The Sheriff of Sundown City

The fundamental appeal of Donald Trump was always that maybe it could be you. Some breaks, some TV time, and you’re walking into the Oval Office after remaking your party into thousands of Little You’s. But nobody ever bought into the fantasy of falling asleep in public, losing all verbal self-control and saying out loud all the vile things your party used to pretend not to believe. The kick in the pants of cults of personality is that they’re two-way streets, and nobody wants to feel nationally embodied by someone whose continence is marginal, upstairs or down. It’s mortal to the self-image. 

Trump’s long sundown is accelerating all too fast for the MAGA remoras riding an all-access pass to feed on America. Stephen Miller knows that without Oval Office access, he’s just a guy who can’t get laid at Undertaker-Con. Kash Patel is just one Trump heartbeat away from vanishing from collective memory before resurfacing as the most humiliated victim on “Catfish: The TV Show.” Trump’s dismal, slurring, near-somnolent harangue of the United Nations in September seems downright spritely compared to our current fare: calling people “piggy,” atavistically racist rants about Ilhan Omar and Somalians, and His Majesty napping through the Cabinet’s praise circle and grand acknowledgement of the ballroom.

Even before this sudden turn into the last grim chapter of the story of life, Trump had burned off most of his appeal. Most Americans are unpleasantly surprised to see a familiar hard-line anti-immigrant stance fail to dissipate as mere campaign rhetoric, and instead take the form of an American Gestapo black-bagging citizens with neither shame nor warrants. He didn’t magically fix the economy or create jobs or more housing, let alone the affordable kind. He replaced higher prices on goods from inflation with higher prices from tariffs. He’s destroying Obamacare. He’s defunded everything in sight and stripped the government of countless services — all at the regular price.

Trump arrived at a moment when voters both left and right were ready to cleave to a candidate unafraid to call bullshit on the pomposity, cant and charmless fecklessness of D.C. politicians and D.C. culture. He was blessed with a sense of humor that could have held down a drive-time radio slot, and plenty of material whose punchlines were a privileged few who average Americans already disliked. People who needed to explain away the socially repugnant aspects of his politics could couch them as a necessary frankness after years of Republicans pussyfooting around their actual beliefs.

Time doesn’t compromise, though. Years pass, and “You’re fired!” goes from a catchphrase to the bit they do every episode — a perfunctory nostalgic ritual for a time when it meant something. After 10 years, Donald Trump is the GOP, not its alternative. Heckling isn’t policy or vision; hell, it isn’t even heckling when everyone is doing a Trump impression. What do old-school Republicans and “he’s funny, what the hell” independents have left to engage with besides the gruesome spectacle of a geriatric mind disassembling at Mach 1? It’s like a fat, white Urkel asking, “Did I do that?” in the premiere of Season 50. Everything is recognizable, and none of it is fun.

Most voting-age Americans have encountered an elderly relative, friend or acquaintance for whom all the governors came off. The grandma who starts smoking or drinking again, or casually cursing for the first time in her life; or the grandpa who starts trying to feel up women in public. It’s terrifying even when they’re powerless, knowing that a familiar mind is forever gone, replaced by an unknown and ungoverned one, driven by an almost adolescent array of misfiring impulses.

That adolescence now suffuses every level of the MAGA GOP, from lowly tweets to the attempted canonization of vile little snot Charlie Kirk. White House press briefings and responses vacillate between Mean Girls and schoolyard taunts. Government social media accounts teem with weak dunks and memes that border on geriatric in internet time; the only new detail is how much more the next one can resemble official Nazi Party posters. Everyone from senators to secretaries to the vice president engages with reality with the sneering, affected sociopathy of a teen incel. Foreign policy is bullying; law enforcement is bullying; economic policy is bullying plus scamming; all the money they’re spending is someone else’s; all the cars are limos; all the girls are lacquered like every day is Homecoming, and everyone is terminally horny, like an unwanted hug pressing a boner against you. It’s all so fucking embarrassing.

This is the future the GOP has unbuilt for itself, and we will be living with its juvenile mentality for a while, not just as a pose, but as a platform. Watching Trump’s mind unmaking itself and the conservative discourse is like reading the infamous Lee Atwater quote about the Southern Strategy in reverse. After the slow assembly of the GOP’s postwar rhetorical playbook, Trump has rewound the story of American conservatism — from economic abstractions and cuts cuts cuts, back past individuals’ and “states’ rights” and forced busing and returned it to 1954. The next stop is shouting the N-word over and over. 

“You’ll miss the civility when it’s gone” was a mainstream media fallback take as the first Trump nomination loomed. But it turned out to be only half-right. Democratic Party leadership now stands to the right of a radicalizing army of Facebook moms who are less and less shy about indicating where you can shove value-neutral bipartisanship or a politics of civility in place of substance. 

But the civility message wasn’t all wrong. Turns out, people do like symbols of the democratic project they’re technically participants in. (The White House, for one.) We understand that politics involves selfish interests, unfairly amplified voices, little people doing lots of work, and together we all agree on a series of rules for the rituals and make-believe that constitute a society. We agreed to value a certain kind of shared play-pretend, and as such we hold lots of little civic ceremonies for little accomplishments, all of which seem a little silly, but all of which build, little by little, into something special we made for ourselves — a world whose day-to-day dimensions we agreed upon. It’s easy to lampoon the ceremonies we allow ourselves — births, graduations, marriages, deaths — but that laughter depends on our understanding the default solemnity we accord them. Call it code-switching, but we all learned to hear, if not speak, in languages befitting each ritual.

If the cost for this workaday commitment to ritual ennoblement of civic participation was occasional ponderousness and pomposity, the cost of Trump’s alternative is the mental landscape and emotional regulation of the asshole teenager lurking in everyone and waiting for senescence. The angry teen mentality resents, it envies, and it blows up boats because it thinks it’s cool. It thinks the things you care about — like graduating from a service academy — are stupid, and telling you about how he was really getting somewhere with Connie Britton on the set of “Spin City” is more important.  

No one wants to be represented by this version of themselves: facing the nightfall of dementia, every childish anxiety and ugly thought freshly exposed. With more and more regulators burning out of the machine, Trump’s retrogression has no limit but his expiration date. Week by week, the more normative behavior disappears, fewer bizarrely detailed catty comments about New York theater come out of his mouth — those last traces of wryness subsumed by more teen rage and resentment and everything he learned to hide, if only just, until the powers of higher-order thought melt away completely. 

Trump didn’t come to embody the GOP solely out of his own avarice and neediness. He was adopted by a party that proceeded to commit a decade of mental and moral Munichs, one after another, following decades of constructing a messaging apparatus that draped anxiety, resentment, hatred and jealousy with the patina of a contiguous adult rationale. Now, subsumed by a mind too degraded to maintain that thin pretense of maturity, they are witnessing the catastrophic effects of simultaneous senility and childishness. After decades of professing to be the party of adults, they might have no choice but to give it a try.