Ego has been the weather of Donald Trump’s character, but in his second term egomania is emerging as doctrine. Mr Trump not only wants praise, but seems to believe that praise is owed to him by history itself. His social media account, his vain self-described “truths,” circulate AI-generated images that depict him overlooking the globe, as Green Lantern using the power ring to build a wall, and of himself lounging in the Lincoln Memorial, or as a King in a cape. The performing-arts centre that Congress named in honour of a murdered president is now the centre of a litigious battle so that Mr Trump may bolt his name upon it.
A triumphal arch is planned for the capital. The East Wing of the White House was knocked aside to erect the ballroom, a vanity project Mr Trump has proved fixated on for a year. It is all growing quite tiresome.
Indeed Trump’s vanity is hardly a surprise after his forty years in the public eye and ten in the presidential, however the people and institutions around him have only grown more complicit. The first term had aides who were, in their best moments, able to convince the president to find virtue in temperance and restraint; think Hope Hicks.
This term runs on believers instead. The president’s inner circle includes his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, aptly described as “the human printer,” whose tasks include maximising his Truth Social output, and providing proximity rather than judgment. Cronyism and sycophants aren’t inherently scandalous in and of themselves, but they tend to be a symptom of the loyalty-for-office bargain that Mr Trump prioritizes. Consequently, the Republic is in the hands of a White House that produces decisions nobody in the room was willing or capable of questioning.
In his first term, Mr Trump’s antics were at best, and rarely, amusing, at worst, and frequently, embarrassing. However it is dangerous, particularly in this time of war. The world he’s created is not yielding to his whims; gas prices are over four dollars a gallon and climbing. The war he’s “won” repeatedly and claimed to end in weeks grinds towards its seventh month, his approval rating hovers in the twenties. A man who built his entire political identity around “winning so much you will get tired of winning” does not respond to this type of resistance by pulling back. Mr Trump has reached instead for whatever has worked for him; spectacle and retribution. A president who loses altitude is, by long experience, a dangerous kind. That is where we are.
In Dallas, in a desperate attempt to shore up enthusiasm for the midterms, Mr Trump opted to host a first-of-its-kind midterm convention to convince voters, more than once, to imagine he was on the ballot. But voters aren’t imagining, nor are they pretending otherwise.
Mr Trump is, by virtue of his talent and temperament, a master of pretending. He has spent a career persuading rooms to see him as what he wanted them to see. However, after ten years, it seems the real world and the American people have started setting limits on this gift. In Dallas, he pleaded that he was on the ballot, and offered a five-thousand-dollar “dividend” to all adults, so long as the Republicans held both chambers of Congress. One would question how this promise would be fulfilled. What is the funding mechanism? Where is the legal basis? The most endangered Republicans in the country, a label that describes more and more in Washington with each passing day, but specifically those in Alaska, Michigan, and Maine, opted to stay away from Dallas.
The Republican defensive wall, having been originally staked in reliably red Texas, now finds itself extending to Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina. Texas is the clearest specimen of the detriment of Trump’s loyalty cult to the Republican Party at large. Ken Paxton, twice impeached by his own party, is the president’s chosen nominee for the Senate seat vacated by John Cornyn. Cornyn, a conservative who has won every one of his Senate elections since 2002 by double digits, was primaried purely on the basis of Mr Paxton’s perceived superior loyalty to Mr Trump. As a result an election that would’ve been an afterthought and called for the Republicans at the polls’ close has turned into the nation’s most watched Senate contest, with Democratic state representative James Talarico running even with Mr Paxton in recent polling.
The question put to the electorate is whether Congress will act as a check on this presidency or will rubber-stamp it. Voters, for all of their faults, are not blind and will not accept Mr Trump’s assertions that “prices are fine,” the war in Iran is won, and that corruption is “FAKE NEWS!” Indeed this president, facing irrelevance, a failure of a legacy, will grow more desperate to find whatever feeds the appetite that elected him twice. Mr Trump’s authoritarianism is the method of a man who feels the walls closing in.
It is no coincidence that Mr Trump’s attacks on the media have reached an unprecedented level, barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because he judged their coverage to be false. Other networks, to their credit, refused to fill the resulting gap in pool coverage, rather than choosing to profit off a rival’s exclusion. A welcome and honourable holdout in these times, overshadowed by Mr Trump’s subsequent decision to stand up a taxpayer funded YouTube channel, colloquially called Trump TV, looping old inauguration footage to an audience that was, contrary to his insistence, in
the low thousands. The new White House helipad was drowned out by the rotors. The incompetence of the Trump administration amuses, until one remembers the intentions and ambitions underneath it. Call this the most authoritarian presidency since Wilson’s. Both presidents punished the press for their coverage, both folded the machinery of the state into the imperial presidency, and both went to war without the Congress the Constitution requires to declare it.
In this term, Mr Trump has grown more grandiose, more certain of his own invincibility and indispensability, and has treated the presidency with carelessness and the country as a vessel to serve and ratify his greatness, not to check him. In 1974, Gerald Ford, ascending to the Presidency, proclaimed that “our long national nightmare is over” and whilst America, and the rest of the world, find itself under siege until 20 January 2029. A Congress willing to function as a check rather than a rubber stamp, and a Republican party, in opposition, that finds itself potentially willing to break free of his grip will propel America one step closer to that aim. Mr Trump asked the country to pretend he was on the ballot. Six weeks from now the country will answer him, and it should vote as if he is.