I was caught short by a notable finding in a “post-mortem” memorandum released by conservative polling firm WPA Intelligence yesterday. It stated that “Republican pundits and candidates may have inadvertently helped Democrats by spending much of the month of August addressing the raid” at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home and present political headquarters.
I am curiously agnostic as to the reliability of the finding. It is indeed very plausible that the front-and-center discussion of the raid at Mar-a-Lago was harmful to Republican candidates, given what we know about the ultimate electoral fates of most of the strongly Trump-associated ones. Then again, the data could have been sliced in more granular ways. How much of this discussion was criticism? Defense? By a pundit or a politician? These distinctions matter greatly in terms of measuring absolute impact.
And yet, I also don’t particularly care, because the way WPA’s finding was phrased provoked a far more fundamental question from me: What else would you have had us do? It is impossible to treat it as a quotidian occurrence when a former president of the United States has a search warrant executed upon his residence by the FBI, and that search turns up clear evidence of classified information he had refused to hand over and was storing unsecurely. This is not a minor affair fit for disposal after a 24-hour news cycle.
I expect a certain amount of verbal dexterity and strategic sense from politicians — they must know how to push their own message and not get captured by the media’s preferred one — but even that has its realistic limits; this is certainly no subject that could be left unaddressed, primarily because Trump forces everyone to take a side on the matter regardless. But what were pundits supposed to say? To ask the question rhetorically is to answer it: either strategically soft-pedal it (“This isn’t helpful to the team”) or face it full-on. The former cedes all persuasive credibility on the matter (and, eventually, all other matters as well). The latter confers at least a mild sense of satisfaction upon self-reflection.
It is the compulsive nature of Trump’s behavior that makes it so exhausting. My primary takeaway from the FBI raid was that Trump is a man who grasps reflexively, claims what he believes or wishes were his and holds onto it long past the limits of common sense or any greater sense of loyalty to civic norms, the rule of law, or the party he seeks to lead. That is the real tragedy, because whatever substantive achievements Trump may have had as president, he has proven over time only to be as good as his guardrails. His guardrails are largely gone now.
No better evidence of that could be found than the by turns shameful and farcical “dinner disaster,” where Trump kicked the Thanksgiving week off early this year with a dinner whose guest-list included three notorious antisemites, two failed and/or current presidential candidates, and four people banned from social media and decent society for either incitement of crowds, racial hatred, or both. (I present readers with a Venn Diagram to assemble at their leisure.) Any political operation, to say nothing of one surrounding an ex-president who had already announced his candidacy for office, that allows that to happen is no operation at all. Nobody is protecting Trump from his worst instincts anymore. Thus shall it ever be.
I wish I could end with a hopeful assessment; instead, I fear it leads me to the point that should not have to be proven anymore, but seems in danger of being forgotten by too many: It will always be this way. These are the wages of Trump. Until he is gone from the party, whether defeated and thus dangerously embittered, or by circumstance of accidental good judgment or ill fortune, we will always have to answer about him, even if not for him.