There are two aspects of Donald Trump’s character that are important to understand in September 2024: First, that he is a lunatic; second, that he is a coward.
Trump’s personal cowardice is, of course, legendary. His campaign has worked very hard to find something disqualifying in Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz’s 24-year military career, and it has been nauseating to watch Marine veteran J. D. Vance play the attack dog (think yappy little dachshund) on that front, acting on behalf of a man whose father bought him a phony diagnosis of bone spurs (which miraculously healed without treatment!) to keep him out of military service when his country came calling during the Vietnam era.
Trump is manifestly afraid of all sorts of things: germs (handshakes are “barbaric,” he once whined), birds, women who are not on his payroll, etc. But he also is afraid to do his own lunatic dirty work.
Trump has recently intensified his habit of reposting Truth Social content of a barking-mad nature—calling for military tribunals to hear cases against Liz Cheney and Barack Obama, sedition charges against members of the January 6 committee, things of that nature. He reposts QAnon content, vague (and not-so-vague) threats to use violence against his political opponents. That these are reposts on his little-used narcissistic social-media platform rather than things he says himself in public is a way of avoiding direct accountability for this lunacy. Low-bottom sycophants and cowards such as Sen. Ted Cruz and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson find it easier to blow off questions about Trump’s reposts on an obscure digital outlet than questions about the lunatic things that come out of the man’s own mouth or phone.
But those things are bonkers, too.
Trump has recently threatened to imprison political enemies, to pursue treason charges against political opponents and media critics, to hand out life sentences to Mark Zuckerberg (“he will spend the rest of his life in prison”) and anybody else implicated in the same imaginary election-stealing he has been lying about since 2020.*
This is bananas stuff. Trump is a would-be caudillo, but his cowardice has largely spared us having to fight him, because he prefers to hide behind lawyers and then, after his lawyers get laughed out of court, to rage about the judges from the safe remove of social media. He is the Walter Mitty of Augusto Pinochets.
Trump apologists such as Rep. Dan Crenshaw—and what the hell happened to that guy?—who wave their hands and protest that January 6 and the related effort to overthrow the legitimately elected executive of the United States (which is what nullifying a presidential election is) did not amount to anything because it did not involve very much bloodshed are being spectacularly inane. “Don’t worry—the guy is too stupid and lazy to successfully install himself as a dictator” is simultaneously true and possibly the most asinine line of exculpatory political rhetoric in the whole history of American oratory.
The guy is talking about convening military tribunals and capital charges (treason is a death-penalty offense in the United States) against his political enemies. What does constitutional scholar Ted Cruz have to say about that? What says American patriot Dan Crenshaw? Nobody expects a mess of wilted polyester such as Lindsey Graham to suddenly discover his manhood, but what about Sen. Tom Cotton? Each and every one of these gentlemen is lined up behind a guy who has called for the “termination” of the Constitution so that he can go about setting up his military tribunals and pursuing his vendettas. The cravenness of it all is astounding.
Military tribunals and trumped-up treason charges are not policy debates about which reasonable people can disagree. They are the daydreams of a would-be tyrant. Nothing about the nature or character of the Democratic candidate changes that. Kamala Harris could be Vladimir Lenin himself, and Trump would still be precisely what he is. The fact that this can be said by so few people in the conservative movement—including the leaders of many of its most important organs and institutions—and by almost no one in the Republican Party tells us something we need to know: It isn’t just Donald Trump. None of these people can responsibly be entrusted with real political power.
Keep that in mind the next time someone asks you for a vote or a donation or tries to sell you a subscription. Donald Trump is loud and clear about his intentions and priorities.
You can’t say you didn’t know. You can’t say you didn’t have a choice.
Correction, September 10, 2024: This piece initially misspelled Mark Zuckerberg’s surname.
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