Trump has supplanted Nixon as the saddest figure in post-presidential politics

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps...a-ratings-80771852?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

Donald Trump’s Enemies Need Him
He brings them a sense of purpose—not to mention ratings and in some cases money.
By William McGurn
April 10, 2023 at 6:00 pm ET

A Jules Feiffer cartoon in the Village Voice once depicted a man suffering from liberal ennui. The man shifted uncomfortably in his chair and explained how he was bored all the time, had no appetite, no interest in life, no sense of humor, no capacity even for outrage.

The punch line? “I need Nixon.”

The cartoon ran in September 1974, a month after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency rather than face impeachment. Suddenly legions of satirists, activists, politicians, pundits and celebrities were left without the man they had denounced, battled and tried to bring down for years. Many, like the poor fellow in the Feiffer cartoon, didn’t quite know what to do with themselves.

Donald Trump is the new Nixon. Yes, his significant early lead in GOP 2024 primary polls reflects a large constituency that wouldn’t abandon him, as he once put it, if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone. Still, Republicans have other candidates they could nominate and it wouldn’t lead them to a crisis of the soul.

Not so for Mr. Trump’s most ardent foes. Some of them—the Lincoln Project comes to mind—have made a small fortune off Mr. Trump. At least two online journals, the Dispatch and the Bulwark, got started as expressions of conservative opposition to Mr. Trump. And would former Rep. Adam Kinzinger ever be in the news if Mr. Trump weren’t there to attack him?

Mr. Kinzinger is a small fish compared with others invested in Mr. Trump. The New York developer and former reality TV star might have been a newbie to politics, but he was made for television. In the year leading up to his election in 2016, the tracking firm mediaQuant estimated Mr. Trump generated $5 billion in “earned” media, the industry term for free advertising.

Much of this coverage was negative. MediaQuant, for example, says his percentage of negative publicity was roughly twice that for Hillary Clinton. Another way of saying that is that Mr. Trump was ratings gold for his professed enemies at CNN and MSNBC. After the long dry spell that followed the 2020 election and Mr. Biden’s swearing-in as president, media outlets are again looking for Mr. Trump to spin his circus into ratings gold—as his arraignment last week did.

Mr. Trump was also good for his friends at Fox News—perhaps too good, given the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against it. But those who hate Mr. Trump need him far more than those who love him. A 2017 headline in the Independent, a left-wing British newspaper, summed up the dynamic: “Trump’s attacks on CNN helped their revenues far more than his praise helped Fox News, new figures suggest.” The New York Times accused CNN president Jeff Zucker of creating a monster with all the attention the network lavished on Mr. Trump. Then again, the Times’ own coverage also contributed to the frenzy with both the quantity and the combative tone.

Or look at Alvin Bragg. Without Mr. Trump, Mr. Bragg would be remembered merely as Manhattan’s worst district attorney. But the former president—with a supporting cast out of a Tom Wolfe novel, including a p*rn star and a lead witness with a perjury conviction—gives Mr. Bragg the chance to redeem himself as the Man Who Got Liberty Valance . . . er, Donald Trump.

Then there are the Democrats, who have been running against Mr. Trump for so long it’s not clear they would know what to do against another Republican candidate except shout “Jan. 6” in response to any statement about taxes or spending or the Biden administration’s incoherent foreign policy.

Joe himself won because he wasn’t Mr. Trump, and he spent the presidential campaign pleasantly resting in his Wilmington, Del., basement while the press fixated on Covid policy and the Trump White House drama. When he was elected, he rightly told the nation it was a time for healing.

But no one’s been less willing to turn the page than Mr. Biden. In addition to blaming Mr. Trump for his own fiascoes—first it was inflation, last week it was the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan—he routinely demonizes Mr. Trump’s supporters. Mr. Biden depends on Mr. Trump for his own sense of moral heroism, so much so that if the GOP nominated someone else, Mr. Biden would campaign against Mr. Trump anyway.

Donald Trump has any number of supporters in the Republican Party who would love to see him return to office. But many of these people would likely be satisfied with a victory by someone like Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Not so Mr. Trump’s detractors, who, like the subject of Mr. Feiffer’s cartoon, would find themselves wistful without Mr. Trump to kick around. They may not want him to win, but they sure need him to run.

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.

Appeared in the April 11, 2023, print edition as 'Trump’s Enemies Need Him'.
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https://newsletters.theatlantic.com...45e/trump-fbi-search-rand-paul-espionage-act/

The People Who Can’t Stop Making Excuses for Trump
His enablers’ inability to stick to a story is important.

By Molly Jong-Fast
AUGUST 18, 2022


Since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on Monday, August 8, the MAGA airwaves have been filled with people making excuses for Donald Trump. These excuses have run from the benign (minimizing the allegations) to the ridiculous (suggesting this was an FBI plot to incriminate Trump). Some say more about the people making them than they do about Trump, like a kind of political Rorschach test in which the excuse makers reveal their own legislative fantasies or political agendas.

This week, Republican Senator Rand Paul used the Mar-a-Lago search to call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, the law that makes it illegal to obtain or disclose information related to national defense that could be used against the U.S., or to the benefit of another country, and which was cited in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant released Friday, August 12th. Paul called the act an “egregious affront to the 1st Amendment,” though it’s hard to square anything First Amendment–related with Trump’s possible misdeeds that led to the search. (Paul is also a supporter of Edward Snowden, who was charged in 2013 with violating the very same act Paul wants repealed.)

Conservative talk-show host Charlie Kirk tried a different tack over the weekend, claiming that the Mar-a-Lago search was issued over a “paperwork dispute.” (Allegedly stealing classified documents related to cybersecurity—and possibly even-more-sensitive topics—is a “paperwork dispute” in the way drowning someone is a “water dispute,” but I digress.) A few days earlier, Kirk and Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich also tried to float the idea that Trump was possibly set up by the FBI.

Fox & Friends weekend cohost Will Cain went for a fascinating perversion of history, telling the audience on Sunday, “President Nixon said [that] if the president does it, then it is not illegal. Is that not truly the standard when it comes to classified documents?” The irony here is that Nixon made a huge goof when he used this phrase during his interviews with British journalist David Frost in 1977; when Nixon said, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he betrayed the above-the-law hubris of his administration, which proved to be one of the greatest gotcha moments in presidential history. So it’s a bit odd that Cain is using Nixon’s moment of admitting presidential overreach as a way to cover for Trump’s lawlessness.

Some of the excuses weren’t even excuses so much as blatant lies. Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, for instance, complained that the FBI should have just subpoenaed the documents from Trump. “It’s not like Trump won’t cooperate,” Watters said. If only Watters had been patient enough to wait a day, when it was reported that actually the FBI had subpoenaed documents from Trump in the spring, apparently to no avail.

There’s a history here. Whenever it seems like Trump (or someone in Trump’s inner circle, like Donald Trump Jr., who was found by former Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to be too stupid—Dana Milbank’s word—to collude) might be held accountable, someone comes along and makes an excuse for him. Sources told The New York Times that Trump was too busy (in the Times’ summary of their comments) “settling political grievances and personal grudges” to be focused on returning the documents. Just as a source also blamed former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in part, for the documents not being returned—just as, years ago, Trump blamed everyone, from China to U.S. governors, for his complete inability to govern.

But the current streak of excuses, which have been wildly different from each other, is unusual. The MAGA world tends to speak in lockstep. When it doesn’t, it’s because Trump and company have done something so outside the norm, they can’t quite figure out how to cover for him. This period might be most like the days after the Access Hollywood tape was leaked, when Republicans were waiting to see if the base would continue on the Trump train.

Trump’s enablers will continue making excuses for him as long as he continues to have the support of the GOP base. But the frantic running in circles, the inability to stick to a story, and the weird panic in Trumpworld is important to pay attention to. Trump and MAGA figures like Steve Bannon have long used a damage-control strategy of, to quote Bannon, “flood[ing] the zone with ****.” The goal is not to persuade but to confuse and paralyze the public. But while Bannon and his allies were never in doubt about their own goals and values, the GOP now seems to be struggling—and failing—to decide what it believes, and what it can possibly sell to the American public.

 

What’s sad about this?

 

His unselfishness reminds me of Jimmy Carter. What a hero!

 

This changes everything!

 

...if the FBI and the leftist deep state would've left the Donald alone and let him keep all those classified documents he was stockpiling in his kiddie drawer at home...

...he could've sold some of them like his role model Nixon sold stuff he had from the white house post-presidency.

...it's all about capitalizing on your opportunities. baby!

 

Forgot this one...

 

If you want to set it to music, there's this:



eta: now that I just read them again, the lyrics are shockingly appropriate