The Bread-and-Circus Stage of American Decline

The last month of American politics has seen more bombshells than eastern Ukraine. On Thursday afternoon, Politico dropped another.

Reporter Natalie Allison served as bombardier by teasing her latest scoop. “There appears to be a new softness to Donald Trump,” she tweeted, “with people who’ve talked [to] him describing him with words like ‘existential,’ ‘serene,’ ‘emotional’ and even ‘spiritual.’”

Scott Jennings, a Republican analyst for CNN, echoed the point shortly before Trump walked out to accept his party’s nomination last evening: “I’ve seen a big chunk of Trump’s speech … folks, buckle up because he’s about to blow the doors off and rise to the occasion.”

This was going to be the moment that Donald Trump finally became presidential.

“This is the moment Trump became president” is a running joke among his critics who follow politics closely. It began with a comment made by Van Jones, a Democrat, after Trump’s first address to Congress in 2017. Impressed by the uncharacteristically sober tone and substance of that speech, and moved by one passage that paid tribute to the widow of a Navy SEAL, a hopeful Jones declared that “he became president of the United States in that moment, period.”

The very belated maturity of Donald J. Trump had supposedly begun.

Seven years of manic destructive immaturity later, Jones’ comment has become a punchline that’s referenced ironically whenever political analysts spot signs of restraint and compassion in a man who plainly views such things as evidence of contemptible weakness. In one Trump crisis after another, from the trauma of the pandemic to the trauma of losing reelection to the trauma of nearly being murdered, breaths have been held and fingers have been crossed that the gravity of the moment would puncture untapped reservoirs of goodwill and moral leadership in him. 

And every time, it hasn’t.

He didn’t “rise to the occasion” during COVID. He didn’t “rise to the occasion” after the 2020 election either, defying some historically embarrassing wishful thinking in the process. Somehow, despite those painful lessons, pockets of the commentariat in 2024 continue to search the skies for evidence of Trump aging into statesmanship, like Linus van Pelt awaiting the Great Pumpkin.

This time will be different. You’ll see.

In fairness, there was more reason than usual to believe that this time really might be different. The terrifying experience of barely cheating death will affect any human being. Observers could place themselves in Trump’s shoes and imagine how having a bullet graze their head would upend their view of life. A normal, well-adjusted person jolted by mortality might understandably feel compelled to repent and to use the time they have left to live a more charitable existence.

A normal, well-adjusted person.

The remarkable thing about Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday night is that he managed to do a serviceable impression of a normal, well-adjusted person—for 28 minutes.

But a man who can’t change, won’t.

I don’t think Scott Jennings or the sources who spoke to Natalie Allison sincerely believed that Trump had turned over a new leaf or would “rise to the occasion.”

Few of us are qualified to diagnose the precise nature of his psychological debilitation. But it’s there, plain as day. It’s silly to hypothesize that it might be “cured” in a blink by a near-miss from rifle fire.

Trump is Trump. He’ll always be Trump. An archangel could visit him and he’d end up yammering about how the 2020 election was rigged until the angel could take no more and flew off.

The point of having Republican insiders babble about a new, “softer” MAGA before the speech, I take it, was to try to prime public perceptions of it in advance. My theory of GOP messaging in the Trump era is that it’s less about reacting to events than it is about creating alternate realities. The reality that Trump’s allies wanted to create last night for swing voters was that he’s a changed man.

All the tumult and drama and daily exhaustions of the first term? They’re all gone. He’ll never be the same after having been shot at without result. He’s seen the light. You can trust him now.

Trump began his speech by recounting the assassination attempt, which was smart politics in that it was destined to be engrossing and ensured that viewers not inclined to watch the whole thing would at least see the part that humanized him. He was subdued in the retelling too, which was unnerving to his critics—not necessarily because we thought he had earnestly turned over a new leaf but because his tone might lead persuadable voters to think he had.

On Dispatch Live last night, Jonah Goldberg said that the first half-hour of the address alarmed him insofar as it seemed as if Trump had expanded his repertoire of emotional manipulation tactics. Watching him succeed with soft-spoken relatability rather than boorish bravado felt like watching the velociraptors learn to work the doorknobs in a Jurassic Park movie.

But it couldn’t last. The final hour of what would turn out to be the longest presidential acceptance speech in the television era affirmed that a man who can’t change, won’t.

Trump’s handlers wanted to keep things short and conciliatory in tone, but having been handed a television audience of millions, their principal couldn’t resist going off-script and holding forth. What was supposed to be a tightly choreographed rebranding of a demagogue became the sort of tedious stream-of-consciousness grievance-belching typical of his rallies.

Before the speech, as evidence of his new tone and commitment to national unity, his aides whispered to reporters that he wouldn’t so much as mention Joe Biden in his address. But then he did, accusing him by name in what was clearly an ad lib of having done more damage to the country than the 10 worst presidents in American history combined.

He attacked “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.” He accused Democrats of having “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election. He whined about unfair media coverage from news programs like “Deface the Nation.” He lied a lot. In the end, a speech that was 3,000 words as prepared ended up being more than 12,000 as delivered. It was after midnight on the east coast when he wrapped up.

He was an unchanged man. Those following live reaction on social media as he spoke could actually track the horror in real time as viewers impressed by the speech’s somber opening realized that Trump is, and will always be, Trump.

No one who watched it all the way through could come away feeling differently. But for the other 99 percent of America, the alternate reality of a kinder, gentler demagogue that was cultivated by Trump’s allies and amplified by friendly media might have legs.

Trump has meaningfully changed since 2016 or even 2020 in only three ways. He’s much older and more unfocused now than he was when he entered politics, which might have contributed to his lack of discipline last night. After years of impeachments, indictments, and a failed coup attempt, he’s also more aggrieved than he used to be. And he’s surrounded by a thick phalanx of post-liberal chuds with big plans to turn American government into a subsidiary of Trump, Inc. None of those changes is for the better.

But in his essence, he is who he is and will forever remain so. “It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day,” his top adviser, Chris LaCivita, ominously warned Politico this week about how the campaign would react to another election defeat. Trump is Trump, always. Vote accordingly.

“Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump” was half the story on night four of the Republican convention. The other half was “meet the new Republican politics,” which was emphatically not the same as the old Republican politics.

A few hours before Trump’s speech, CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Sen. Marco Rubio what he expected from that evening’s address.

Rubio pointed to the assassination attempt as evidence of the gravity of this moment. “At least in my view of it, it sort of reminds us that at the end … we’re not in the entertainment business, right?” he said.

Define “we,” Marco.

Of the eight people who immediately preceded Trump onstage on Thursday evening, fully half were entertainers. Tucker Carlson is a storyteller; Hulk Hogan is a pro wrestler; Dana White runs UFC; Kid Rock is Kid Rock. The person who spoke before Carlson was Alina Habba, who nowadays merely moonlights as an attorney while working her full-time job as a right-wing media “personality.”

The Republican Party is in the entertainment business. It didn’t used to be, but there are a lot of things it didn’t used to be that it is now.

There’s an obvious method to the madness of having figures like Hogan and White soak up primetime television minutes that would have otherwise gone to elder statesmen in a party whose base hates many of its own leaders. Working-class voters (and not just white ones) are Trump’s bread and butter; watching Hulk Hogan hulk out over “Trumpamania” surely stands a better chance of moving votes than watching Mitch McConnell burble insincere platitudes about a nominee he hates.

That may be especially true among the lowest of low-information voters inclined to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a look, as my colleague John McCormack speculated yesterday. The mix of cranks like Tucker and tough-guy showmen who cater to America’s “bro” demographic was aimed directly at the Joe Rogan fan base, which is sizable.

But understanding the convention line-up purely in strategic terms is reductive, I think.

It’s possible that the likes of Hogan and White were invited for no better reason than that Trump famously enjoys wrestling and ultimate fighting—and he has for decades. The American right is a monarchy now, and kings have always had jesters. It’s the job of a royal court to present silly amusements for His Majesty’s entertainment.

The likelier truth, though, is that a guy who figured out that you could become president by becoming a television game-show host first is following his instincts by treating politics as entertainment.

Consider the most notable line from Trump’s speech, which wasn’t about his near-assassination, Joe Biden, or the 2020 election. It was this:

It is technically possible, I guess, to reduce the national debt while also reducing federal revenue if you’re willing to slash spending aggressively enough. But it’s so wildly unrealistic, especially for the GOP in its current incarnation, that it stands out as a brazen lie even by Trump’s standards.

It’s not the sort of lie you tell when you’re trying to put one over on voters. It’s the sort of lie you tell when you don’t care a whit about an issue and can’t be roused to pretend otherwise.

Trump’s party isn’t going to cut spending. If there was any doubt about that, his record during his first term—before the pandemic, not just after—removed it. For him, fiscal policy is determined by what’s good for his near-term polling, not what’s good for America’s long-term health. “No tax on tips” is a nice example: That’s stupid for many reasons, starting with its effect on the deficit, but it might help him win Nevada. The same goes for his interest in replacing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell with a flunky who’ll cut interest rates on his say-so. Reducing rates would goose inflation, but the immediate stimulus to the economy would give Trump some “numbers” he can boast about.

The growing burden of servicing the national debt is one of the two biggest challenges facing America, yet the Republican nominee has never so much as glanced in the direction of meaningfully addressing it. In 2016 he ludicrously vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years while simultaneously swearing up and down that he wouldn’t touch entitlements, a promise that persists to this day. The only thing one can say in his defense is that, incredibly, the other party is even less serious about fiscal stability than Republicans are.

The other great challenge facing America, by the way, is containing China. Would it surprise you to learn that Trump seems not to care so much about that either?

We are in the bread-and-circus stage of American decline. The way I understood the line-up of Republican convention speakers on Thursday night was simply Trump and his party leaning into the “circus” part.

If you’re faced with an electorate that’s given up all sense of civic responsibility or never learned it in the first place, it’s rational to offer them spectacle in lieu of solutions to their problems. Trump is offering them a solution of sorts on immigration—also wildly unrealistic, go figure—but he’s blessed by the fact that Democrats have no solutions of their own apart from outlandish pandering. And so, in a thoroughly unserious country, he’s calculated that he can win if politics is reduced to a contest of who can put on the most entertaining pageant.

Pitted against a beauty-pageant promoter, Joe Biden’s party doesn’t stand a chance.

Last night, needing a break, I switched over to Netflix and was greeted with Hillbilly Elegy at the top of my “recommended” feed.

“Do you really think so little of me, algorithm?” I thought. If I wanted to watch a cartoonish supervillain’s origin story, I would have cued up Joker.

I thought of J.D. Vance again later when I switched back to the convention and caught Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock doing their thing. (“Ripping the flag in half to reveal the Trump campaign logo is just too on the nose,” one clever Twitter user observed of Hogan’s shirt-tearing shtick.) Four days after Vance landed on the ticket, it’s received wisdom that the senator from Ohio is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2028. But in a party that’s more interested in pageantry than in policy, is that really true?

Maybe it is. He isn’t an entertainer to the same degree as his running mate, but he did get famous selling a book that became a movie. And he’s a hell of an actor: Of all the people in the GOP who’ve sought to get ahead by posturing as authoritarians, only J.D. played the part well enough to end up as the heir apparent.

He’s got chops. I just don’t know that he has the boorish charisma needed to entertain a party, and a country, as unserious as ours.

Vance is a serious intellectual. Worse than that for him, he seems serious about nationalist policy solutions. His “real America” cred may be a hundred times greater than Trump’s biographically, but it’s a hundred times less so temperamentally. Perhaps with practice he can remake himself as a demagogue as mean-spirited as Trump or as conspiratorially glassy-eyed as Tucker Carlson, but that’s a high bar. And there are lots of other talented lowlifes in the party, like Matt Gaetz, who’ll also be striving to clear it.

Vance seems to be calculating that a dogmatic post-liberal ideologue can make up for what he lacks in charisma with intellect and policy creativity. But that was also Ron DeSantis’ calculation in this year’s primary. How’d it turn out?

In time, I suspect the New Right avant garde will discover to its dismay that rank-and-file Republicans care no more about nationalist ideology on the merits than they cared about Reaganite conservatism when Trump arrived. Fundamentally, they don’t believe that America will be made great again by policy solutions so much as by personalities.

They want the circus. In the end, as big a clown as he is, I suspect Vance just isn’t big enough.