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I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program: Americans are baffled about what’s happened to Donald Trump.
He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him.
He’s gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened?
The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career.
He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.
His pathetic attempt to question the racial identity of Vice President Harris was just a warmed-over version of his Obama Birther slanders; they played well back in the first decade of this century, but now they’re just old and flat.
His claim that Hispanic immigrants and asylum seekers are “taking Black jobs” is just a makeover of his 2015 coming-down-the-escalator pitch. It was new and novel then and caught the love and attention of racists all across America; now it’s just a tired retread.
His forcing Republicans in the House to vote down the border bill that Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford principally wrote just adds to the perception that he’s a rank hypocrite with little interest in actually solving America’s problems.
His newest fundraising grifts — “gold” tennis shoes, bloody-ear bobble head dolls, raising the Mar-a-Lago entrance fee for spies and hangers-on to $1,000,000 — are every bit as pathetic and sloppy as his old pitches for Trump steaks, Trump water, and his failed Trump “First Class” Airline.
His entire career in the media has been characterized by rich-frat-boy flamboyance and testosterone-driven excess, from publicly cheating on each of his three wives to bragging about leering in the dressing rooms of teen beauty pageants to his faux “successful businessman” routine on NBC. Today, though, nobody is shocked, amazed, or impressed; more Americans pity him than are in awe of his proclaimed masculinity.
The one aspect of his public persona that hasn’t much changed is his naked racism, although even that has become boring. He’s now desperately trying to slice-and-dice the American electorate so he can pit separate groups of people against each other or suck up to whatever faction he thinks might save his doomed candidacy.
He’s trying to appeal to boomers by saying he’ll repeal the income tax Reagan put on Social Security; it’s not working because boomers remember that every one of the four budgets his administration produced when he was president called for radical cuts in Social Security.
He thinks he can ingratiate himself with Jews by saying that Kamala Harris “hates Jews” when most Americans know she’s married to one. When that didn’t work, he tried sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu and inviting him to Mar-a-Lago; most Americans realize that both men are spinning political plates in the air as fast as they can to avoid going to prison for corruption. Now he just sounds like an aging antisemite afraid of jail.
He believes young people will swoon when he says he wants to eliminate income taxes on tips, but most young workers are still old enough to remember that in 2020, as the Economic Policy Institute noted in their headline, “Trump administration finalizes regulation that will cost tipped workers more than $700 million annually.”
He thinks trash-talking women, calling them “nasty” and other epithets, will bond men to him; instead, they imagine him bursting in on their mothers, sisters, wives, or daughters in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room.
In each one of these efforts to either turn Americans against each other or slice off and nail down a segment of the electorate, Trump is ignoring what most citizens are fundamentally concerned about: the physical, emotional, and fiscal health of our entire country.
Nobody — outside of his Greene/Gaetz/Boebert fan club in the House — believes his promise to pardon the people who tried to beat over 140 police officers to death is righteous; it just makes him look and sound like a sleazy, washed-up, wannabee mob boss who hates cops.
The only “new” policies Fat Elvis Trump has come up with are those brought to him by billionaires dangling campaign contributions:
— He wanted TikTok banned until billionaire Jeff Yass — the largest American investor in the platform — visited him at his shabby golf motel.
— He correctly pointed out that Bitcoin is a risky commodity rather than a currency until Bitcoin aficionados and billionaires Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Antonio Gracias, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss came to his defense.
He doesn’t have any new vision for America: he just wants to be the star of his own version of The Apprentice, reliving the highlights from his glory days and, of course, keeping himself out of prison by taking control of the Department of Justice.
He oversaw the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, giving America the second-worst Covid death rate in the world because of his incompetence.
He gave us the worst economy since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.
He nearly destroyed an international alliance of democracies that it took good men and women across dozens of nations — and two bloody world wars — a century to put together.
Fat Elvis Trump thinks he can keep spinning the old hits, but polls now show that — outside of his elderly white rally audiences — Americans have figured him out, are tired of his cons, and have moved on.
And it couldn’t happen at a better time: A new day is at hand if enough of us will simply show up and vote this November.
