Trump Thinks America Wants His Perversions
Let’s hope he is wrong.
MEASLES, MISINFORMATION, a “vigorous spanking” of misogyny—whether women like it or not—a violent nine-gun fantasy for political enemies, crudeness, petty insults, and cronyism.
Pick your perversion, America. His final hours of campaigning show Donald Trump is betting enough of us want this.
Friday night Trump simulated a sex act with a microphone, after suggesting he “knock the hell out of the people backstage” whom he blamed for that microphone not working to his liking. Throughout the day, the media had been obsessing over Trump’s suggestion that former Rep. Liz Cheney, who is campaigning against him and supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, should be shot at.
The spectacle and the back and forth over whether he was describing a firing squad or—as his surrogates argue—merely sending her to fight in wars she has supported, may seem like damaging distractions for a campaign nearing the end. But they’re actually Trump‘s goal.
He says something vile. He titillates his supporters with viscerally violent imagery. And then he watches as privately shocked Republicans run to cameras to explain that this was, in fact, perfectly normal. He wants to be the center of attention. He wants to shock. He believes this will endear him to voters who can’t stand the status quo.
All last week, Trump continued to denigrate Kamala Harris by calling her “low IQ” and “dumb as a rock.” It’s a quintessentially Trump response to a gaping gender gap: Insult Harris while also telling women that he—having been found legally guilt of sexual assault—will protect women “whether they like it or not.” Trump continued on Saturday to talk about women as objects in need of his safeguarding: home alone, vulnerable to marauding migrants coming to kill them in their kitchens. “Women have to be protected when they’re at home in suburbia,” he declared. At another rally on Friday, he basked in their supposed gratitude for him: “the suburban housewives love me.”
Of course, men condescending to and offending women were just background noise at last week’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. The main show was a comedian’s disparagement of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” That one Trump didn’t seem to like, after it exploded into a political problem for him.
But after a week of refusing to apologize to the Puerto Rican community, Trump simply dismissed it. On Saturday, he referred to the episode as “one comedian” who “told one little joke.”
“He mentioned Puerto Rico and they made it like a big deal,” Trump said in a phone call interview with Fox News.
While there is much debate around whether Trump is experiencing cognitive decline and has become disinhibited, we should be clear about what’s happening down the home stretch of the campaign: These are choices Trump is making. He knows how to behave well enough when he wants to and he has chosen not to. He is behaving this way because he feels he can, because he believes it works, because it has worked.
TRUMP IS MORE POPULAR HAVING TRIED to steal an election and having incited an insurrection. With two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions, and four criminal indictments, Trump’s approval has grown, and he has new converts among the young and nonwhite, union members, and Jewish Americans.
He is well positioned to win. And he trusts that voters want him, and all his grievance and vengeance, corruption and lies—that they are not asking for a competent government that can respond to crises or solve problems.
Trump hasn’t even tried pretending that he cares about that. He doesn’t seem interested in what Elon Musk will do as secretary of efficiency or what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to do to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump needs Elon’s money for his campaign and he needed Kennedy’s endorsement to draw in some Democratic and oddball votes. Musk spreads election lies on X and will be invited into Trump’s administration—even though he is one of the government’s largest contractors—to do what he wants and to further his own interests. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who rejects vaccines but has been invited to manage health policy in agencies across the government. Trump has said RFK can go “wild” and pledged to let him manage “women’s health.” Voters know Trump doesn’t give two shits about health or spending reductions.
According to new reporting by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic, campaign staff succeeded in talking Trump out of using a new nickname for President Joe Biden that Trump wanted to launch after the disastrous June 27 debate: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
Yet he bristled this summer when people were complimenting his campaign for its discipline, saying at a private fundraiser, “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
Trumpologists have spent nine years analyzing and debating different theories of Trump’s superpowers—the reptilian brain, the ability to lie so openly as his supporters enjoy being in on it, how the Big Lie convinced millions of Americans that coordinated nefarious forces control just one election (and only at the top of the ticket) instead of what they had always seen, that their neighbors operate thousands of decentralized elections, county by county.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos wrote in 2018:
Trump is a predator. When something enters his world, he either eats it, kills it or mates with it. That is all his predatory instincts can do. The president’s primitive nature is the root of his narcissism. Trump’s immediate and voracious appetites allow no concern for others or understanding of tomorrow. He reacts instinctively, not emotionally, morally or intellectually. He is insensitive to truth and incapable of discipline or strategy.
The difference between 2018 and 2024 is that those people with the long resumes and Ivy League pedigrees who disciplined Trump in his first term are gone and banished. This third presidential campaign has proven that Trump can no longer be restrained.
Alberta concluded from his reporting: “At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.”
Trump’s power comes from us. Bit by bit, Americans have absorbed the Trump assault and adapted, as humans do. And nine years after he took our political system hostage, Trump now has faith that, for enough of us, his id is our id; that we can tolerate the spectacle and may even like it.
Enough of us must show him, and his party, he is mistaken.