The lull before the storm

The "resistance" lies in wait for Trump

Jonathan Chait, the left-wing commentator, discusses what he calls “the bizarre normalcy of Trump 2.0.” Indeed, there is something ironic, if not bizarre, about the left’s comparatively subdued reaction to the Trump transition — Chait mistakes it for “serenity” — this time around.

In 2016, the Trump transition was fairly normal. His Cabinet picks weren’t shocking. They weren’t even very surprising.

Their merits aside, Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Elaine Chao, Alex Acosta, James Mattis, Steve Mnuchin, Sonny Perdue, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Wilbur Scott, John Kelly, and Dan Coates were the kind of people one would reasonably expect to hold a Cabinet job in a Republican administration. Ben Carson might not have been, but his selection raised few eyebrows.

This time, Trump has picked any number of Cabinet nominees who would never have been picked for the positions they hope to hold by a normal Republican president. Their merits aside, I’ll cite Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Matt Gaetz (before he stepped aside) as examples. At the subcabinet level and ambassador level, I’ll add Kash Patel, Metmet Oz, and convicted felon Charles Kushner.

In addition, the Trump transition team reportedly is asking applicants for high-level positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and what they think about the January 6, 2021 riot. The “wrong” answers, reportedly, are that the election wasn’t stolen and that the rioters shouldn’t have tried to overturn the result.

If this, in fact, is how applicants are being screened, it doesn’t strike me as normal

Logically, therefore, one would expect that the sense of abnormality, and the “resistance” thereto, would be more pronounced now than it was in late 2016. Yet, as Chait observes, this is not the case.

There are reasons why it isn’t. Fatigue may be one. Another might be that the left has become more accustomed to Trump. A third, relatedly, might be what I’ll call the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. There’s also the fact that Trump has now run for the presidency three times and won twice. In a sense, he’s “normal” by definition.

But the main point I want to make is that the comparative absence of talk about resistance by the left doesn’t mean that the left has “normalized” Trump in any meaningful sense. It just means that there’s a lull before the storm. Things might seem calm at the moment, but a big storm is brewing.

To put it in Freudian terms, the left-liberal ego is trying to think through Trump’s victory, but its id is raging. The id won’t be repressed much longer.

One can see this phenomenon play out on cable television. CNN is still somewhat in “explaining” mode. Chastened, most of its liberal talking heads are trying to process the election and thinking about their party’s future direction.

At MSNBC, with the exception of Joe Scarborough and his wife, the talking heads seem to be in full Trump-bashing mode. Rachel Maddow’s hair is every bit as much on fire as it was in December 2016.

CNN and MSNBC have both lost a big percentage of their viewers since the election. MSNBC has been hit a little harder than CNN.

To me, this shows disillusion with the election more than disillusion with either network. Recall that Fox News lost lots of viewers after the 2020 election. This was due in part to unhappiness with Fox’s early (and correct) call that Joe Biden had carried Arizona. But it was also due, I think, to the fact that conservatives wanted to take some time off from the depressing political news.

If the past is a good guide, CNN and MSNBC will recover their audiences. It also seems likely that CNN will move away from navel gazing and towards stridency because that’s what its viewers will want to see once Trump’s victory has been fully digested, as it nearly has been.

The Washington Post is already there. I detect little difference between its approach to Trump now and its approach eight years ago. The only difference is that there’s more indecision, this time, about which outrages, real or imagined, to highlight. From the Post’s perspective, Trump has “flooded the zone” with outrages.

In the end, I think the Democratic party, not the media, will drive the train — as it usually does. I suspect that liberal Democrats in the Deep State are already laying traps, as they did for Michael Flynn in late December 2016-early January 2017. And I suspect that more than one major MAGA figure will fall into a trap.

But even in the unlikely event that the Trump administration avoids unforced errors, the “serene mood” in Washington that Chait depicts won’t last into the new year. By then, Democrats and their media allies will have settled on their best, nastiest talking points and the mood will be anything but serene.

That was the real “normalcy” of Trump 1.0. I predict it will be the “normalcy” of Trump 2.0, as well.