With a very weird stretch of time marked by the Schiavo saga, the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, and even a Royal Wedding, it’s a good time to take stock of where things are politically.Things are not looking good for George W. Bush and his party. His approval ratings have sagged after leaping after the Iraqi elections. The famously disciplined GOP is divided over a whole host of matters, with the famously pampered conservative base as unhappy as it’s been in a long time.Bush’s main domestic initiative, his Social Security privatization push, has gone nowhere, after months of presidential hype. Senate Republicans seem to be waivering in their long-threatened determination to ram through Bush’s judicial nominations by outlawing filibusters. House Republicans are now indelibly identified with their Leader, Tom DeLay, who’s working hard to achieve Gingrich-level pariah status, even aside from his ethics recidivism and his growing enmeshment in the Abramaoff-Indian-Casino-Shakedown scandal. House and Senate Republicans are at odds on a whole variety of substantive and political issues, including the budget, which may never get resolved this year despite growing public worries about ever-escalating public debts. The economy is chugging along in low gear, but not much so you’d notice. What people are noticing is a continuing health care cost spiral, which the GOPers haven’t a single clue how to confront, and now a gasoline price spiral, which Bush energy policies would make worse.International affairs remain a relative bright spot for Bush, but now the post-election euphoria on Iraq has turned into another tense period of uncertainty, and the recent presidential commission report on the whole Iraq WMD issue has poured a few more gallons of cold water on the administration’s international credibility. Promising developments are still underway in Palestine and especially in Lebanon, but in neither arena is a dramatic pro-democracy, pro-peace breakthrough as likely as it appeared a few weeks ago.It probably won’t help Bush internationally that his next scheduled act is a high-profile confirmation fight over a proposed ambassador to the U.N. whose public record contains a string of obnoxious unilateralist comments as long as your arm. And to top it all off, his most important foreign ally, Tony Blair, is in a tough election fight; if Labour loses or simply loses a lot of ground, it will be almost entirely attributable to W.If you add it up, the president and his party appear to be in a whole heap o’ trouble, with no obvious relief in sight.This doesn’t necessarily translate itself into political gains for Democrats (more about that in near-future posts), but we can pretty much forget about the idea that Bush and company are off to a roaring second-term start.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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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:
Trolling the liberals
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.
Playing chess, not checkers
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.
He’s a man of the people, and the people are as childish as he is
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?
Trump is an insurgent leader with an insurgent style
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.
He’s saving America, so he should be able to do any damn thing he wants
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?