Well, that was fast. For a whole day in Washington, Thursday, May 12, Donald Trump managed to be on his best, and before this his seldom beheld, behavior, acting for once like a rational human as opposed to just being himself.
Magically, he seemed to pull off a complete transformation: He did not rage, rant, call people names, malign people’s looks, mention his genitals, demean people’s wives, accuse people’s fathers of having tried to kill Kennedy, incite people to even small forms of violence or threaten perhaps to somehow stage riots if things didn’t go as he planned.
As a reward for having passed this fairly low bar of normal behavior, he was reported once more to have become “presidential,” just your average pol with some minor rough edges that could be sanded off easily.
“They called him a madman, a con man, a cancer and worse during an ugly nominating fight, but in the week since [he] became the nominee, many of his former rivals and members of his party’s establishment are already softening,” as the New York Times put it. Perhaps the days of rough sailing were finally over. But that was then.
Just as Thursday the 12 began to slide slowly to Friday the 13, three stories popped up on the airwaves that sounded that old manic horn.
By a glitch, it was said, a white supremacist had gotten his name on a list of Trump delegates to the party’s state meeting in California. His long-time ex-butler of thirty years standing was under investigation concerning Facebook posts he had written that were “laced with vulgarities and epithets” and called for the lynching of Barack Obama. And Trump himself was revealed as having in the 1990s made calls to the media under an alias, identifying himself at times as “Jim Miller,” and lavishing torrents of praise on himself.
In other words, just another typical day in the GOP since Trump took it over, over the strange kind of things that for some unknown reason don’t seem to happen in other campaigns. Other campaigns don’t attract white supremacists. Most candidates don’t seem to have butlers, much less those who think about murdering presidents.
Needless to say, most people don’t pretend to be other people and then lie about it when the evidence strongly suggests that they did. It’s not that other people can’t slip, or know damaged people, or have the off moment. It’s that all these things that happen to Trump have the same shimmer of weirdness around them, and they happen to him ALL THE TIME.
And when they do, they rub off on everything near him, including the party he’s now taking over. By the Todd Akin rule — that every Republican deserves blame for all the things said and done by other Republicans — all Republicans will be asked from now on to explain and defend all aspects of Trumpian madness.
“For the next six months, you are going to be hostage to every single thing that Trump says,” Charlie Sykes says, correctly.
“What of the next time he says something wacky … or comes up with some other birther or truther conspiracy? This is going to be the most difficult, complicated thing we’ve ever seen in Republican politics … This whole alliance could be blown up by one tweet.”
“We are beginning the process of discussing what unity looks like in the Republican Party,” as PaulRyan said Saturday. “This isn’t done in a couple of meetings.” But it may take more time than he ever imagined. And perhaps he won’t like what he sees.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
