Donald Trump Undersold His Appeal To His Supporters Before
He Won’t Make That Mistake Again
On Saturday, July 13, 2024, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. Violence of this kind must be condemned in the strongest terms possible, by everyone, everywhere on the political spectrum. (And the Secret Service has some answering to do.)
In so many ways, the 2016 election seems very long ago, but cast your mind back with me a moment.
At a 2016 campaign rally in Iowa, Donald Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
This was a despicable thing to say at the time, in an endless buffet of despicableness: Mocking John McCain’s military service and sacrifice, mocking a New York Times reporter’s physical handicap, threatening to jail Hillary Clinton, and on and on.
Despicable as it was, Trump was right about the level of loyalty among his followers. If anything, he understated it. That blind loyalty has grown so much that it’s an exercise in futility to wonder if “this” or “that” could shake their commitment to him.
The answer is a soft, simple, “no.” There is no limit to some of his followers’ loyalty. Period, full stop.
Two specific, guilty by jury examples: Trump was found responsible for sexual abuse, with a $5 million penalty. His followers? “That wasn’t a criminal trial, so…so what?”
Trump was found guilty of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn star. His followers? “It’s just politics…it’s “lawfare.” Oh, and wait till we take over again.” (I do give them credit for the new word they created, combining “law” and “warfare.”)
Whatever the actual, exact percentage of the voting population that supports Trump without question or exception, it’s “baked in.” There is no changing it, it is a scientific fact now, like gravity, the speed of light, Trump’s narcissism and, it must be said, his messianic complex.
I can’t help but wonder now — worry is the real word — given Trump’s attempted assassination, just how much deeper Trump’s unquestioned support can go, and in direct correlation, how much higher his messiah complex can grow.
Post-assassination attempt, there are calls to bring down the “temperature” of our political talk in this election season, and that’s all fine and well, despite some of the hypocrisy of certain elected “leaders” (I’ll skip names, for now, of those on the right saying one thing about Democrats’ rhetoric, who do the exact same things, and worse).
But is Donald Trump even capable of bringing down the temperature of his rhetoric? Like the slogan “America runs on Dunkin’,” Trump runs on anger, aggrievement, and fear.
It’s Trump’s schtick, and say what you want about him, he’s very good at it. He knows his audience, and when it works, it works very well.
It’s how he convinces his followers he cares about them, how we gets them to donate to a billionaire’s legal fees, and how he’s manipulated them into believing his guilty verdicts are actually the exact opposite, somehow proving his innocence.
How could surviving the assassin’s bullets NOT turn him up to eleven?
Trump might take the stage at this week’s Republican National Convention and change his tune, he might lead by example, and call for calm, and tolerance, and unity. But who really believes that will happen? (I’m sure many of his followers, his truest believers, want the exact opposite.)
I do not believe Trump can evolve, that he is capable of change, except for the worse; doubling down on every bad and immoral idea possible. Nothing in the past 8+ years has shown he can do anything else.
I also hope I’m wrong, because if I’m not, imagining what’s next for the new and improved messianic Trump, and his cult of MAGA, and for America, boggles the mind. We haven’t seen anything yet.
