"Surely," you say, "Donald Trump's personal lawyer pleading guilty and implicating Trump in commission of a felony for an illegal payoff of campaign funds for a playmate mistress, the same week his former campaign manager was convicted on fraud, the same week his long-time business CFO agreed to immunity from prosecution, is enough to break the hold on Trump's supporters and allow us to end this long national nightmare, correct Zandar? Surely this is the inflection point where it all comes apart, yes?"
To which, I point you to this week's NY Times column by Roger Cohen, where the answer is "No, and they will never abandon him."
The thing about all the shocking Trump revelations — Michael Cohen’s about violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to two women in coordination with a “candidate for federal office” being the latest — is that they are already baked into Trump’s image. His supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one, Babcox included, who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the “Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.
It’s also why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything starts to unravel must be viewed warily. Sure, Trump sounds more desperate. But who’s the enforcer if Trump has broken the law? It’s Congress — and until things change there (which could happen in November) or Republicans at last abandon a policy of hold-my-nose opportunism, Trump will ride out the storm.
There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?
Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.
It will take decades to clean up the mess that Trump has caused after just 19 months. If he is allowed to serve out a full term, the rest of my lifetime will be required just to get us back to the post-Bush era of world mistrust against us. If he is re-elected in 2020, it will never happen.
The main reason for that is the GOP enablers who have covered for Trump, most of all his supporters. They simply don't care anymore. We've reverted, full-form, to the American status quo, a country founded on slave labor, racism, Calvinist hypocrisy, and greed, the country that has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing, and only after everything else has been tried.
The Obama experiment was the right thing, but now everything else must be tried. The fact we followed up with Trump, rather than elect America's first woman president, is everything you need to know.
Trump's not the problem. It's the people who voted for him, and support him now.
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