President Who?

Now that Joe Biden has been elected president, it is important to begin planning for the post-presidency of Donald J. Trump. Trump has been such a toxic force in our national politics for the past five years, and is continuing to do so much damage to our social fabric, that a strategy will be necessary for navigating his continued presence on the cultural scene. Speculation is of course inevitable. Will Trump continue to loom as large in our media ecosphere as he does now? Will he continue to dominate Republican electoral politics? Will he mobilize his followers to wreak havoc on the Biden presidency?

I, for one, believe that the most dire predictions of future danger from Trump will not bear out. Trump is neither stupid nor crazy. He has a real talent for self-promotion and an uncanny grasp of the dynamics of reality television. But he has committed the one irredeemable sin in those domains: he has over-exposed himself. The Trump show is exciting to watch because the authority and power he wields as president make his obscenities titillatingly shocking and dangerous. Once he is stripped of the office, his repetitive, simplistic, and unimaginative vulgarities will grow dull much faster than he or his supporters anticipate.

My purpose here is not to foretell outcomes, however, but to examine tactics. Events may prove me wrong. In any case, it is certainly true that to whatever degree the damage Trump inflicts may be variable, much will depend on how his opponents respond to his provocations and attacks and those who would follow in his footsteps. What then, is the best posture to embrace in this regard?

I would argue that, to best shield ourselves from the residual influence of Donald Trump, we will need an even stricter and more comprehensive version of "Godwin's Law." Where Godwin's Law dictates that Hitler and the Nazis should not be invoked unless the issue under discussion rises to the level of genocide or totalitarian oppression, in the future we should refrain from mentioning Donald Trump at all. 

Why would that be the case? The temptation to evoke Trump rhetorically will be very strong when he is finally ejected from the Oval Office. Whenever a Republican electoral candidate begins to speak in racist dog whistles or deploys nativist rhetoric, there will be a strong impulse to label him or her "the next Donald Trump." There may, indeed be much justification in such messaging. But it will ultimately be counterproductive. 

Again, why? The answer lies in the nature of the particular con game that Trump has pulled during his tenure in office. He has kept himself afloat by politicizing everything. Russian interference? A hoax. Likewise Covid-19. The wall is rising. China is paying tariffs. New auto plants are opening in Detroit. Anyone who disagrees with these manifestly ludicrous propositions is purveying "fake news." How do we know? Because anyone who gets these "facts" wrong is operating from bias. They don't like Donald Trump (forget the idea that Trump is, in fact loathsome- that is the fakest of fake news)!

It is a clever circular logic trap, and has proven tenaciously effective. Thus as tempting as it will be to compress exposition by pointing to his toadies and imitators and yelling "Trump!", we should not. To be sure, we should not ignore Trumpism. It is bound to rear its ugly head repeatedly in coming years, and must be vigorously rooted out. But we can talk about Trumpism without mentioning Trump himself. 

"We all know what happens when you pretend a public health crisis isn't happening." "We had a leader who set one half of the country against the other, and that ended up being torture for both sides." We can talk about Trumpism while talking around Trump. Trump has treated his entire presidency as a branding exercise, he has made himself into the key symbolic asset of his particular strain of white nationalism. The more thoroughly we can ignore him, the more effectively we can defuse the toxic forces that he has galvanized so malignantly.