the New York Post covers of my youth, and the Howard Stern shows of my misspent adolescence.

And more fool me!

That guy put three constitutionalist judges on the Supreme Court, and they overturned Roe v. Wade. It is enough to put you in mind to rewrite the classics. Here’s an original, by Herman Melville:

Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

How would Melville see our age? “O great democratic God, Thou who didst not hesitate to make NBC and CNN’s Jeff Zucker like a chariot for thy orangest servant. The meanest Queens scion transfigured into the Apprentice, then magnified as Candidate. The mighty laughed. And how, Sweet Lord, you shook them off their pretender thrones. The first shall be last. And the Donald shall be first.”

If Providence played a role in raising up the Donald once, can it do it again? Yes, of course. Donald Trump, if he can gather together his populist base in the GOP one more time, will utterly dominate the Donald Trump lane of the Republican Party. He’ll have no contenders there. And he can establish unstoppable momentum against a divided field to become the nominee once more. And if you can become a major-party nominee, you can become president. That’s basically the story of how we got Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Benjamin Harrison.

Yes, there is a Donald Trump “penalty” with voters. It kept him well below 50 percent in 2016. It has also been a drag on Republicans running for office that have his stink on them. But if Joe Biden is presiding over a double-dip recession, if unemployment climbs fast, and if inflation remains at all elevated, yes, of course he can win again.

But it’s going to remain strange. The sequel is already insane. Fox News interrupted Trump’s announcement speech before it was over — broadcasting it as a small silent box in the corner of the screen, while contributors such as Mike Huckabee told the television audience that the speech was amazing and that it meant Donald Trump was unstoppable.

Well, golly, if it’s so good, can we see the rest of it? Nope, on to Laura Ingraham as the hour changed. And then she started running highlights from earlier in the speech, before Trump had even wrapped it up. It was like something from a Terry Gilliam film or a Michel Houellebecq novel. Trump’s great strength in 2016 was that the media ran him without filters from the start of his rallies to the end. Here he was now, triple-Saran-wrapped by cable-news repackaging. Cut the boring part. Tell the couch taters what to think of it. And everyone please emphasize how well he did not ranting about how the 2020 election was stolen.

I suppose oddest of all was the setting at Mar-a-Lago. Biden has his Delaware basement, and George W. Bush had his Texas ranch — as though he were some French president who occasionally retreated to re-gather himself upon his provincial terroir. But Mar-a-Lago is more like a true royal court of exile. A Jacobite heir’s living arrangements outside l’Angleterre. The gilt furniture and parade of dignitaries all there to reinforce the claim to authority that isn’t quite enough to get back to the original throne. Come for the golf, stay for the steak. And if you’re lucky, enjoy a tour through the classified documents and gaze upon the mash notes from Kim Jong-un.

It’s enough to make the painting of Andrew Jackson laugh and the one of John Quincy Adams weep.