There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him

robosmith · June 1, 2024

There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him

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In the past few days, Donald Trump has floated the idea of remaining in office for a third term, despite the Constitution’s two-term limit; sent out a social-media post touting the “unified Reich” that America will become when he wins; and repeatedly promoted a false new conspiracy theory that the F.B.I., when it raided Mar-a-Lago last year to recover classified documents that Trump is accused of illegally taking from the White House, had threatened to use lethal force to take him out. “I nearly escaped death,” he said in a fund-raising e-mail sent on Thursday morning. “Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me!” All of these outrages spurred their own news cycles of shock and disputation; Trump’s claims about the Mar-a-Lago raid even prompted the normally reticent Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to respond in a statement calling them “false” and “extremely dangerous.”

In an interview released on Tuesday, Trump, who is a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday, signalled that he was open to restrictions on Americans’ right to contraception—an inflammatory suggestion that, a few hours later, he disavowed. “I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL,” he wrote on social media. Was Trump’s gaffe the mistake of a septuagenarian who did not understand the question? Or perhaps a dog whistle to some of his far-right followers who, having won at the Supreme Court on abortion, now want the Court to strike down the 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut that first established Americans’ constitutional right to privacy?

Whatever the reason, it’s increasingly clear that Trump is having a harder and harder time articulating coherent thoughts these days—a development that is on full display in his daily rants to reporters upon entering and leaving the New York courthouse where, since April, he has been on trial on criminal charges of falsifying business records to cover up a pre-election hush-money payment to a former adult-film star. On Tuesday, Trump’s defense team rested their case without calling him to the stand, despite Trump blustering for weeks that he wanted to testify on his own behalf. Here was how he explained that decision:

As soon as next week, the jury in the New York case may render a verdict; if Trump is found guilty, he would be the first major-party nominee in American history to carry the label of “convicted felon” to the polls in November.

That Republicans have made their peace with their leader’s alternately reckless and incoherent big mouth is both old news and perhaps the most important news of the 2024 campaign. On Wednesday, Nikki Haley announced that she would be voting for Trump for President. Just a few months ago, Haley was the last remaining Republican holdout against Trump in the G.O.P. primaries, and, even when she bowed to the inevitable electoral math and dropped out of the race, she refused to endorse him. Her criticism of Trump on the campaign trail leaned heavily into his reckless statements, volatile behavior, and questionable psychological state. Trump, she said, was “diminished,” “unstable,” even “unhinged.”

Is Trump more hinged now than he was in February? Haley did not try to make that case. Instead, she reverted to what has become the Republican template for such flip-flops in this election cycle—see also: William Barr, Mitch McConnell, Chris Sununu—which is to all but ignore Trump while insisting that Joe Biden has been such a “catastrophe” in the White House that it justifies voting for a man who nicknamed her Birdbrain and whose campaign once called her a “wailing loser hellbent on an alternative reality.” Some of the coverage insisted on pointing out that Haley, though she said she would vote for him, was still not endorsing Trump—a contortion that immediately brought to mind Bill Clinton’s famous response to the question of whether he had sex with an intern: “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”