The battle to bury Donald Trump is now entering its third phase.
The initial phase was the confident view of the Never Trumpers led briefly by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky that Trump was a freakish and horrifying phenomenon who had been endured and would vanish and almost be forgotten but not seen, again.
The Democrats having been stretched so uncomfortably by Trump, and despite having the support of 95 percent of the national political media and outspending him two to one, had to have recourse to unverifiable, post-electoral, lopsided Biden vote drops after election day to squeak to victory, were less sanguine.
They organized an airtight media debunking of his election challenge, which was made more plausible by the amateurish scattergun performance of the Trump legal team, chasing after eccentric irregularities rather than focusing upon the constitutional legality and vote counting integrity in the six swing states. (Peggy Noonan subtly suggested in the Wall Street Journal on June 6 that any question of the election was “conspiracism.”)
As if it were a silver stake to drive into the heart of a sleeping vampire, they magnified the Jan. 6 invasion by hooligans at the Capitol into an attempted insurrection, the subject of an impeachment, (with no supportive evidence, but that’s a detail) and attempted removal from office of someone who’d already retired the office at the end of his term, and thundered from every rooftop in America that Trump was a lawless aspiring dictator unfit for any office of trust, public or private.
The fact that that attempt fizzled out was highlighted by the recent uproar that the Republican Party has become a personality cult. He has not been the subject of any greater personality cult than a number of other presidents including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. They were all, at least at times, popular presidents and it served the interests of their down-ballot partisans to line up on their coattails.
Distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recounted the story of the ”Shorenstein System”: a New York municipal official (Hymie Shorenstein) complained that he had no campaign and the ward captain asked if he had noticed that the ferryboats around New York harbor brought floating garbage in behind them when they docked, and said that the name of his ferry boat was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
What is really happening here and it has not happened since Andrew Jackson, is that there is an imperishable mass attachment to someone who was ostensibly defeated in the last election and who has been banned from most of the media and all of the social media. The real subject of the Democrats’ and Never Trumpers’ vexation is their own inability to separate Trump from his immense following or shrink that following.
The Democrats have had to govern for the last 140 days and only their hammer-lock on the totalitarian Trump-hating national political media has maintained the levitation of this new administration’s completely unwarranted approval rating. The bumblebee has denied all laws of nature but it is an industrious and inoffensive creature; that cannot be said of this administration.
In the light of the failure of their effort to destroy Trump’s popularity among Republicans and to banish him from public esteem, we are now on to phase 3, which is a resumption of the protracted legal attempt to destroy him.