Trump Finally Jumped the Shark, There’s No Turning Back

The term “jumping the shark” means to do a gimmick in order to generate publicity for something once wildly successful, but no longer so. It also describes the point in a TV series where outlandish events are included for novelty only, indicative of a decline in quality. In the reality TV show known as Donald Trump’s life, that point was reached a few weeks ago in Mar-a-Lago, where Trump pouted and preened and called Mitch McConnell a “dumb son of a bitch,” and a “stone cold loser,” and also called Mike Pence a “coward.” This was vintage Trump, designed to rile the base. This is what got all the big ratings in 2016. And now? Crickets. It was not the resounding come back he hoped it would be. The Week:

But wait, isn’t this what Trump always does? He rants and raves about his grievances and a sizable faction of Republican voters lap it up — right?

Not exactly. When Trump ran for president in 2016, he bonded with his audiences mainly on their terms, placing himself in their camp, defending and championing them against all the fools and crooks who had turned the country into a “disaster” (his favorite adjective during the general election campaign). Once he’d ascended to the White House and found himself in the position of having to defend himself against charges of collusion with Russia and other misdeeds, Trump’s public remarks were much more defensive and focused on himself. But he was also the president, which allowed his fixation on “deep state” antagonists to be transmuted into a battle for Republican survival more generally.

But now? Either Trump is the sorest loser in the history of American democracy — the Big Baby his critics always claimed he was — or else he really did win in a landslide and yet nonetheless allowed himself to be deposed and banished to South Florida while Joe Biden effortlessly took over the White House in a coup. Either way, he looks very small indeed. […]

The great irony here is that Trump has been so successful at remaking the GOP in his own image that the party doesn’t really need him anymore. Sure, they’ll try to avoid provoking his wrath. But every viable candidate for president in 2024 is going to be following Trump’s lead on immigration, trade, and waging a rhetorically ferocious culture war against the left — and most of them will be doing it without Trump’s own considerable personal liabilities, including the hatred of a large swath of the electorate.

Put in slightly different terms, the 2020 election results show that Trump has given Republicans a potentially fruitful way forward — but also that he can’t be the one to lead the way there because he’s a drag on the party. Trump’s own dead weight, and not some cockamamie conspiracy, is what accounts for his loss last year despite Republicans doing so well down ballot.

Trump will likely go down in history as a blunt instrument who shattered a staid consensus on the right but who was far too widely loathed and incompetent at governing to deliver the party to the Promised Land himself. That’s never been clearer than it is right now.

I don’t know if he “shattered a broad consensus” so much as he splintered the rotted log that was the GOP, fracturing it beyond repair. Right now the Republican party is a dysfunctional and fragmented mess. If it finds its bearings in actual conservatism and goes back to its roots, it will probably do okay. But to follow the path of Trumpism is sure destruction. If/when some of the QAnon crazies in Congress, the House especially, go down the tubes in 2022, that will be a sure sign that this mad phase in American politics was just that, a mad phase. Or, maybe Trumpism without Trump will be the face of the new GOP.  As always, time will tell.