IF HE'S ELECTED, TRUMP WON'T BE A PUSHOVER FOR PROJECT 2025

In an audio essay that's transcribed here, Ezra Klein says what I've been thinking about Donald Trump's recent behavior: that Trump, as he ages, is more tired and more prone to rambling, but mostly he's experiencing increased disinhibition, not dementia -- which makes sense because he was always much more disinhibited than the rest of us.

Whatever you think of that idea, you should consider another part of Klein's argument: that Trump still seems largely in control in his world. Klein quotes what Tim Walz said after Trump's bizarre DJ set at a Pennslvania town hall:

It was strange. But if this was your grandfather, you would take the keys away.

Klein says:

I don’t think Walz has this right. Trump did not freeze up on that stage.... He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present.

Later, Klein elaborates on this:

What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.

If Klein is right about this, as I suspect, then Trump will still have a great deal of power if he's elected president. The campaign aides who couldn't persuade him to go back to taking questions at that town hall will be in his admininstration. Kristi Noem, who stood on stage with him and did the "YMCA" hand gestures by his side, will probably be in his cabinet.

As Klein notes, when Trump was president, members of his administration prevented him from doing many of the things he wanted to do:

In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

... In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

But if Trump wins next month, this time should be very different:

But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time.... That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, “We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” He went on to say, “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”

I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answer.

That's why I don't believe that a second Trump presidency would go the way most liberals now seem to think it would, with J.D. Vance and his Project 2025 allies quickly taking over from a diminished, weakened Trump. Trump may be weaker now, and more disinhibited, but he still has the power to intimidate the people around him.

And he appears to be gaining in the polls, so maybe he truly understands how he benefits from generating outrage and even bafflement. If so, that's a sign that there hasn't been much cognitive decline in one of the few corners of his mind that's ever functioned well -- the part that knows how to keep him in the headlines.

The expected leader of the coup to dethrone Trump as the head of his own second administration is J.D. Vance. But as Klein notes, "Don Jr. was one of the people who reportedly persuaded Trump to pick Vance." Maybe you think Junior misjudged Vance. Maybe you think he's in on the plot. I think Vance might be less dangerous to Trump than you think. By inclination, he's a follower, not a leader -- he hitched himself to the Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld crowd at Yale Law, he hitched himself to Peter Thiel, and now he's hitching himself to Trump.

I'd also remind you that right-wing groups like to play the long game. It took them half a century to overturn Roe v. Wade. They didn't care. Having to fight for decades meant that the money kept rolling in for decades. They don't need to win it all in the next four years.

If Trump wins, the Project 2025 crowd will act in defiance of him some of the time, but he'll push back on them at other times -- and many times they'll agree, or Project 2025 will pursue policy goals Trump doesn't care about and wouldn't have cared about when he was younger. But he'll still do what he wants much of the time, because he still intimidates the people most loyal to him, who'll be right by his side.