From Dangerous Clown to Dangerous Bore
by Professor John Kane
Donald J. Trump has been many things to many people over the four years of his presidency. For members of his cult, who have remained astonishingly steadfast and seem even to have enlarged their numbers, he has been an object of adulation. For those unsusceptible to his peculiar charms, he has been variously and simultaneously a clown, a flagrant misogynist, a not-so-secret racist, an outrageous liar, a national embarrassment, a dangerous demagogue, an ignorant policy-maker, an irresponsible leader, an incipient autocrat, and ― above all ― a malignant narcissist.
But while he has always been a boor, it was not anticipated that he would ever become a bore. We may have watched his showman’s antics day by day, sometimes hour by hour, either with joy or horror depending on our political proclivities, but we did watch them with a certain fascination. Donald may have been fatiguing but he was never boring.
Till now.
Practically the only thing Trump seems to have learned from history, and this famously from Goebbels, is that the big lie told often enough will be believed. He has again proved the validity of the dictum, at least for a zealously disgruntled minority of citizens who, eschewing ‘lamestream’ media that would inform them otherwise, believe his monotonously repeated claim that he won the election, not just by a wee bit but massively. For those beyond the Trumpian thrall of determined ignorance, the constant repetition of a blatant lie weeks after the election results ― and after fifty-odd court cases that abjectly failed to prove even a modicum of fraud ― becomes, like all mindless repetition, simply boring.
Even Donald, as he repeats his lie in his now-rare appearances seems fundamentally bored ― one might say manically bored. For when you have nothing to rest your case upon but an easily disprovable lie, it requires a certain maniacal dedication to persist in it. But manias are always boring to those who do not share them. Trump’s mania grows out of his need to appear never to be a loser, realities be damned. He thus remains true to the strategy he devised and pursued long before the election that he feared he may lose, which was to label the process (mail-in voting) fraudulent before it had occurred. Having indeed lost, he has nothing to fall back upon but that false claim. Dogged stubbornness in a lie being a poor substitute for spirited advocacy of a just cause, the result is tedium tinged by anxiety.
And yet we do not, and cannot, dismiss this empty vessel’s sounding brass as we might the tedious proclamations of a boring acquaintance, for Trump both bores and scares us. Boredom and fear are after all not mutually exclusive ― imagine a dinner guest of Stalin’s nodding off during an endless peroration by the dictator. Trump scares us not directly but through his mendacious hold over his famous ‘base’, and then through that base’s hold over a supine majority of the Republican Party, and then through the threat that Republican capitulation to Trumpism presents to democratic government.
This threat is founded in congressional Republicans’ fear of being ‘primaried’, that is, ousted because of perceived disloyalty to the great leader in the primary elections that decide candidates. There is a decided structural element in this and thus in Trump’s ascendancy, which has to do precisely with the nature of primaries as a means of choosing representatives and also national leaders.
Turnouts in American elections are notoriously low (the recent election being an exception), but they are vanishingly low in primaries. As a group of Yale political scholars has argued, this means the latter can be easily dominated by the most determined voters, which is often in practice a fanatical minority that can force candidates toward extreme policy positions on pain of expulsion. This easy takeover of primaries goes a long way toward explaining the emergence of hyper-partisanship in American politics, and thus the increasing ungovernability of the nation.
Trump is not the originator but the beneficiary of this system. The Republican Party has been on an extended trajectory of pursuing political advantage through sotto voce appeal to the baser instincts and racist elements of American society. It is a strategy that has paid off handsomely in terms of sustained political power but, like all deals with the devil, the devil wins in the end. Formerly dominant ‘moderate’ Republicans who provided a veneer of respectability to modern Republicanism have been virtually annihilated precisely by those base elements they both cultivated and suppressed. The vulnerabilities of the primary system have been exploited to reverse the ascendancy of the elite over the base.
Trump has exchanged sotto voce messaging for a megaphone and unleashed the latent power of the regressive and resentful base. But to whose advantage? The Republican Party’s or his own? Here’s the rub. The Republican Party, having abandoned all authentic claims to principled politics, has become merely an instrument for whoever can believably claim leadership, which since 2016 has been Donald Trump. Even in electoral defeat, which usually spells the end of demagogic power, Trump seems to retain the whip-hand over Republicans.
Trump in his tweets likes to label Republicans who thwart his will RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). This includes Governors Ducey and Kemp of Arizona and Georgia respectively, both of whom were enthusiastic Trumpians for whom he personally campaigned but who, when they chose to follow legal protocol and correctly declare their states for Joe Biden, incurred his vengeful wrath. The irony is that no one is more of a RINO than Trump, for whom Republicanism was never more than a flag of convenience (he professed to be a Democrat in a former incarnation). The Republican Party presented the line of least resistance to an opportunistic grifter who probably never expected to win but who, once he did, was poised to subvert the entire party to his will.
And here is figured the regrettable condition of today’s Republican Party. Who now is a ‘real’ Republican? According to Trump, anyone who practically opposes him is not one, but this includes many who have devoted their lives, hopes and careers to Republican politics. The structural conditions of power and fear outlined above ensures that there are many officially identified Republicans ― state attorneys-general and congressional representatives who signed up to the absurd and doomed Texan Supreme Court challenge ― who will back the Trumpian position.
Think about it. If you are not for Trump you are not a real Republican. But Trump is not a real Republican. Therefore, the Grand Old Party (GOP) no longer in fact exists in any independent sense. It is truly the party of Trump, whose principles, such as they are, are deeply regressive in historical terms. Witness the December 12th ‘Stop the Steal’ MAGA rally in Washington DC, in which white nationalist Nick Fuentes urged the crowd to ‘destroy the GOP’ because the party had failed adequately to support Trump’s attempted overthrow of the results of the election. This included attacks on alleged RINOs like Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, candidates for the run-off senatorial election in Georgia which will decide which party controls the Senate. ‘Regular’ Republicans must quail at the self-destructive power of the monster they have themselves created.
So, yes, Trump has become a crashing bore but is yet a dangerous one. The Republicans who signed up to the Texas folly were no doubt acting in the confidence that it would fail and thus that their ‘virtue signalling’ (or vice signalling) to Trump supporters would be costless. But the fact remained that the words ‘sedition’ and ‘treason’ had been believably uttered about what was in fact an attempt to reverse the outcome of a fair election. And Trump by putting Trump first and making loyalty to him rather than to the party (never mind constitutional government) paramount has created a rift among the Republicans that might carry significant scars once he is gone, which will not be long now. Republicans still fear Trump because they are unsure how strong his hold will remain on the base after January 20 (and some are already calculating how to take over that base should his hold falter).
The irony of the November 3rd election was that, though it was a loser for Trump, it was overall a big gainer for the party at state and federal levels. The nation on balance rejected Trump but not the Republican Party which should mean it has a clear political future if it manages to consolidate its gains. The question that hangs perilously in the balance is what sort of party post-Trump it might choose to be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations and Researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and five times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
