Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

90% : Trump nodded along from his center box, radiating pride of ownership -- Liddle Marco had grown up so beautifully.
88% : Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable -- foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself.
86% : "I do have a lot of surrogates, and they are speaking very beautifully," Trump bragged during one of his news conferences.
84% : Boebert took the opportunity to boast on Trump's behalf about one of his favorite topics: his supreme intelligence -- as evidenced by the fact that, as Trump loves to mention, he allegedly once "aced" some cognitive test.
73% : It was not clear whether Trump himself cared (he probably did; such an honor!), but dressing in the boss's full uniform -- white shirt, navy suit, and the signature neckwear -- was an added curtsy.
73% : Trump can do as he pleased, as he predicted.
71% : She started the job in 2017, the day before Trump delivered his mood-setting "American carnage" speech at his inauguration.
70% : After Houston, Kaufman told me, he was heading down to Florida to celebrate Romney's 77th birthday, not far -- geographically, anyway -- from Mar-a-Lago, where Trump would be receiving a dear friend of his own the same weekend: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an authoritarian whom Trump hailed as the best leader in the world.
68% : Within a few months, however, Burgum would be eager to tell everyone what regular company he was keeping with Trump.
67% : Trump waved and clapped for himself.
65% : "It will be very easy; I can make them evolve," Trump told me.
65% : "On the first night of the convention, Trump made what would become his familiar WWE-style entrance.
65% : Trump was then seen on-screen doing a quick twirl of his finger, the universal gesture for Let's get on with this.
64% : Greenwood persisted in bestowing his blessings until Trump could wait no longer and began his slow walk onto the convention floor.
64% : "You know what I liked about Trump?"
58% : As someone who has hung around Trump a lot, Jack knew enough to focus on the boss's main erogenous zone: his golf game.
58% : Trump was solidly up in the polls.
57% : "My fellow Americans," Senator Marco Rubio said from the podium while Trump -- his Audience of One -- squinted up at him like a building inspector.
55% : She said all the right things and made herself MAGA-friendly and reliable, enough to persuade Trump to make her his RNC chair.
53% : "It's just so easy, how they do that," Trump said.
53% : For one thing, the bloodshed reaffirmed the popular Republican notion that Trump is a uniquely marked and defiant figure, as reflected by the T-shirts being sold depicting the wounded nominee raising his fist (as well as the still-fashionable mug-shot merchandise).
53% : "I've noticed that for whatever reason, Trump is a magnet for these kinds of mangled phrases, misstatements, and malapropisms.
53% : They also shared the buoyant faith that supporting Trump would be a panacea.
51% : Back in March, Trump had traveled to Rome, Georgia, for a rally in which he would praise Jack as "a fighter" and "a MAGA man.
50% : We were talking on the phone, and Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Anaheim, California.
50% : Trump said at the Anaheim rally.
50% : "I don't think so," Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, said during his Republican-primary campaign last year, when asked whether he would ever do business with Trump.
49% : If nothing else, Trump has a keen eye for finding soft targets: pushovers he can bully, rules he can flout, entire political parties he can raze and remake in his image.
48% : After Trump won the nomination in 2016, "The party defines the party" became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP's putative leaders.
48% : Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump famously tried to strong-arm to "find 11,780 votes" to overturn Biden's 2020 victory in the state, seemed especially anxious when I had breakfast with him in Atlanta in May.
48% : I remember hearing that as bombast at the time, the kind of casual dismissals Trump tosses around.
47% : "Prayer works," Greenwood called out as Trump stood in the wings.
46% : If anything, this is the fun part for Trump: showing off that he has snapped up another politician like a distressed condo asset.
46% : It was such an upbeat and cheerful affair, not characteristic at all of these gatherings since Trump took over the franchise and made it a grievance-filled and even menacing place.
46% : But others who had served Trump had made different judgments.
44% : "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by" is how Trump responded to the debate question, less a call for restraint than a call to action.
43% : Several delegates I spoke with said the near miss proved that Trump either had been touched by God or possessed a superhuman ability to withstand danger.
41% : I talked a lot with Rubio in the last days of the 2016 primary, back when he was happy to speak candidly about Trump, and about how he knew better than to entrust the leadership of the United States to a "fraud," "lunatic," and "con artist" with autocratic instincts.
41% : Unluckily for Dugan, his main Republican rival for the congressional seat, Brian Jack, used to work for Trump in the White House.
41% : They had made their calculations, wore their practiced faces of satisfaction, and had somehow found a way to live with the learned helplessness that Trump had reduced them to.
40% : "I have never seen people able to pivot like politicians.""It's happening with all of them," Trump said.
40% : Trump appears to reserve special appreciation for those attendants who are willing to exult in his alleged physical prowess -- right out of the authoritarian playbook of the bare-chested and robust Vladimir Putin on horseback.
39% : "Why are you so afraid of saying what you really feel about Trump?" I asked.
38% : "Four more years, it'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote anymore," Trump reassured a gathering of Christian conservatives this past July.
37% : She had done her best for Trump, taken so much of his abuse and carried so much of his water.
37% : Because you'll develop "a herd mentality," Trump explained at a town hall in Pennsylvania.
36% : In retrospect, though, Trump was prospecting, sizing up the Republican "leaders" he would be competing against.
34% : Kaufman told me he was fine with Trump, explaining to me in the common parlance of a practiced Trump apologist that "not everybody likes his style.
33% : Trump is "in good spirits," Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida reported, while Gaetz complained that their hero was facing "the Mr. Potato Head doll of crimes," which is not technically a legal classification, by the way.
32% : But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with "brutal, vicious killers" -- by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries.
32% : Haley even made what passed for a subversive remark in her convention speech, when she said that not everyone agrees with Trump all of the time.
32% : He was a fierce critic of Trump before he became a Republican Senate candidate who saw an obvious path to the front of the herd.
31% : "They might speak badly about me now, but they won't later," Trump said.
31% : J. D. Vance: Donald Trump is an opioid for the masses"I've never seen anything like it," Trump told me the following spring, as he was completing his romp to the 2016 nomination.
31% : "We've been waging an all-out war on American democracy," Trump announced in Iowa this past December.
30% : ""Don't you have any ambivalence at all about Trump?"
30% : "Or would you?"I include this exchange because it typifies how some longtime Republican officials -- clearly uneasy about Trump -- can become comically evasive whenever asked about him.
28% : "Trump accepted Perry's support, and then promptly taunted him.
27% : They made their pilgrimage to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where Trump spent a good part of May facing 34 criminal counts stemming from his ill-fated attempt to hide a $130,000 payment to his alleged porno paramour.
26% : "Does anything about Trump give you pause?"
25% : I've heard all the private doubts about Trump from his most public of validators.
24% : Trump bragged at a campaign stop with Vance in Youngstown in 2022.
23% : As with many other brand-name Republicans in the arena, Rubio had once despised Trump.
23% : He then revealed that Trump had shot a 70 on 18 holes.
21% : Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee in 2016, would become frustrated with Trump over his obvious scorn for his organization.
21% : "Hutchinson had previously distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans to have held elected office who said he would not vote for Trump.
21% : "Resistance" to Trump, lame as it was, had become an inside joke among the party faithful.
21% : Although the Senate candidate from Ohio had previously dismissed Trump as "noxious," "reprehensible," and "cultural heroin," among other things, he worked to convince Trump that he was reformed.
21% : If Trump had a mustache, his acolytes would all grow and groom one just like his -- as Baath Party loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.
20% : Boebert's "cognitive dissonance" claim made me think of the early days of COVID, in 2020, when Trump tried to convince everyone that the pandemic would soon disappear.
19% : Former Texas Governor Rick Perry had recently endorsed him, despite dismissing Trump earlier as a "cancer on conservatism" and "a barking carnival act.
19% : Mattis, who was of course nowhere near this convention, had issued a statement on the night of January 6, 2021, blasting Trump as well as those who enabled him as "pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice."
17% : We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies.
17% : "Also a long time ago: the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, where Ted Cruz had delivered his plucky "vote your conscience" speech in defiance of Trump, whom Cruz had called "utterly amoral" and "a sniveling coward.
17% : Gaetz's words, which appeared on X, intentionally echoed Trump's from the 2020 debate where he'd been asked to condemn neofascist groups who had been disrupting some of that summer's Black Lives
16% : Biden's defeat of Trump in 2020 had seemed certain to weaken Trump's grip on the Republican Party, if not end his political career.
14% : (Graham had called Trump, among other not-nice things, "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" and "a kook.")
13% : Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that "Trump is not going to change the institution," referring to the GOP.
13% : This might be because those who speak excitedly about Trump, including Trump himself, tend to talk fast and off-the-cuff and perhaps have less capacity than most for shame and embarrassment (and grammar).
10% : That same day, Mitch McConnell -- who had criticized the then-president for his "disgraceful" conduct on January 6, 2021 -- endorsed Trump.
3% : Rubio implied that Trump had a small penis; Trump derided Rubio as "Liddle Marco" and called him "weak like a baby."

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