What’s Does He Want?

In the hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, I worried about the people of New Orleans. The forecasts were dire, there was bound to be destruction, and it would take a generation to restore the city. That was the part that felt genuine and normative.

But I also confess that I was keyed up and agitated. Like many people, I’m attracted to spectacle. I wanted to see just how bad it would be, which parts of the city would be under water, whether the levees would hold or flood the neighborhoods nearby. This is this part of me I hesitate to acknowledge, but there is something in many of us that craves spectacle and stimulation. The Colosseum in Rome sat 80,000 people. That’s a whole lot of spectators who paid to see Technicolor gore.

So much for the mystifying rise of Donald Trump. How is it possible that we are still entangled in his world, the brutal coarseness of it, the contempt for standards and boundaries, the greedy appetite for self-dealing and enrichment? Part of the answer lies in our own appetite for excitement. Except for the figures at the margins of society, we have never encountered a figure like Trump before, who holds us by the force of his self-indulgent destructiveness, his transgressive displays of dictatorial force. Despite my very best and most honorable instincts I have looked at him through my fingers to track what he was ready to do next.

You and I may abominate Donald Trump for all the painfully obvious reasons, but there are plenty of people who are stirred by this unprecedented performance. Chief among them might be Donald Trump himself. We are looking at a man who has no real plan. Removing Cornyn to elevate Paxton in Texas was by all accounts a foolhardy move. It may very well cost the Republicans the Senate, but that was nothing for Trump next to the sheer excitement of doing it, the chaos it created, the moment of crazy triumph.

The same with his recent statements about the economy, his dismissive remarks about gas prices and affordability. We will see these clips from now until the midterms, but there will be no regret from Donald Trump, who must see these pronouncements as a manifestation of his power. They have not shaken his core of cultists and so they enhance his delusional sense of self.

All of this argues for our relentless resistance. We are deep in the midst of a pathological presidency, largely disconnected from the normal constraints of politics. There is no fix, no levee that will hold, because Donald Trump is a floodwater force. In the name of brutal self-assertion, he will keep pressing against the banks until the earth gives way. Our job is to hold on until his defeat is certain.