NEW DIMENSIONS IN "THIS IS HOW YOU GOT TRUMP"

Please tell me that what Politico's John Harris writes here won't become conventional wisdom:

Two years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidency and — it seemed safe to assume — was at last about to lose his hold on national attention.

Soon enough, one supposed, those four bizarre years would come to seem like a hallucination — blurry and unreal....

This week, as the Jan. 6 special committee holds its hearing before the midterm elections, is a good moment to take stock of Trump’s astonishing achievement since November 2020. In historical terms, Trump is a larger figure than ever....

Here is the great paradox of the Jan. 6 panel. Its inquiry has systematically dismantled Trump’s deceptions and denialism surrounding the 2020 election. At the same time, it has helped build Trump into something much larger than he appeared two years ago. He is a political leader too serious to forget.

... the Jan. 6 committee has assured that he still matters now, and will be argued about for a long time to come.

Will other pundits seize on this argument -- that Trump is still a force in American politics because the January 6 committee kept him in the spotlight and made him seem consequential? That if it weren't for the committee, he would have faded into obscurity?

Harris says the committee showed us a Trump who's more than a laughingstock.

For seven years, since Trump first vaulted into serious presidential contention in 2015, there has been a tension in how his opponents view him: buffoon or tyrant?

Is he an adolescent at large who craves publicity and applause more than genuine power, and spends hours a day watching cable TV and spouting words that he doesn’t actually believe? Or is he someone who brings conscious method to his demagoguery, and is willing to shred any political or constitutional constraint that gets in his way?

...What the Jan. 6 panel accomplished was to assemble a vast array of evidence for the second interpretation. It made irrefutably clear how purposeful his effort was to sow doubt about the election, to try to enlist the Justice Department and other arms of the government to pursue his fraudulent claims of fraud, and illuminated how he encouraged mayhem on Jan. 6 and initially shrugged his shoulders at the outbreak of violence at the Capitol. This is not the work of a buffoon.

Trump is a buffoon in many ways, but he's always known how to stir up the masses for his own benefit, and he's always done so in an amoral and purposeful way. That's what made him dangerous from the moment he entered politics. The January 6 committee isn't responsible for his success at rabble-rousing and manipulating -- the committee merely revealed how he used his toxic skills in response to the 2020 election. Those skills, and the love and sense of solidarity they engender among Republican voters, made him the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination immediately after the 2020 results were tabulated, and would have kept him in that position whether there'd been a January 6 committee or not.

Polling from Harris's employer bears this out. In the most recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump is the 2024 candidate preferred by 52% of Republicans surveyed. Just before the committee hearings started, in early June, the number was 51%. Just after his acquittal in his second impeachment trial, in mid-February 2021, the number was 53%. Just before Thanksgiving 2020, a couple of weeks after the election but well before January 6, the number was 54%. This number never really changes.

January 6 committee members aren't doing this. Trump is doing this. He's kept himself relevant by channeling and encouraging voter rage. Blaming the committee for Trump's continued political relevance is Murc's Law in action.

(Murc's Law: "the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics," manifested, for instance, when commentators blame Democrats for the failure of a good bill that every Senate Democrat supports but that doesn't pass because every Republican votes to filibuster it. Harris is clearly saying that when Democrats talk about Trump's ruthlessness scheming, they make Trump more powerful as a schemer.)

Harris says "it seemed safe to assume" that Trump would fade into obscurity after the 2020 election, but some of us never thought he would. It was clear that, on the right, he was the most beloved politcal figure since Ronald Reagan. It was clear that he'd want to run again if he lost, and that he'd have a level of passionate support that would never have been offered to Jimmy Carter after 1980 or George H.W. Bush after 1992. The people responsible for this are Trump, his enablers, and the voters who wallow in his toxicity. Don't blame the people trying to hold him accountable.