It is a perennial consternation to the Resistance Twitter set that Donald Trump’s decades-long career as a snake-oil salesman has never managed to derail his political ambitions. “If Donald Trump committed these offenses against the law for decades,” historian and Biden-whisperer Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC, “how is it that our political system allowed him to be elected president?” If only the rubes knew they were being had!
The imputation of false consciousness, and the almost touchingly naïve hope that today’s new outrage will be the one to finally break the spell, lacks a crucial piece of analytical self-awareness. Trump’s critics are absolutely right to see the ex-president’s grift. But they fail to recognize the universality in both the American political system and human nature itself when it comes to people willing to fork over money and affection to obvious blowhards and crooks as long as the recipients have the right enemies. The grift is happening across the street, yes—but it’s also coming from inside the house.
Take Letitia James. The ink wasn’t yet dry on her quarter-billion-dollar civil lawsuit when the ambitious prosecutor—who once tried running for New York governor for a hot minute—sent out a sleazy fundraising email bragging, “Guess who’s in the headlines again?”
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