Trump's going to lose- now what?

Embed from Getty Images

Donald Trump is probably going to lose, and by most accounts, he's going to lose by a lot. This happens to coincide with his party members jumping ship on him- an unholy combination of Trumps decreasing popularity and his claim that he's capable of handling women's crotches with impunity.

For Republican politicians, it's an incredibly fine line. This man is the walking embodiment of political Russian roulette. Un-endorsing the current presidential nominee (and implicitly endorsing Hillary) could cost governors or senators or mayors dearly in the eyes of today's all-or-nothing voter base. Supporting him means attaching your name to an unstable nuclear reactor. The next thing he does (or the next thing he's discovered to have done) could not only ruin his odds, his brand and his life- it could also do the same to them. To those paying attention, the line he crossed seems hilariously arbitrary: This man has talked shit about Popes and prisoners of war. He's been accused of sexual assault and peeping at underage women. He's made fun of a person with atypical arms and advocated for killing children.  But if you think that's bad, get this- one time, on a bus in 2005, he made a lame joke about grabbing vaginae. TUCK AND ROLL.

Actions are taken when the perception of circumstances necessitates them, and conversely, the actions taken indicate the perception of circumstances. When Republicans blasted away from Trump at warp-speed it was because they knew Trump had finally pussy grabbed his way past salvation. The timing, though, didn't go unnoticed.

The implications, when you think about them, are insane: Somewhere, in a meeting room, somebodies political adviser has almost certainly said the phrase “Sure, voters were cool with lies, stupidity and advocating war crimes, but this Billy Bush situation is going to really piss them off.” Jump off the Titanic and hope to hell you can swim far enough away to avoid getting sucked down by the whirlpool.

The question isn't so much whether or not Trump's implosion will drag the whole party out to the woodshed, because it probably won't. The only thing Trump supporters hate more than a Democrat is a loser, and when Trump lies beaten and broken, there probably won't be anyone willing to stick around. Winning is what he has always claimed to be able to do, and he had a flawless political record to back it up. This might be his first campaign, but he's never lost a campaign.

It's really how he got there in the first place. He didn't come out of nowhere- before he was screaming about the Mexican rapists and email servers and untenable plans for a wall, he was a massive public figure. He was famous and successful on at least a superficial level. In the beginning of a political career, especially when starting at such a high level, name recognition is everything, and Trump isn't just his name- it's his brand. Call it the Trump tautology- he is a successful person because he is great, and he is great because he is successful. It's a fun narrative, and it works, even if it the story isn't super conducive to words like “settlements” and “divorce” and “bankruptcy”. It didn't matter until later, when words like "grab them by the pussy" got thrown in as well.

When he loses the election, he'll lose some of his identity, and some of his brand sheen, and some of his speculative wealth, if not actual. But this probably isn't good news.

As fun as it is to wallow in the irony, there's always a backlash- if the GOP has done their job, the narrative will change. Two years from now the story won't be that Trump was the symbol of the party or its members or its backers, but that he was just another washed-up jerk-off that crashed and burned, while the rest of the party shook their heads. This means a difficult task for anybody trying to link Trump to any future party candidate.

In the upcoming elections where Democratic candidates pay for commercials that show side by side profiles of Trump and whichever white male they're trying to paint him over, it won't stick: Trump himself will become the problem, not the things he said. So once the election is over and they completely disown him, they'll guaranteed their survival for at least a little bit. Their entire platform exists as a contrarian position to people they can paint as bad guys, and since the election is almost certainly going Hillary Clinton's way, it doesn't look like they'll be running out of bad guys for at least four more years.

Nobody who likes Trump now won't like the next Trump. Even though their candidate will lose, So what? They don't need to change their mindset, because it was their candidate, not their ideals, that self destructed in the final weeks of the campaign. There will still be a federal government in which there is at least one Democratic representative or executive or judge, meaning there's work to do.

What has become abundantly clear in this election is that what people want isn't policy discussions- they want wars of attrition, to see whose good luck and good publicity and gaffe defenses can last long enough to inspire enough people to get off the couch or spend a few minutes more on the drive home from work to hit a voting booth. The name of the game is elimination, not governing.

Even when the GOP had a majority in the House and Senate after they won the absolute shit out of everything in 2014, the actual act of governing was more like a snake pit under a throw rug than an actual responsibility. Attempting to push policy usually means somebody pushing back (arguably as our founders intended.) Today, though, compromise is seen as failure- the fact that the Democrats maintain the ability to resist equates to a GOP loss. And if this election will teach us  anything, it's that some people don't mind supporting psychopaths, but nobody would never support a loser.

The Trump supporters aren't going anywhere, even if he is. Trump didn't create the xenophobia or resentment that his base nurtures- he simply gave them a flag to fly over it, swam out, and rode the wave (right into the rocks). Trump might lose a few billion dollars in brand value but the base isn't going to fade into the background. If anything, they'll only become more and more angry- and the anger will build, only to find a candidate who is somewhat competent, and knows enough about elections to not run for office when there's the possibility of somebody digging up a recording of them bragging about trying to fuck married women.

The classic problem of current identity politics boils down to this: there is a party that claims to want to help people by enacting policy, and there is a party that claims to want to help people by first destroying the other party, then figuring the rest out later (and honestly, who knows what the truth actually is.) Oh, sure, there are certain stated policies, but ask everyone in rural Illinois that owns a “make America great again” hat about Trump's position on getting oil from OPEC and let me know what they say- I imagine the vast majority of answers will involve a shotgun.

But really, you can't blame them for being angry. The political landscape was already bloated and ineffectual, and when news comes at you constantly, from every direction, then on the slight chance that any law gets passed, the trickle-down is so staggeringly slow that the conversation has pivoted five-hundred times, so that we don't know what is and isn't the result of it. God forbid anyone we elect actually takes the time to consider it, debate the minutiae of it, make it better. Cooperation is for the weak, and that's how both parties want it, apparently.

Try this at home- a copy of either party's official platform and sip (SIP) a drink every time the platform, which by definition is supposed to list the policies they want enacted, mentions the opposition. Christ, you could probably just subtract the specific number of policies from the total of times one party blasts the other and you'd still be too wasted to walk. Even if Democrats get ever-so-slightly more specific about the exact actions they want the federal government to take, the reasoning behind it never strays far from “because the other guys don't want that.”

When Trump loses, the smarter Republicans will disappear for a minute. There's no plus side for Ted Cruz or Chris Christie or whoever to be seen shaking hands with people who claim the elections are rigged, even if they'll be slitting each others throats to make their message resonate louder with that same group in three years. At this point, fuck policy- it will be a full time job trying to retain the public image of being Trump without being Trump. Like it or not, in two and a half-ish years from today, we'll get to see what happens when GOP presidential hopefuls need to lean on the fervor of the Trump supporters of today- will they try to throw equal parts policy minutiae and loud-mouthed insanity into a blender, then splatter the result on the wall and figure the voters will go along with whatever, or will Trump go down in history as a prototype of the more suave politician that's willing to rub elbows with the post-deplorables?

Today's Trumpers are now the main driving force behind the dogma that, at one time, could be at least superficially controlled by the overly emphatic patriotism and the swirling speeches of whichever prominent white person was willing to spend 24 days a month speaking at different county churches. Back then, the racism was subtle, implied, never stated because as long as we weren't “racist” like the Nazi's in The Blues Brothers, we weren't really racist. But then there was Trump, who presented racism not so much as mere demagoguery, but like one would present a thesis. “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're bringing guns, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” He explicated the inner monologue of every bigot everywhere. Give the guy some credit- he said it straight-forward enough to mortify the planet, but with enough of a vague cop-out at the end that it forced the GOP to jump in line behind him, lest they lose out on some of that sweet, sweet vote from the batshit sect.

Unless we've all grossly underestimated the size of the the “fuck it, let's just vote for this guy to see what happens” crowd, we have to assume that one political loss in one election year won't be enough to convince the “hang Hillary” folk to address American politics on some sort of traditional “this is what I think about what you think” level- the fire's already been started, and there's no turning back. The monkey is out of the bag, man, and it ain't going back in, unless the party gets enough of a hold of itself to convince the Trumpers to shut the fuck up long enough to convince enough Hillary 2020 voters that she's ineffectual, so much so that they'll forget to vote on November 8^th.

Then we're right back to where we started before this entire shit-show nuked modern politics into Fallout 4 territory. Four years from now we'll get to hear all of this again, but in the GOP best case scenario, the voice will be quieter, and probably not going on coked-out twitter rants at 4 in the morning.

What will happen to Donald Trump? Probably nothing. Almost certainly, he'll get lost in the clusterfuck that will be the new era of the GOP sad-sacks trying to shit on President Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo's legacy, with probably equally ineffective results. If we're lucky, he'll fade into oblivion, making sure to preemptively check for microphones on whoever he's cheating at golf or trying to fuck via a trip to the furniture store. But if we're luckier, he'll remain in the public eye, long enough to convince James Woods or whichever Baldwin brother decides he has enough of a chance to carry on the crazy torch. If the crazy train comes in again, well, at least now we know how to deal with it- we simply won't deal with it, and let it destroy itself. Grab some popcorn, enjoy the rest of the show, and pray we get to talk about policy sometime before we die.

Here's my twitter. swellbo@gmail.com is my email.  Say hello!