Donald Trump opened his first speech of the Republican National Convention today by telling the live crowd chanting the usual “four more years.” “If you want to really drive them crazy, you say 12 more years.”
The Washington Post says he was joking. The New York Times calls this a “provocation.” It is—and it isn’t. I spent last fall traveling the country attending Trump rallies and watching others online. This particular provocation, this joke, was an increasingly common rhetorical device. Now it’s following the pattern of other Trump transgressions: He slips such provocations into his speeches as if they’re asides, as if he’s just musing on an idea. Then the idea becomes something other people are saying. He pulls back by declaring it’s a joke—and then proverbially shrugs, and says in so many words, “but maybe it’s not so crazy.” This joking-not joking rhetorical device is the means by which Trump normalizes that which might be—at first, only at first—even too much for his base.
Recall, for instance, the way he worked the “treason” of Joe Biden and Barack Obama into the new mainstream of his own creation. At first, he’d heard they’d spied, then a lot of people were saying they had done very bad things, then they had, no question, done them, then maybe it was treason, and now, in the Trumposphere—affirmed by the right-wing press, reported in quotation by the rest—it is. A death penalty offense. A QAnon conspiracy theory validated—confirmed, in the minds of the believers—by the president in speech after speech.
I understand why much of the press insists on treating Trump’s increasingly serious bids for an unlimited presidency as the ugly joke he sometimes says they are. Rhetorical analysis is outside the framework of everyday reporting. If Trump says it’s a joke—even as he constructs his jokes to lead to actual beliefs—reporters report that claim. And maybe some of them want to—maybe, even now, they want to believe that some norms still hold. Maybe they’re afraid that if they acknowledge just how far beyond norms he’s gone, they’ll be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship is not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party’s most heated partisans but an actual idea, a joke, for now, a possibility, maybe, sooner rather than later. “I have to see,” Trump says of whether he’ll accept the results of a democratic election. “I’m not just going to say yes, I’m not going to say no.”
Maybe the rest of the press is right. Maybe we should keep pretending. Fake it till we make it, back to something like the semblance of democracy that preceded Trump and will follow, just as surely as the center must hold, as things won’t fall apart, because look, Republicans endorsing Biden, because did you see the DNC roll call? That guy from Rhode Island with the calamari? That’s America, right?
Yes, but not the only one. We tell ourselves Trump is too lazy, too incompetent, too fixated by his own image on the screen to look past it to fascism. Not just the gestures—those he’s already proved himself capable of—but the real deal, the full-fledged authoritarianism he’s teased in Portland and on the border and nearly every time he takes the podium. And it’s true—Trump lacks the drive of Mussolini or the will of Putin. He won’t seize that kind of power. He’s not actually that bold. But he’ll take it if he can. If it’s easy. Inertia, the tendency of things in motion to remain in motion, will carry him there if we don’t apply friction every inch of the way.