NO, TRUMP IS STILL NOT "A SPENT AND EXHAUSTED FORCE"

Jamelle Bouie apparently believes that we're seeing the end of Trumpism:

i don’t know how you can watch this rally and not conclude that maga is a spent and exhausted force

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 27, 2024 at 8:32 PM

He elaborates in his column today:

I’m sure that, to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.

But being "not yet defeated" is how Trump defines victory -- if he wins, even with a minority of the popular vote, that means he's the most powerful, most virile, and most sexually attractive man on earth, even if he barely has the energy to get to the finish line. Remember, this is someone who was once in debt to the tune of nearly a billion dollars in the early 1990s, and he responded by, among other things, publishing a book called Trump: Surviving at the Top. That's what he cares about: not having ideas or a vision (as a real estate developer or as a politician), but just being at the top. He wants to be president. There may be a "determined political movement" behind him, but he's part of it only to the extent that it's determined to give him power and glory.

This doesn't mean he's indifferent to how he gets to the top. When he was actually building buildings, he wanted them to be big and garish. As a politician, he wants to be racist, vindictive, and corrupt. But the main message he's been sending since his first major business failures has been nothing more than Fuck you -- I'm surviving. At the top!

Bouie wasn't impressed with Trump's words at Madison Square Garden:

As for Trump’s speech, it was a long meandering mess, less vigorous than it was, to borrow a phrase, low energy. There was no positive agenda, no optimistic picture for the country, nothing that came close to the tone of either his 2016 or 2020 campaigns, when Trump would pivot, on occasion, to being a candidate of change and prosperity. Not this time: Trump gave the American public a rant, centered on his wounded ego and his desire for revenge and retribution.

But that's because we don't live in the world of 2016 or 2020. Thirty percent of the country loves his act, but Trump has intuited that he can still win the votes of another 15-20 percent of the country who don't like his act but assume they can just ignore it for four years by never reading or watching the news, an approach that's extremely easy in a post-newspaper, post-cable world. Those people think he'll make a lot of noise but be a normal president otherwise, all while magically ending every war and lowering prices to 2019 levels. They don't need him to be a statesman. They just need him not to be Joe Biden, whom they regard as a terrible president, even if they voted for him.

Are there enough of these people to get Trump a win? We won't know until next week. There might not be. But nothing Trump has done in this campaign -- not "They're eating the dogs," not the DJ party -- has alienated them. Trump will get at least 47% of the vote. He'll win, at minimum, 230 electoral votes.

Bouie continues:

Is this the message of a winning campaign with the energy and confidence necessary to push through to Election Day? Or is it the message of an undisciplined candidate who believes that his days in the spotlight are coming to an end and wants to make the most of them before he can no longer claim this kind of attention?

Have you heard of fuck-you money -- an amount of money so large that you don't need to care what your haters think? Trump has fuck-you political clout. He knew it two campaigns ago, when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. (It remains to be seen whether Tony Hinchcliffe's verbal gunshots on Seventh Avenue will lose votes for Trump.) This fuck-you clout might never be enough for Trump to win the popular vote in a presidential election, and it might not be enough for him to win the Electoral College more than that one time, but it's enough for him to stay competitive in a third straight election, after not only the DJ set and the pet-eating monologue but the felony conviction and the rape adjudication and the multiple indictments and the two impeachments and January 6. Fuck-you political clout means that Trump doesn't need to deliver inspiring speeches, or even coherent speeches. He's literally now like a rock star who shows up hours late for the gig and then plays whatever the hell he feels like playing, even if it's not what the audience wants to hear.

We've been writing Trump's political obituary practically every day since the summer of 2015. Haven't we learned not to do that? Trump will be a spent force when he's dead, or when he's so deep in dementia that even his superfans can't deny his cognitive loss. Until that time, he'll be very, very difficult to beat. So let's hold off on the premature celebrations.