A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook:
As the last week’s events around the failure of the Republicans and Donald Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right.
I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painful, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget.
But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that weakness, I argued again and again, had little to do with Trump’s personal fecklessness or incorrigible incompetence, considerable as they were and are. It had much more to do with the dysfunction internal to the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
I continued to make that argument throughout Trump’s first term and was frequently criticized for it. Which has made it all the more surprising, these past few months, to see people claim that the new Trump, the Trump who ran and won in 2024, has learned the painful lessons of his first term, when key underlings opposed him and even more key Republicans departed him. Last I had checked, hardly anyone was willing to acknowledge that the story of his first term was not Prometheus Unbound but a lot of sound and fury, signifying, well, you now how that goes.
Regardless, as this Facebook post from October suggests, I’ve not been convinced that Trump 2.0 would necessarily be all that different from Trump 1.0. Nothing having to do with Trump personally; I’ve always thought the focus on his personal flaws and hapless leadership has distracted us from the deeper rot within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Well, with the last week’s events, the media has finally realized the truth:…
Auteur: Corey Robin
