COVID Goes Away; Trump Comes Back

I've thought all along that COVID was an adventitious development that was seized by the deep state in order to give society at large -- or more accurately, society at large except for the upper and gentry classes -- a time out over of all things, Donald Trump. What I find to be a remarkable confirmation of this is that within days of the CDC radically liberalizing its COVID protocols, and within weeks of the LA County health department backing down on reinstating indoor masking, we had the remarkably counterproductive FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Exacly contemporary with the raid, Trump has fully reentered the public discourse. Banned by Twitter, he's simply putting out mean tweets on his own platform, which people have given the same attention they gave on Twitter -- except that Twitter, facing allegations from Elon Musk that maybe a third of its accounts are phony, is a diminished thing.

The return of Trump has been greeted by consternation, especially among never Trumpers, who continue to think that of all people, Liz Cheney should continue to carry the never Trump banner. In recent weeks, I've become concerned about the mental stability of the writers at the never Trump Hot Air blog. This morning:

I think of the Trump-era GOP as a 30/50/20 proposition. Thirty percent are fanatics who’ll support him in whatever he wants to do. If he wins a second term and asks the new Republican Congress to pass an enabling act so that he can rule by decree, the 30 percent will say that it’ll be great not to have to worry about congressional gridlock anymore. At the other pole are the 20 percent, the people like me who find all of this endlessly repulsive and would struggle to think of an unkind word to say about Cheney after she sacrificed her career to hold Trump accountable for trying to stage a coup. She committed an act of civic heroism and demonstrated honor to a downright freakish degree among American politicians. And she knows it, which I imagine is why she’s at peace with losing this race 70/30.

The problem is that the anti-Trump left wing media and the never-Trump right wing media were united in wishful thinking in the runup to yesterday's Wyoming primary that Cheney might either pull it out in a squeaker or at least do significantly better than predicted, but she did neither, losing as Allahpundit puts it 70/30, only a slight exaggeration. But the never-Trumpers now claim to be "at peace" with that. The problem is that the consensus across the board is that the raid and Trump's simultaneous return to the stage energized his base, and Cheney's loss exceeded expectations as a result.

But what's next? It's worth revisiting the man's political career. From a 2019 piece in Politico, Why Trump Will Survive Even This

If you think a phone call to Ukraine can do what Robert Mueller, the 2018 midterms and Stormy Daniels couldn’t, you haven’t been paying attention.

Nobody is going to hold Donald Trump accountable for his alleged Ukrainian shenanigans because—as we’ve seen in his career and the first 32 months of his presidency—he’s too good at deflecting investigators, irate Democrats and pesky reporters.

To begin with, Trump suffers no shame when confronted with the outrages of his personal, professional and political lives. A normal fellow would blush crimson if caught paying a porn actress hush money after purportedly having sex with her. He’d cringe if confronted with the lascivious things he’d repeatedly said about his eldest daughter. He’d wear a mask to avoid being recognized if 17 women had accused him of sexual misbehavior. He would leave politics if captured on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

. . . Like the “trickster” figure in literature, Trump uses his far-ranging skills at guile, treachery and humor to undermine the established order to get what he wants. Each time he shatters the standard rules of behavior and persists, Trump resets what’s considered acceptable. This makes him a bigger villain to his foes. But he also makes him a bigger hero to his fans.

As Brian Bennett wrote in Time last spring, Trump’s dexterity at squeezing out of Robert S. Mueller III’s trap had the weird effect of inoculating the president from future probes. Like the brassy villain in a movie, Trump has taken everything the established rules of order could throw at him and has not just survived but thrived. If Mueller and his $32 million investigation and saturation press coverage couldn’t bring Trump down, can we really expect a Trump telephone conversation with a foreign president in which he urges the investigation of his political rival’s clan to break the hold he has on his supporters?

Well, in comparing Trump to a literary archetype, this guy's onto something. A month ago, I compared Trump to the truth-teller as an American archetype, Ishmael in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, or the noir detectives Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. (I would add one I forgot in that list, Caleb Trask in Steinbeck's East of Eden.) But since then, I've been thinking about a new archetype, the neo-noir action hero like Jason Bourne in that eponymous film franchise or John Wick in his own, very similar series.

And those figures aren't entirely unrelated to Johnny Depp's public persona, the flawed but utimately decent man of integrity wrongly defamed. And of course, the thing about Jason Bourne and John Wick is that they're highly efficient, ruthlessly homicidal guys, but the audience instinctively believes in the justice of every offhand assassination they commit. They're all basically decent men of integrity; we'll root for them every time.

And of course, beaten, shattered, hopelessly weakened, gravely wounded at the end of each episode, they nevertheless come back stronger than ever for the sequel. There's even a bit of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, who plays most of the film with stitches in his nose.

The public badly wants a figure like these. This is what the bien pensants of the media don't underatand. If Mueller couldn't beat Trump, and Liz Cheney couldn't, a hoaxed-up epidemic wasn't going to work any better. What are they going to do, reeducate us to forget about Huckleberry Finn, Jason Bourne, John Wick, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or Jake Gittes?