Opinion | Trump Would Be Long Gone if Only We Could …

Notably, she continued, “Trump is neither seen nor heard in these ads.”

In “Trump Conviction Shows There’s No 2024 Game Changer Coming,” Ed Kilgore, a former Democratic operative who is now a political columnist for New York magazine, explained from a separate vantage point Trump’s seeming invulnerability:

You can argue all day about why Trump seems to be “Teflon Don” or even conclude that it’s not about him but about his feckless opponents in both parties or about an atmosphere of partisan polarization that nothing can penetrate. But whatever it is, we’re in a presidential contest that appears to be all but impervious to the kinds of things that used to be called “game changers.”

It’s time to accept at least as a rebuttable presumption that the game isn’t changing. And that has implications for future events like the presidential debates, the two major-party conventions, and the cut-and-thrust of the campaign competition as the November election grows nigh.

Trump, Kilgore continued,

is incapable of moderating his savage and vengeful message, and this year’s turnout dynamics could make Biden’s base of support more reliable. And Trump’s polling lead, even though it has induced regular panic in some Democratic ranks, has never been more than a few ticks away from vanishing altogether.

But no one should expect Trump to self-destruct or persuadable voters to wake up some morning and realize what a terrible man he is.

The strategy adopted by Trump and his allies to deal with his apparent liabilities is not to change course, but to double down.

On June 6, Trump posted one of his increasingly typical rants on Truth Social, which has to be read in full to be appreciated:

It is a Total and Complete American Tragedy that the Crooked Joe Biden Department of Injustice is so desperate to jail Steve Bannon, and every other Republican, for that matter, for not SUBMITTING to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, made up of all Democrats, and two CRAZED FORMER REPUBLICAN LUNATICS, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, and Liz “Out of Her Mind” Cheney. It has been irrefutably proven that it was the Unselects who committed actual crimes when they deleted and destroyed all material evidence, in a pathetic attempt to protect Crazy Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats from the TRUTH — THAT I DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. The un-American Weaponization of our Law Enforcement has reached levels of Illegality never thought possible before. INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR “FINDINGS!” MAGA2024.

Dr. Phil McGraw, a television host sympathetic to Trump, pointedly encouraged him to abandon his threats to prosecute adversaries if re-elected. During an hourlong conversation with Trump last week on “Dr. Phil Primetime,” McGraw said: “There are headlines out there that say, when you win your second term, that you are going to make the people that have come after you pay retribution and revenge.”

McGraw then suggested to Trump that he abandon his threats to prosecute his adversaries:

Let me ask you this, before you even respond to that, I want to play “what if” with you for a minute. What if when you win this election, you said, “Enough is enough? Too much is too much. This is a race to the bottom, and it stops here.”

Trump initially took the bait, telling McGraw “I’m OK with it. I am. I’m OK with that,” but quickly returned to form: “Sometimes revenge can be justified, though. I have to be honest, sometimes it can.”

Trump’s strategy of openly declaring his intentions is “an age-old gambit from the authoritarian playbook,” according to Adam Parkhomenko, a Democratic political strategist, writing in Los Angeles magazine this week.

In “Trump Is Conditioning Americans With Authoritarian Statements,” Parkhomenko described Trump’s underlying calculation:

Trump, like aspiring authoritarians before him, is fostering a national environment in which his self-first vision of governance can be achieved. He is conditioning and reconditioning Americans to tolerate central tenets of authoritarianism. Sadly, the sinister strategy is thus far working.

Each time he speaks of eroding the norms of American governance, our national and individual alarm bells ring a little quieter than the time before. Numbness permeates about the grave danger he represents.

How does this process of generating tolerance for authoritarianism work?

Evil intentions are floated. Reactions are assessed. Weaknesses are exploited. Intentions are repeated. Wrongs become desensitized. Scapegoats are named. Opposition is divided and conquered. Power is grabbed. Distractions are created. Dissent is squashed. Then, with the groundwork complete, what was once considered unthinkable becomes reality.

As Trump’s repeated authoritarian statements wear out moderate voters’ emotions, they also provide tantalizing red meat to his base. MAGA die-hards are thrilled by Trump’s every suggestion of upending norms in America because they wish to live in a country in which Trump is their all-powerful leader. They want Donald Trump as their Vladimir Putin or their Kim Jong Un.

Trump, Parkhomenko continued,

has told America who he admires, who he is and how he intends to destroy the foundations of our republic. After years of conditioning, many voters will dismiss the former president’s statements as hyperbole and nothing more than “Trump being Trump.” Others will wrongly believe that sweeping changes could never come to pass in America, even if he is elected.

In a chilling analogy, Parkhomenko described Trump’s efforts to desensitize his audience:

Horror movies become less scary each time they are watched, and Americans have viewed the Donald Trump horror show on repeat for nearly a decade. The villain does not change, but the viewer’s response calms dramatically. No matter what Trump says or does, Americans have seen this movie before, and we’ve seen it so many times that what once shook us at our core is now just background noise.

In this sense, the 2024 election will be a test: Can the Democratic Party, with Biden at the top of the ticket, somehow reanimate and reawaken those voters who have become inured to Trump’s insatiable venality, his relentless obsession with personal enrichment, his unquenchable thirst for wealth and power, his profound lack of moral principle or ethical boundaries, his divisive and chaotic indifference, his inability to feel guilt or remorse, his manipulative and unscrupulous focus on his own advantage — to the exclusion of all others and the public good?