Ten Years Ago I Warned Republicans Had Few Means of Limiting the Damage Trump Would Do
Ten years ago today, I published this article, in which I predicted that Republicans would all fall in line behind Trump.
[S]o long as the base continues to eat up Trump’s schtick –the Republicans are going to be stuck with him, because they have few means of controlling him and even fewer to limit any damage he might do if provoked.
[snip]
If all proceeds as things appear to be proceeding — although, yes, it is far too early to say for certain that it will — Republicans will ultimately be applauding the prospect of President Trump. complete with the possibility he’ll appoint Dennis Rodman (drawing on his diplomatic trip to North Korea) as Ambassador to China. If and when Trump becomes the only viable opponent for Hillary Clinton, Republicans will be forced to accept their fate and hope for the best.
And with it, they may well recognize that their ideological celebration of the rich and of demagoguery have delivered them precisely the candidate they’ve asked for.
It’s a dizzying read for me, not least because I recognize a number of things (including the Russian plot to help Trump, but even more the resurgent authoritarianism of the right) had already kicked off, little visible until Trump caused a light to focus on them.
That said, what was already visible — not least, Trump’s demonization of immigrants as a means to grab attention and encourage the worst instincts among white Americans — carry through to this day.
In recent days Trump’s ability to grab and control attention has come under strain, in part because the very forces he unleashed refuse to be placated by bullshit.
But after Donald Trump largely confessed that he knew of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking but did nothing more than demand that Epstein stop recruiting at Mar-a-Lago, the press has largely ignored the import of that and moved on.
As a WaPo story quoting the White House declaring victory on Trump’s Epstein scandal notes today, Trump has managed to do this before.
“People forget,” the White House official said. “We’ve gone through these things for the last eight years.”
It’s been ten years, not eight.
Yes, the MSM appears to be moving on to the next big thing and it’s hardly surprising. Regarding his first term, I underestimated the damage he would inflict, but then I also was convinced Kamala would win. You have much better predictive abilities.
Careful, Dr. Wheeler. He might go ALL CAPS on you.
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Thank you both!
Not a chance. Ms. Tarlov he can watch on Fox. To go all caps on Dr. Wheeler, the man would have to READ.
The hinge moment for me came a few weeks later, during the GOP primary debate when Trump so famously responded to Megyn Kelly’s question about his misogynist insults with the (certainly canned) line “Just Rosie O’Donnell.” Plus ca change.
What struck me then as a harbinger was *not* Trump being a pig; we knew that. It was the audience’s rapturous laughter. What I heard in that moment was the paradigmatic expression of laughter-as-release: in this case, clearly release TO, not FROM. Trump was giving permission to hate women (emblemized, as always, by Rosie O’Donnell) and damn if there weren’t a huge number of folks slobbering for just that release, some of them women themselves. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, all were demonized but none with the deeply personal hatred directed at women.
After that I started noticing the suicides. One women, two, in Colorado. Another closer to my home. All seemingly in response to a message from the zeitgeist: Erase yourself. Do it now. I felt tempted myself. This place has been a large part of my personal resistance, for which I thank you and all those who comment here.
And that depression in the topography of America reemerged eight years later when Trump sadly won 2 million more votes than the far more qualified candidate. People don’t change in my experience.
I for one welcome your comments Ginevra. I too find rebalancing by reading emptywheel. As to trump giving permission I realized just this morning, reading shallow “fashion” news, that the inappropriateness of “trump family fashion sense” is another way to influence followers. Any dictates of what should be considered proper attire are overthrown. Jared always looks like he’s outgrown his suit to me, not to mention junior’s garish ex-fiancee. I feel like this thwarting of fashion norms is always deliberate because it is done to appeal to those who cannot afford to follow fashion & thus hate the elite who can or do. But then too trump has his own fashion grifts which enable followers to identify instead with him. Cults are a bitch.
Ginerva, I must try to pass on a quote attributed to Truman Capote: “Suicide is usually a case of killing the wrong person”. Stick around, please.
Your comments have been so helpful to me, and helped me stay grounded. I also look for release from this mortal coil, but I’ll be damned if it is because of a con artist and a gaggle of stooges (mainly fed by propaganda.) Let’s hang around and do some good trouble!
I know the feeling. Ten years ago I cut out an innocuous little ‘paper tiger’ of Trump -a rather flatteringly 1980s man in a suit publicity photo from a newspaper, taped it to my kitchen wall, and stuck a dart with US flag fletching in his forehead. It’s still there.
It was also a joke, but seriously, literally sticking a pin in my sense of foreboding.
I’d sat up like a cat spotting a fox when he came down the escalator (having grown up in NYS, familiar with word from Wayne Barrett and Akwesasne Notes) and started monitoring CNN & MSNBC to see what most fellow citizens (in fact still primarily relying on TV news to inform their political decisions), were getting there.
I stuck a pin in that sense of foreboding because they were laughing.
Not just the vapidly ‘political’ jockeys, but the political opposition with a voice there.
You were thinking about how it could play out on the right.
But Karl Rove et al had already made it clear, over & over again, what the GOP were capable of, and we at least had an inkling of how the obtusely misapplied Social Darwinism and half-baked “marked-based management” ideology of their vestigial Nazi-alignment rationalizes it (cynically defending knowingly evil energy policies by peddling ‘vaguely’ fatalistic end times fantasies by Pavlovian dog whistle to prosperity church evangelicals, and anyone caught unawares, to whom that ‘rings a bell,’ by dint of growing up in a country in which it is impossible to avoid being steeped in the religious concepts of an occasionally charming Protestant moral establishment (a term coined by David Sehat).
No; what alarmed me was seeing how it would play out on the other side, how they -‘we,’ were already falling for it, already helping the most bent Republicans pave the way for that tool and his precious Sharpie to ensconce himself in our Oval Office. Because they were laughing & crying, instead of making & covering the opposition’s arguments, which have nothing to do with Trump.
Sorry, I was responding to Marcy, didn’t realize I was still desperately trying not to respond to Ginevra. We just lost my son’s brother to suicide not two weeks ago.
Well just thanks for sticking around, Ginevra, you’re one of the best things going here.
He’s the most powerful man in the world, and nobody knows how to stop him. Europe is grovelling before him, so it isn’t just the Republicans.
He has complete control except for certain federal judges, and he is in the process of ‘fixing’ that problem as 225 years of jurisprudence is being re-written. It’s the only branch that he doesn’t yet own.
My prediction is that he will get the Federal Reserve to accede to his wishes, too.
His strategy is to attack, attack, attack, until his opposition is reduced to rubble and he is the last man standing on top of the wreckage. Collateral damage means nothing to him because he must always be the winner, at least in his own mind. Getting his way is his only goal, because all is about him. Nothing else matters.
At least for today, the Federal Reserve is maintaining its independence … holding interest rates steady.
Powell has no more shits to give about that dick-tater, apparently — which is an attitude that’s not as rare as it often feels it is.
I’m wondering whether Colbert is actually considering the Meidas network’s appeal to have him in their shop. You wanna change things up, that’s a good way to do it, imo. All the old paradigms are in flux, not just the democracy/autocracy one.
I’m not convinced this entire Epstein business is going away. Even if the mainstream media outlets are moving on, there’s too much buzzing around on social and non-traditional media. Trump’s position – I got mad at Epstein because he was recruiting my employees for sex trafficking – is going to throw gas on the fire.
But what depresses me is how vacant so many members of Congress have turned out to be. They have no moral floor at all. They could have stopped Trump at so many moments, and they chose to just go along instead.
It was a terrible tactical mistake for Democrats to insist on impeachment after January 6th. At the time, there were Republicans who would have voted for censure that would have prevented Trump from ever holding office again. Instead of censure, they chose impeachment for the political theater when they didn’t have the votes. Then the moderate Republicans retired or got squeezed out, and now . . . here we are.
It was naive to think we had an embedded political culture that would prevent authoritarianism from taking hold here. That culture was a mile wide but an inch deep.
TWO impeachments. And the GOP decided beforehand they would protect their demi-god.
What impeachments?
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/8/1/headlines/smithsonian_removes_explicit_references_to_trumps_impeachments_from_exhibit
The number of calling-out-of-Trump postings on Tik Tok is jumping up.
Time for Trump to reach for the platform-ban-hammer he set temporarily aside?
There’s a form of censure that prevents a sitting, or former, president from ever holding office again? I can’t imagine that’s right. Impeachment was exactly the right thing to do – it’s the remedy the Constitution provides for what Trump did (among other things), and it revealed the full extent of Senate Republicans’ perfidy.
That censure is in the 14th Amendment. Congress has the power to enforce it. The Supreme Court did not rule otherwise; it just held that state authorities in Colorado could not enforce it. So it could have been done.
As to impeachment revealing perfidy, a lot of good that has done. It’s long forgotten, and once again, here we are.
Do you believe the unaccountable Supreme Court (thanks Judicial Council!) would support a 14th amendment censure that precludes Trmp from running for office again?
I have my doubts.
I have the same concerns about the Supremes as many of the people who read EW. But a specific act of Congress anchored in the authority granted them by the 14th Amendment would be hard for the Court’s members to overcome. Remember, they’re supposed to be originalists or textualists.
It might be 6-3 or 5-4, but I think it would have survived.
The mention of Dennis Rodman as a possible ambassador to North Korea when compared with some of the people who have actually been put in place … well, I’ll just say that if Rodman were given that job today, most of us would probably say “ok, could have been a lot worse, still want my Senators to vote ‘no’ but I’m going to direct my efforts towards worse problems” … in short, as prescient as Dr. Wheeler has been, the reality of this second term has been on the very high end of the worst of possible anticipated outcomes.
They’ve broken the bell on the WTF’o’meter.
Dennis Rodman as ambassador to N. Korea would be pretty close to worst and could see it sparking who knows what badness. Nothing surprises me anymore though.
Rodman might be an improvement in Trump 2’s cabinet.
Back in 2016, Hillary mentioned a chunk of Trump’s supporters as the basket of deplorables. This term, Trump elevated them to his cabinet.