JOHN HARRIS IS WRONG AGAIN

Oh, look! Politico's John Harris says Donald Trump is losing his grip on the GOP!

Trump seems to do this a lot!

Somehow, Trump's grip persists -- but hey, maybe the loosening is real this time! So why does Harris say Trump's grip is slipping? Apparently Harris read The Catcher in the Rye when he was thirteen and it really stuck with him, because he thinks what people hate most of all is anyone who's a "phony." (Does anyone even use that word anymore?)

It strains memory now to recall that when Donald Trump first shoved his way into presidential politics seven years ago this spring, and soon after humiliated a long parade of establishment Republicans, his appeal to voters had a coherent dimension.

... The most powerful part of that argument was about the nature of establishment politics in both parties: It was the province of weak and contemptible people. Conventional politicians were calculating, careerist, cowardly — willing to sacrifice principle and the interests of ordinary Americans to suit their own interests. In short, the problem with American politics was that it was dominated by phonies.

... just because Trump is someone who is comfortable lying — anyone paying attention has known that since the 1980s — he was not at the outset of his political career defined by artifice. His grandiose self-conception, his vanity, his gleeful satyriasis — these are common traits in politicians, but most would try to hide them from view. Trump put them proudly on display. On the few occasions he was ever scolded into an apology — such as his notorious comments about how women like to be grabbed by famous people — he backtracked quickly. Whatever else you could say about Trump, he was not a phony.

Whatever else you could say about Trump, he was not a phony. I'm reminded of a famous tweet:

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

— wint (@dril) February 15, 2017

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta say that Trump is not a phony. The business skills he claims are phony. His alleged genius at dealmaking is phony. His claims of military and scientific expertise are phony. His religiosity (which fools many evangelicals) is phony. And I'm just scratching the surface.

But yes, Trump is genuine about a few things that many politicians lie about. Harris writes, "His grandiose self-conception, his vanity, his gleeful satyriasis — these are common traits in politicians, but most would try to hide them from view. Trump put them proudly on display." That's true. It's a big part of Trump's appeal. But Trump is still a fraud in every other way.

Harris regards Trump as genuine because he's genuine in a few ways that many of the people in Harris's small, insular world aren't. But now, according to Harris, Trump is phony in one of those ways. Consider his recent un-endorsement of Mo Brooks in the Alabama Senate race, ostensibly because Brooks wants to move on from discussing the 2020 election (in reality, it's because Brooks is trailing in the polls):

The move put an especially bright light on a trend years in the making: Trump has moved from being the beneficiary of America’s instinctual suspicion that most politicians are phonies who don’t really believe a thing they say, to being the enforcer against politicians who are insufficiently phony in professing blind devotion to him.

What? Harris thinks Trump looks like a phony because he demands that lesser Republicans kiss his ass? Trump's followers like that about him. They live vicariously through it -- they'd love to tell people to kiss their asses the way Trump does.

Harris continues:

One suspects that Trump himself does not realize how far he has drifted from the original source of his appeal as someone who is not connected to a reigning power structure and may lie and even cheat but does not traffic in the usual political B.S. Now Trump is trying to create his own power structure.

Every Trump follower wants him to create his own power structure! Apart from the QAnon types who think Trump is secretly running the country and allowing it to seem as if Joe Biden is in the White House as part of a brilliant plan, every Trump supporter believes that Trump was routinely sabotaged by evildoers and traitors from the moment he took the oath of office, and right up until January 6. They want all the saboteurs banished, if not executed. They want a power structure that consists of Trump loyalists only, because they're the only patriotic Americans.

In what other ways is Trump newly "phony"?

... even if one accepts that in his self-delusion Trump really does believe the election was somehow rigged against him, he also says lots of other things that he self-evidently doesn’t believe.

There is little doubt that Trump genuinely believes that the United States has no interest in being at odds with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and no business getting enmeshed in the Ukraine conflict. But now that Russian atrocities in Ukraine make that view broadly unpopular, Trump does what any conventional politician would do — pretend that his view is something else, and ludicrously assert that as president he would be much more confrontational with Putin than the Biden administration, including threatening the launch of nuclear weapons.

But Trump has been insisting that he's tough on Russia for years. In 2018, he said. "There's never been a president as tough on Russia as I have been." In 2019, he tweeted: "I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President." His 2020 campaign issued a press release headlined "FACT: Trump Has Been Tougher On Russia Than Biden." Of course this is phony -- but Trump has been phony this way all along.

Understanding the psychology of Trumpism is the kind of thing elite media figures should be good at -- it doesn't require them to give up their precious bothsiderism or take GOP threats to democracy seriously. But they can't even do this right.