Opinion

WACO, Texas — In the first big rally of his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump didn’t dwell on the symbolism of speaking in Waco amid the 30th anniversary of the deadly siege there that still serves as a right-wing cri de coeur against federal authority.He didn’t have to.This speech, like so many of his speeches, was a mix of lies, hyperbole, superlatives, invectives, doomsaying, puerile humor and callbacks to old grievances — messaging that operates on multiple levels.Some of his followers hear a call to arms. Some hear their private thoughts given voice. Others hear the lamentations of a valiant victim. Still others hear a wry jokester poking his finger into the eye of the political establishment.In attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — a likely rival for the Republican nomination — for perceived disloyalty, Trump invoked a former Tallahassee mayor, Andrew Gillum, who ran against DeSantis in 2018. A year and a half later, Gillum was found in a Miami Beach hotel room with what reports called “a reputed male escort and suspected methamphetamine.”But those facts weren’t enough for Trump, who turned up the sensationalism, calling Gillum a “crackhead,” getting a laugh from the crowd.It’s a standard part of Trump’s routine: Comedians aren’t bound by the truth — or the sensitivities of race, gender and sexuality — after all. To get laughs, they’re granted license to engage in all manner of distortion, and that’s what Trump does.In fact, Trump’s entertainment quotient doesn’t get nearly as much attention and analysis as it deserves. His supporters like him in part because of the irreverence he brings to the political arena.He called Stormy Daniels “horse-face” and said that if he’d had an affair, she would “not be the one” — a remark not only crude and sexist, but one that belies the reality that more than a dozen women have accused him of sexual improprieties.Remember: Before Trump, when national politicians were of the more traditional variety, a man commenting on a woman’s looks, even in an attempt to flatter, was rightly off limits. A decade ago, when President Barack Obama jokingly called Kamala Harris the “best-looking attorney general in the country,” he was so roundly criticized that he was forced to apologize.But when Trump disparaged Daniels, the crowd cheered him on.Trump is the Andrew Dice Clay of American politics, appealing to machismo, misogyny and mischief — a type of character that’s a constant in American culture.Clay himself was just a darker version of characters from 1970s pop culture, like Danny in “Grease” and Fonzie in “Happy Days.” And they were just bubble gum-and-giggles versions of characters played by James Dean in the 1950s.Trump took an American archetype and added horror, actual political power and a potentially empire-ending ego. His humor and audacity are often part of the narrative of the American folk hero, a status that Trump has attained among his followers.Indeed, the atmosphere outside of Saturday’s rally, on a beautiful spring day, felt like tailgating before a concert.This is part of what makes Trump so dangerous. For some, the extreme fandom creates community. For others, Trump worship could inspire violent fanaticism, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021.It’s a formula, and among die-hard Trump fans, it works. But, as the charm of the formula fades, it may also prove to be Trump’s Achilles' heel. He’s stuck in a backward-facing posture when the country is moving forward. Instead of vision, Trump offers revision.Trump is still exaggerating old accomplishments, relitigating a lost election and marking enemies for retribution. He’s stuck in a rut.He has an obsession with enemies, personal, real or perceived. He needs them, otherwise he’s a warrior without a war.All the while, Republicans around the country looking for someone new, arguably led by DeSantis, have moved on to their own war, a new war, a culture war.It’s not focused on them personally, but on using parental fears to further oppressive policies. While Trump disparaged minorities on a national level — civil rights protesters, immigrants and Muslims — today’s Republicans have started to codify oppression on a local level.They provide legislative bite for Trump’s rhetorical bark. They’re what Trumpism looks like without him, what intolerance looks like when you dress it up and make it dance.They’re the vanguards of the ridiculous war on wokeness. But this isn’t Trump’s lane. It’s not his invention. And his pride resists a full embrace of it.Trump spoke for about an hour and half Saturday but mostly saved the culture-war rhetoric for the end, threatening an executive order to cancel funding to schools that teach critical race theory, “transgender insanity” or “racial, sexual or political content.”It was a sweeping threat, but even there he promised to do it through easily reversible executive dictate rather than through more sturdy legislative mechanisms.Trump had a moment. He won an election (even if it came with Russian connections and James Comey’s bad judgment). And for four years, the proverbial inmates ran the asylum. But that time has passed. Trump hasn’t moved, but the ground beneath him has shifted.After Trump’s speech, I went back to listen to his first speech after announcing his candidacy in 2015. The tone and themes were strikingly similar. He hasn’t grown much, personally or politically, since then. He’s more sure of himself and more vulgar, but narcissism is still his engine.Ultimately, if his legal issues don’t do him in, his inability to grow beyond nostalgia and negativity could.Being the personification of a television rerun, a horror comedy with retro reference, isn’t a match for this moment. This is not 2016.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

I know this little column won’t put to bed (pun definitely intended) the controversies about “woke” and “wokeness.”

When a person wants to score points in a political argument, they often quote someone who commands respect from those on both sides of the debate. Whether that person agrees with their position, took a position on their issue or even said what they claim sometimes doesn’t matter.

Of course, Donald Trump went to social media to speculate that he’d be arrested on Tuesday of this week and — big surprise — that turned out not to be true.Of course, he’s trying to incite his followers with the prospect of their beloved leader facing criminal charges, and simultaneously using that to squeeze them for more money.Of course, many Republicans are not only rushing to Trump’s defense, armed with a quiver of false equivalencies, but also seeking any opportunity to bash Democrats and call them hypocrites for seeking to hold Trump accountable.Of course, many Democrats are, on the one hand, relishing the idea that charges may begin sticking to Slick Donald, but on the other hand, twisting themselves into knots worrying whether an indictment will actually strengthen his standing with his base.If a former president is indicted, it will be unprecedented. But the atmospherics will be all-too-familiar, a kind of political déjà vu, as we remain trapped in a repeating cycle of Trump-era truisms: the defense of hard-core political acolytes, the rapid erosion of norms and a paralyzing reticence among those who could check his abuses of power.It’s impossible to completely game out the legal and political ramifications of a Trump indictment, but because the public is hungry for theories and pundits are champing at the bit to provide them, we’re awash in takes about what happens next.But I challenge you to tune all of that out.We know Trump and how he operates. He tries — and often succeeds — to spin his negatives into positives, to deny his misdeeds while charging that those trying to hold him accountable are the real culprits.Trump’s strategy from the very beginning of his political foray has been to discredit or destroy the gatekeepers, in politics and the media, who might one day be called upon to expose him. (“Low-energy” Jeb Bush, anyone?) He continues to brand them as weak, dishonest and out to get anyone who supports him.And every time an attempt to hold him accountable falls short of delivering the most fitting consequences, he counts that as a victory, and the effort’s “failure” as proof of its illegitimacy. Then he rolls all this together in his rhetoric to bolster his contention that all investigations of him and members of his inner circle amount to a campaign of political harassment.In a video Trump released early Tuesday morning, he railed that the “horrible, radical left, Democrat investigations of your all-time-favorite president, me, is just a continuation of the most disgusting witch hunt in the history of our country,” adding: “It’s gone on forever.”He goes on to call Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, which explored his campaign’s communications with Russia during the 2016 election, “a hoax,” and contends that investigators “even spied on my campaign.” He then ties in new investigations — the classified documents probe, the Georgia election interference investigation and the allegations about hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.Trump will never not be this guy. He’s never going to concede or show contrition in the face of any accusation. He’s going to fight. And that’s precisely why his people adore him. That’s why they’ll continue to support and defend him. They want to be like him: not forced to back down, even when they are wrong.Trump intuitively understands this, so he continuously feeds the idea that he’s their proxy in the ideological war. “They’re not coming after me,” he said in the same video, “they’re coming after you. I’m just standing in their way, and I always will stand in their way.”Republican officials and strategists who want to remain Republican officials and strategists know this, too. So most either join Trump’s condemnation of the prosecutors or fall silent.Democrats also know this, and it worries them.But ultimately, they can’t let that matter. There’s no world in which Trump’s supporters will accept it if he’s punished. Trying to find a point of consensus with them when it comes to Trump is a fool’s errand. They will get mad. Let them.Republicans will accuse prosecutors of partisanship and overreach. Let them.Trump will scream like a baby. Let him.We’re at a point in the nation’s history where we are called to endure what I call the inconvenience of the necessary, a point at which something is morally right — and morally unavoidable — but the political timing is problematic.We’ve faced these moments before, and too often we’ve eschewed the moral position for the political one — from allowing Reconstruction to fail and allowing Jim Crow to rise, to delaying acknowledgment of LGBTQ rights, to the about-face on police reform in the face of a public panic about crime.Moving forward, unapologetically and righteously, with the prosecution of Trump is another test that our country faces and another chance our country has to make the right — or wrong — choice.History is always watching and always recording.Trump will not be remembered well. He will, I believe, be a marker of one of the times the country came closest to losing itself. The question remaining to be answered is how the rest of us will be remembered.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

From time to time I’ll look up a date just to see if anything interesting happened on that day in history.