What A Character Señor Trumpanzee Is... There's Never Been Anyone Like Him Since PT Barnum

Can Anyone Ever Respect The Asslicking Republicans Enabling Trump?

People often ask what we look for when we’re vetting candidates for Blue America. It starts with policy, of course. But once we’re sure we’re talking with a progressive, we want to know about less tangible things, like courage and character. One of America’s top leaders, Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike Johnson, said in 2015 that “The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House… I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be president.” That wasn’t the only quote I found from a Trump supporter about his character. 3 years before Vivek Ramaswamy was auditioning for a job by saying “Trump was the greatest president of the 21st Century,” he had called Señor T a “sore loser” and his election denialism “abhorrent,” while describing January 6 as a “dark day for democracy.” And you’ve probably heard the clips of Rubio saying “Donald Trump is a con artist [and] the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency” and seen these comments from Ted Cruz before the two of them started publicly and regularly fellating Trump whenever they got the chance to.:

Yesterday, Mark Leibovich reprised those comments as sidebars for the fantastic essay he wrote about the frightening lack of character displayed by the Republican politicians Trump whipped into line. He called it “hypocrisy and spinelessness,” which fits the bill pretty well for the individuals who make up a party that has ceded any claim on the loyalty of any American patriot.

In 2015 Mark Leibovich spent a lot of time with candidate Trump. He wrote that Trump was “disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed. But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with ‘brutal, vicious killers’— by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings. ‘I will roll over them,’ he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were ‘puppets,’ ‘not strong people.’ He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating. ‘They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,’ Trump said. They like to say they are ‘public servants,’ he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would ‘evolve,’ as they say in politics. ‘It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,’ Trump told me. ‘They will evolve.’ Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”

In retrospect, this was hilarious.

… [This year, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee] I’d been watching Trump’s adulators work the arena all week, trying to outdo one another. “My fellow Americans,” Senator Marco Rubio said from the podium while Trump— his Audience of One— squinted up at him like a building inspector. As with many other brand-name Republicans in the arena, Rubio had once despised Trump. He ran against him for president in 2016. It got ornery. Rubio implied that Trump had a small penis; Trump derided Rubio as “Liddle Marco” and called him “weak like a baby.” That last assessment held up well.

“The only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again is to make Donald J. Trump our president again,” Rubio declaimed from the podium. Trump nodded along from his center box, radiating pride of ownership— Liddle Marco had grown up so beautifully.

Not all that long ago, Rubio had told me that “we should not have cults of personality” in the U.S. His parents and grandparents had fled dictatorship in Cuba. Their journey made him appreciate the gift of freedom and the danger of strongmen.

I talked a lot with Rubio in the last days of the 2016 primary, back when he was happy to speak candidly about Trump, and about how he knew better than to entrust the leadership of the United States to a “fraud,” “lunatic,” and “con artist” with autocratic instincts. And they all knew better— the Rubios, the Ted Cruzes, the J. D. Vances, the Doug Burgums, the Nikki Haleys, the Mitch McConnells, the Vivek Ramaswamys, all of them. They probably still know better. But they are all expedient, to their political core. “If you don’t want to get reelected,” Graham once told me, “you’re in the wrong business.”

For years, many had predicted a reckoning, a shared realization that the noisy, grievance-packed redoubt that the GOP had become— marked by servile devotion to one man— was perhaps not aligned with the party’s best traditions of rugged, free-thinking individualists. “Anytime a leader builds an entire movement around himself, it almost always leads to disaster,” Rubio had told me.

After so many party defections, electoral defeats, and broken spirits, surely some Republican self-correction was inevitable. But although there have been flashes, they haven’t lasted. I’ve heard all the private doubts about Trump from his most public of validators. These private doubts were once very public. “Mark my words, there will be prominent people in American politics who will spend years explaining to people how they fell into this,” Rubio told the NY Times in 2016, right before he “fell into this” himself.

“I don’t think so,” Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, said during his Republican-primary campaign last year, when asked whether he would ever do business with Trump. “I just think it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep.” Within a few months, however, Burgum would be eager to tell everyone what regular company he was keeping with Trump. “It’s been a real honor for Kathryn and I to have spent as much time with the president as we have,” Burgum said in June as he was auditioning to be Trump’s running mate.

I’d thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future. At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves.

“I feel no need to kiss the ring,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s most competitive primary challenger in 2024, had vowed in February. Haley even made what passed for a subversive remark in her convention speech, when she said that not everyone agrees with Trump all of the time. “That’s their problem,” someone yelled out from the crowd.

But the ring, it would be kissed. “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said.

I ran into former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on the arena concourse. He was one of the only Republican-primary challengers who dared question Trump’s worldview. His campaign had gone nowhere, but Hutchinson held relatively firm. “I’m troubled,” Hutchinson told me. “I don’t want our party to be defined by attacks on our judiciary system. I don’t want it to be defined by anger.”

Hutchinson had previously distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans to have held elected office who said he would not vote for Trump. “I’ve made some commitments about not voting for a convicted felon,” Hutchinson conceded to ABC News later at the convention. Then he softened his position. “But that seems like a long time ago.”

Also a long time ago: the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, where Ted Cruz had delivered his plucky “vote your conscience” speech in defiance of Trump, whom Cruz had called “utterly amoral” and “a sniveling coward.”

“God Bless Donald J. Trump” is how Cruz’s speech in Milwaukee began. “Let me start by giving thanks to God Almighty for protecting President Trump,” he said, while the bandaged Almighty himself preened up at the sniveling coward onstage, who would follow him anywhere.

Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 had seemed certain to weaken Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, if not end his political career. No relevant precedent existed for any one-term president to become his party’s default front-runner in the next election. Especially not an extremely unpopular one-term president who lost by 7 million votes, refused to concede, incited a lethal insurrection in an attempt to overturn the result, was impeached for a second time, defied long-honored tradition by skipping the swearing-in of his successor, left behind a traumatized nation (with 25,000 National Guard troops defending the capital against his own supporters), became the first former president to be indicted … and the rest of the whole loser litany.

Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable— foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and— perhaps most of all— a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).

“You know what I liked about Trump?” Lindsey Graham asked, waxing nostalgic about the former president— and yearning for his return— during a speech in Nashville in 2022. “Everyone was afraid of him. Including me.” It was a killer line, Graham in his amiable-mascot mode. It would also suffice as a preview of the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. “Resistance” to Trump, lame as it was, had become an inside joke among the party faithful.

…60 RNC staffers would quickly be axed by the incoming regime, executed by the new RNC co-chairs, Michael Whatley and— the real new boss— Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, who had been handpicked by the holy father (in-law) himself.

The message was clear: “That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists,” Donald Trump Jr. gloated on Newsmax the day of the RNC staff purges. “The moves that happened today— that’s the final blow. People have to understand that … the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party.”

Lara Trump rose from her seat, slim, cocksure, and angular in the classic style of the family wives. Her father-in-law called Lara “his most valuable asset,” the Maryland committeeman David Bossie would say in his speech seconding her. She was fully fluent in the family language: victimhood. How unfair it all is. All of the witch hunts. “The scales are always tipped against him,” the new co-chair would later tell Sean Hannity on Fox News. “It’s rigged so heavily.”

…Although [Georgia congressional candidate Brian] Jack was not yet well known in this heavily Republican district, he was “Trump-endorsed”— all the yard signs said so— which is akin to a golden ticket in today’s GOP. (Jack wound up winning the primary by a large margin.) The path always starts with a beeline to Trump’s rump. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis observed in January: “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful.”

In 2022, J. D. Vance proved himself a master. Although the Senate candidate from Ohio had previously dismissed Trump as “noxious,” “reprehensible,” and “cultural heroin,” among other things, he worked to convince Trump that he was reformed. Trump may or may not have believed him, but he very much relished the grovel of it.

“J.D. is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad!” Trump bragged at a campaign stop with Vance in Youngstown in 2022. He also claimed that Vance had fallen “in love” with him. If anything, this is the fun part for Trump: showing off that he has snapped up another politician like a distressed condo asset. He had made another Republican candidate— a rich Ivy League ex-Marine, no less— self-emasculate on his behalf.

They all wore red ties, or most of them did. Fat and long, the signature Trumpian garments hung just below their belts. It was not clear whether Trump himself cared (he probably did; such an honor!), but dressing in the boss’s full uniform— white shirt, navy suit, and the signature neckwear— was an added curtsy. If Trump had a mustache, his acolytes would all grow and groom one just like his— as Baath Party loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.

They made their pilgrimage to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where Trump spent a good part of May facing 34 criminal counts stemming from his ill-fated attempt to hide a $130,000 payment to his alleged porno paramour. The acolytes flanked their victim/defendant on the 15th floor as he sat with his arms crossed, jacket open, and eyes closed through prolonged stretches. “I do have a lot of surrogates, and they are speaking very beautifully,” Trump bragged during one of his news conferences.

My visit to 100 Centre Street coincided with the arrival of a large retinue of Trump’s defenders: 11 Republican House members made the trip that Thursday. They would take turns decrying (“very beautifully”) the “political persecution” that was taking place and the travesty of how Biden had “weaponized” the courts against the “greatest president in history.” I waited for the House members at a park across the street from the courthouse, along with a daily clot of reporters and camerapeople, clusters of pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators, and some bemused tourists, most of them from other countries, who had no idea what they’d stumbled upon.

“Standing back and standing by, Mr. President,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, the poofy-haired provocateur from Florida who led that day’s brownnoser brigade. Gaetz’s words, which appeared on Twitter, intentionally echoed Trump’s from the 2020 debate where he’d been asked to condemn neofascist groups who had been disrupting some of that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” is how Trump responded to the debate question, less a call for restraint than a call to action. (“A dog whistle through a bullhorn” is how Kamala Harris described it at the time.)

Each of the Trump toadies in attendance outside the courthouse said their piece about the towering injustice that was occurring inside. Trump is “in good spirits,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida reported, while Gaetz complained that their hero was facing “the Mr. Potato Head doll of crimes,” which is not technically a legal classification, by the way.

A group of New York hecklers greeted the traveling-circus caucus with Bronx cheers. One man stood behind the field-trippers holding a bootlickers sign.

“Lies, lies,” the hecklers cried out.

“Get the fuck out of New York!”

“Go to fucking hell!”

“Matt Gaetz is a pedophile!”

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado started to speak but was interrupted by chants of “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” which, for the uninitiated, referred to an incident at a Denver theater in September 2023 when Boebert was evicted from the musical comedy for performing a series of infractions in her seat: vaping, giggling, and fondling her date below the belt.

Straining to be heard over the hecklers, Boebert vowed that neither Trump nor his supporters would be gagged. “President Trump is not going anywhere … And we are not going anywhere, either.”

A few minutes later, they were all gone.

Boebert saved her best work for that night back at the Capitol, where the House Oversight Committee held a session to debate contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Originally scheduled for that morning, it had been postponed because so many members were in New York.) Boebert took the opportunity to boast on Trump’s behalf about one of his favorite topics: his supreme intelligence— as evidenced by the fact that, as Trump loves to mention, he allegedly once “aced” some cognitive test.

But here’s what Boebert actually said: “President Trump, when he was in office, underwent testing for his cognitive dissonance.”

I’ve noticed that for whatever reason, Trump is a magnet for these kinds of mangled phrases, misstatements, and malapropisms. This might be because those who speak excitedly about Trump, including Trump himself, tend to talk fast and off-the-cuff and perhaps have less capacity than most for shame and embarrassment (and grammar). They can be desperate to please and maybe get careless or lapse into Freudian candor. “We’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy,” Trump announced in Iowa this past December.

Boebert’s “cognitive dissonance” claim made me think of the early days of COVID, in 2020, when Trump tried to convince everyone that the pandemic would soon disappear. Why? Because you’ll develop “a herd mentality,” Trump explained at a town hall in Pennsylvania. He presumably meant “herd immunity,” but this felt like an apt malapropism, if there is such a thing.

Trump’s movement had in fact drawn his followers together as a self-reinforcing herd. They were joined in contempt for a unified enemies list— defined loosely as liberal elites. They also shared the buoyant faith that supporting Trump would be a panacea. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore,” Trump reassured a gathering of Christian conservatives this past July.

… [At the RNC, wrote Leibovich] I watched a lot of Trump’s biggest former skeptics as they peacocked their way through the arena: Rubio, Cruz, Graham, Vance, DeSantis, Burgum, Ramaswamy, Elise Stefanik, and the rest. They had made their calculations, wore their practiced faces of satisfaction, and had somehow found a way to live with the learned helplessness that Trump had reduced them to. But others who had served Trump had made different judgments. I kept recalling the words of retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, who had been Trump’s first secretary of defense. Mattis, who was of course nowhere near this convention, had issued a statement on the night of January 6, 2021, blasting Trump as well as those who enabled him as “pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.” In other words: They all knew better.

That was the nagging dissonance of this spectacle: the gap between what the GOP traditionally believed and what it now allows itself to abide. The party that allegedly reveres the Constitution is going all in on someone who has called for its termination. A party that cherishes freedom is willing to cede authority to a candidate who says he would be a dictator on his first day in office. A party that supposedly venerates law and order is re-upping with an actual felon. A party whose rank and file overwhelmingly wants Russia to defeat Ukraine believes that Biden stole the 2020 election, and that Trump’s legal shambles are entirely a Democratic plot. This is now a party whose standard-bearer has not been endorsed by any former Republican president or nominee, or even his own vice president, who barely escaped death by hanging the last time. And to what end, any of it?

Or maybe the dissonance doesn’t matter. Trump can do as he pleased, as he predicted. “Well, I think we’ve had very weak people,” he said in 2015. “I look at some of the people that are running, and I think they’re not strong people.” I remember hearing that as bombast at the time, the kind of casual dismissals Trump tosses around. In retrospect, though, Trump was prospecting, sizing up the Republican “leaders” he would be competing against. If nothing else, Trump has a keen eye for finding soft targets: pushovers he can bully, rules he can flout, entire political parties he can raze and remake in his image. He would roll over them.