Cheeto Jesus

Trump is a criminal, a pathological liar, a narcissist, and an inveterate bully. He has few deeply held beliefs. As a politician, he has no regard for the mechanics of government or the analysis of policy. He is, as his critics say, vacant. And he is also a genius—not in the sense of a soaring I.Q. or an aptitude for the sciences or any ability to make computations that most human brains cannot. He is, in no way, an intellect. His genius is for the all-American, for publicity, for having the native foresight, buried deep in his viscous core, to understand what he had to do. He had to perform. He had to shout fight, he had to hunt out the cameras, he had to get his fist in the air, he had to apprehend, somehow, what this all meant before the secret service barreled him away. He himself, in the hospital, seemed astounded by his own power. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he told Michael Goodwin, the sycophantic New York Post columnist. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” This is the platonic ideal of a Trump quote: self-aggrandizing, incorrect, and aimed straight, like an arrow into the heart, at all that he will ever care about, and all he has gained. He is known. He is forever known. He has fame, and the best kind, the American kind, that which, like Cronos, devours whatever else is on this Earth, so men and women in Paris and Egypt and Kampala can think of him and dream of him and even bear his likeness, this image of the blood and the flag and the fist, on a cotton t-shirt. What else, near death, can Trump long for? The presidency is beside the point. If he wins, as everyone seems to think he will, he’ll only get four more years anyway, no matter what they tell you about American Hitler. Trump has no genius for governing or genuinely dominating others; he cannot, like Napoleon, stand up a new empire or, like the Nazis and the Soviets, make fascism as real as the gun pressed to your temple. His political machine runs on the exhaust fumes of his own mania, and it can do little to discipline the states, the little republics of federalism that will choose, if governed by Democrats, to shirk Trumpism. Soon, Trump will be eighty, and this milestone will either be celebrated in the Oval Office or at Mar-a-Lago, in permanent exile as a two-time presidential loser.

[N]o one has done more to inject violence into our political discourse than Trump.

He demonizes his political opponents as “animals,” “scum” and “vermin.” He calls for jailing his opponents without cause and forcing them to stand before military tribunals. He speaks of the “bloodbath” that will occur if he loses the election. When a deranged man attempted to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, Trump mocked the incident as his audience laughed.

Trump creates serious fear in the minds of many Americans with his promises to destroy democratic norms and become a dictator on “day one” if he gets re-elected president. On January 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and did nothing as they launched a violent insurrection to overturn the 2020 election. At the Capitol, Trump’s followers hunted Nancy Pelosi and chanted “hang Mike Pence.”

None of this justifies the attempt on his life – or any kind of political violence against anyone. Yet Trump has continually framed American politics as a violent struggle requiring bloodshed.