December 5: A Field Guide to MAGA Excuses for the Toddler President
Don’t know if this post from New York about Trump’s immaturity will get me onto the White House list of enemy media, but there’s a chance.
Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:
Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.
The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.
Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.
But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or trapper keepers.
Martin is just scratching the surface here. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.
But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:
Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administration’s appropriation of their worst impulses.
A second rationalization you hear from Trump’s defenders, particularly when he says or does something that makes no sense, is to argue that he’s operating on multiple levels that include some higher strategies his critics simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp. If, for example, he insults a foreign leader, he may secretly be setting off a diplomatic chain reaction that results in foreign-policy gains somewhere else. Similarly, if he defames federal judges, Democratic elected officials, or mainstream journalists, he may simply be trying to manipulate public opinion in a sophisticated way to overcome those who thwart or undermine his substantive agenda. Trump himself set the template for the “chess not checkers” theory by telling us his most incoherent speeches and statements reflect a novel rhetorical style he calls “the weave.” You do have to admire his chutzpah in telling people they simply aren’t smart enough to follow him as he fails to complete thoughts and sentences.
An even more common excuse for Trump’s worst traits is that he is focused on communicating with the people, not the media or other snooty elites. If he’s crude or impulsive or irrational, so, too, are the people. As one liberal writer ruefully admitted of Trump circa 2016:
He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.
And he behaved just like they would if they were given a billion dollars and unlimited power. Thus his childishness and even his cruelty could be construed as efforts to meld minds with the sovereign public or, at least, key parts of it. This became most explicit in 2024 when Trump’s crudeness and fury about diversity were transformed into a shrew pitch for the support of the “manosphere” and the masses of politically volatile younger men who spend much of their lives there. It could even serve as an excuse for his destruction of the White House as we’ve known it. Gold plating of everything in sight and the construction of a huge, garish ballroom might disgust aesthetes and history buffs with postgraduate degrees and no common sense. But with the White House set to become a venue for UFC fights, why not go big and loud? Nobody elected architecture experts to run the country, did they?
A parallel excuse for Trump’s uncouthness is that transgressions are central to his mission. He’s there to overturn the Establishment, not respect its silly rules of what’s appropriate for presidents. His distractors ruined the country, so who are they to complain when it requires someone unconventional to set things aright? Trump campaigned in 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a disrupter and thrilled his followers by refusing to be domesticated in office. When returned to power most recently, he hit Washington like a gale-force wind defying all precedents and expressing an exasperated public’s disgust with the status quo and the people who led it. So why would anyone expect this Robespierre to play by the rules of Versailles? That’s not who he is and not what he was elected to do.
The president himself has best articulated the standard by which he judges himself and expects to be judged by his followers, and by history, in a Truth Social post this past February: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” From the MAGA point of view, the 47th president is bending history, reversing a long trend toward national decline, and raising the economic aspirations and moral values of America to heights thought to be long lost. Perhaps the most powerful rationalization for Trump’s many excesses ever written was the famous 2016 essay by Michael Anton comparing those supporting Trump’s challenge to Hillary Clinton to the desperate and self-sacrificing passengers of the hijacked September 11 flight that brought the plane down by rushing the terrorists in the cockpit:
[I]f you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
It’s Trump, warts and all, or the abyss, to many Trump fans, today as in 2016. So if he wants to have some boyish fun while he’s saving America, and perhaps civilization, who are we to deny him?
As I was looking through the detailed National Election Pool exit poll data, I came across the following question:
OPINION OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION:
Category %Total Kerry Bush Nader
Angry 23 96 3 1
Dissatisfied 26 82 16 1
Satisfied 26 11 89 0
Enthusiastic 22 2 98 0
In other words, a 49-48 plurality of voters was either angry or dissatisfied with the Bush administration.
I think this settles the question of whether the election was a “mandate” for Bush’s policies.
Yep JC, I agree with you and it is distressing. The only ray of hope I see is if they go too far right that the public opinion poll will shift against them. For this to happen we need to get the idealogues to stop harping on this election, take a balanced look at what is going on in Congress, and report it to the people though a mechanism that the common man can appreciate (sans rhetoric).
The fact that Bush won despite a below 50% approval rating and the decline of one important demographic, the female vote, should be a clue about what happened in this election.
The attacks on 9/11 and subsequent wars have put the fear in the electorate. That situation can’t help but favor the incumbent. Details about pre-9/11 negligence, inept management of an unneccesary war aside, I believe the public is possessed with fear. The incredibly negative campaign against John Kerry raised just enough doubt to allow a Bush win.
For those two reasons, I think the demographics gathered in this campaign are of no real value.
Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has come up with some rather amazing data in his post-election survey that is directly relevant to the ‘mandate’ business:
“There was not a shift to the right. This was a tolerant, outward-looking, change-oriented electorate that elected George Bush. The country was not looking for a conservative president or a conservative regime, though that is what it has achieved.”
“What you’ll see in this data is that there was a large majority of the electorate and particularly pivotal portions of the electorate that were not looking for an election that was going to be settled on issues of security and safety, but were looking for an election that was about their lives and about economic issues and about health care. But in the end they did not think that they were given that choice in this election. And many of those voters held back until the end, and what we see in the end is many rural voters, many older blue collar voters and seniors who moved sharply toward the president on moral issues. The were clearly not going to vote that way until they did not get the choice that would have made it possible.”
“By 52 to 41 percent the voters who ended up voting for George Bush said the country was on the wrong track. They said what they were looking for was a candidate that was going to talk about things central to their lives–the economy and health care– as opposed to safety. In my view, this debate did not get joined in a central enough way, to keep the cultural issues from becoming dominant and moving these voters at the end.”
There *might* be one reason to doubt that Bush will *succeed* in his mission to force a radical agenda down our throats. Fillibuster. The 55 Dems plus a couple of the blue state moderate Republicans might be all we need to stop SS privatization, tax “simplification” and right wing judges. But we have to be able to make sure all our Senators can hold up under the pressure. Surely that’s *possible* if Bush goes too far too fast.
I’m not particularly hopeful:-(
Keith
The Democrats need to retake the senate now! Here’s how…
The background:
Several events in the past few days have shown that the most
radical members of the senate are planning to move aggressively
on their agenda, especially with regard to judicial appointments
and tax cuts.
For example, Arlen Spector is now in trouble for stating that the
senate may not be willing to confirm anti-abortion Supreme Court
judges. This was not a threat, just an observation, but the radicals
are already planning a punishment.
On the other side the senators from NY, CT and NJ are thinking of
dropping out in favor of becoming governors in 2006. They think
they might be more effective, since there is very little they can
do in the senate.
Several moderate Republicans have expressed concern about the
size of the deficit and the balance of trade. The radicals,
however, are threatening to give anyone who is independent the
“Daschle” treatment.
The solution:
The Democrats need to make an appeal to the moderate Republicans
to leave their party and join the Democrats. In addition to
Spector, good candidates are Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich and Collins.
For this to work the Democrats need to find six Republicans that
will all switch together. This will give the Democrats a majority
in the senate and enable them to negotiate the coming legislation
and nominations from an equal position of strength.
This is not as far-fetched as it may seem, several of these
senators are unlikely to run again (Spector has just be
re-elected, for example) and thus don’t have to fear the
lack of election support. With the Democrats in the majority
they also won’t have to worry about retaliation from the
Republicans for support of local projects.
As an incentive, the Democrats should offer these members new
powers such as committee chairmanships and other perks. If
the Republican senators have a problem with declaring themselves
as Democrats (such as what happened with Jeffords) they could
instead create a non-party structure to affiliate these new
allies with. Some name suggestions: “The alliance of responsible
legislators”, “The non-partisan alliance”, “The fiscal moderates
caucus”, etc. This group will caucus with the Democrats and vote
as a block for committee assignments and for those issues on
which they have overall agreement. The Republican members would
still be free to vote with their prior party when they feel they
have to for political or local reasons.
By sweetening the offer enough the Republican moderates will come
as a winners both in terms of their power in the senate and with
their voters back home. They can point to their newfound powers
as a way to promote the interests of their state. While in the
present alignment they are barely tolerated.
The Democrats need to stop despairing and get to work!
I may be incorrect, but while the article is definitely true, and I agree completely that the idea there is a “mandate” is absurd, there is also the practical political reality – and it seems to me this political reality is that the Frist, Hastert, Delay, and the White House, ARE going to be able to push pretty much anything they want through the Congress. Just as a matter of power politics, this seems to be the case, irregardless of whether the public lines up with the goals.
If there are reasons to doubt my above assertion, I would be MOST pleased…