The Secret Donald Trump is No Secret
There's no revelation that will finally end the reign
I was, really, going to write about a book I read this week: J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. I’ll do that later. Instead, a brief note about Donald Trump’s baiting of Kamala Harris on the identity issue during his widely reported appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists and how it relates to a throwaway gag on Tiny Toon Adventures.
You’ve heard about this by now. Trump, having fully abandoned any post-assassination attempt strategy of not being an abrasive divider, charged Vice President Harris with picking her identity as Black to get ahead in her career. It’s clear what the main theme of attacks on Harris will be: she’s too liberal (“wacky” as a response to weird), too dangerous, and too conniving to be president. (That last will encompass some fiercely gendered attacks soon.) Make no mistake, then: this was Trump choosing a high profile venue to launch, even if imperfectly, campaign themes—using an irresistible setting to take back the initiative from a Harris campaign that has had his on the back foot for some time.
That’s not really the narrative that many observers ran with initially. It was portrayed as a meltdown or a disaster, because it is easy for people to assume that the way they process an event is how all audiences will portray it. But sometimes messaging is about changing the conversation from one topic to another—such as from a dynamic, young(er) presidential candidate unifying Democrats to a more familiar and comfortable theme for a Republican candidate (namely, that Harris is a product of affirmative action). To Trump’s camp, I’m sure it also seemed like a good way to wedge Black support for Harris, although I also suspect that the Trump camp is just old enough and just White enough that they may not fully grasp that “Black with a non-Black parent” isn’t really something that will stun the average Black person. Maybe if they’d taken some courses on critical race theory they would have realized this! The main thrust, of course, is for White audiences—stanching defections—by trying to define Harris as conniving and inauthentic. Look for more attacks along this vector.
What I was a little troubled by, though, was the belief that finally the scales would fall from the American electorate’s eyes—that Trump had, at least, crossed the reddest line in making (vile, vindictive, weird) attacks. Folks. It’s 2024. People who vote for Trump like this stuff. They like your outrage at this stuff. They applaud it. They use “deplorable” with pride. And few indeed are the swing voters who have not taken on board that Trump’s a fairly unpleasant guy—and any one of them who does like that stuff likes it because Trump “tells it like it is”, which always and everywhere is code for “tells it in a manner that the guardians of mores don’t like”.
I do think that on net the appearance was bad for Trump—Democrats’ looming Black turnout issue has been, uh, resolved recently in ways that wedge attacks likely won’t dent, and the vast number of multiracial Americans, who skew really young, probably took note of this incident. But I am also so leery of the 2016-2020 cycle in which every week brought some new scandal that portended the end of Trump and instead saw him win one and almost two elections. I’m also tired of folks not treating Trump as a cynical, savvy, and effective political operator who does, at times, actually know what he is doing, even if it’s not what the codes of conduct for the professional/managerial class say should be done.
And in particular I’m tired of people acting like Trump isn’t a known quantity. Here’s where we come back to Tiny Toon Adventures, an animated show that ran for two years in the early 1990s out of Steven Spielberg’s shop. The show was (sorry Xennials!) mostly forgettable, but it was also a valuable conduit for classic farce and vaudeville tropes straight into the brains of impressionable youth (like me). In one throwaway gag, for instance, Donald Trump showed up. Recounted by one TVTropes forum user:
Just rewatched the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Thirteensomething." It actually has a Donald Trump cameo. Babs, upon arriving in New York, runs into Elmyra, who is vacationing there. Elmyra chases Babs, and the scene shifts to the street in front of Trump Tower, where Trump is squeegeeing the windshield of a car. When the driver pays him, Trump looks at the camera and says "Tax-free income!" At which point Babs and Elmyra arrive. Elmyra latches onto Trump, then looks at the camera and says "Oooo...Eat your heart out, Marla!"
So, in a throwaway gag, Tiny Toon Adventures efficiently shows The Donald as a tax cheat and alimony-evading lowlife who attracts terrible allies.
This was in a kid’s show in the 1990s. For my entire life, Donald Trump has been revealed to be a bad businessman, a scoundrel, an abuser, and worse. His bad taste in aesthetics has been a joke since I was in preschool. There is pretty much nothing about the guy that hasn’t been dissected in the decades he’s been a public figure—which goes back to the Reagan era (when he hired Manafort and Stone as his political advisers!). Nothing will come out that will fundamentally change anyone’s impression of him.
Politically, by the way, that does mean that he’s at his ceiling, not his floor, of support. But he’s also at his floor, give or take a percentage point. For all the dramatic importance of the 2024 election, it’s going to come out to grinding turnout and viciously negative campaigns.