Summer BBQ
August 12, 2022. A gathering of ten. Dinner. Wine. Talk.
Democratic businessperson:
Trump and the GOP are in big trouble. FBI search was totally justified. Trump was in possession of nuclear secrets, for god's sake. He was committing a felony.
Democratic lawyer:
Trump and Republicans will be better than ever. He will say he had possession of those documents for four years, so there was no harm in him having them. He will say it's a Democratic witch hunt. He will say they are coming for all Americans next.
It is good to get back to normal.
We were eating, drinking, and talking politics. It is summer. We were outside. We grilled meat. No masks. No talk of COVID. We were part of something humans have been doing since the dawn of time. It felt great.
The FBI search at Mar-a-Lago put Trump back in the spotlight. For a few days Biden had been the story, and it looked good for him.
***He was a dealmaker who resolved things with Manchin and Sinema, and Democrats passed legislation. It supposedly reduced inflation. It did something environmental. It let Medicare negotiate drug prices, at long last. It appropriated money so the IRS could reduce tax cheating by the wealthy. It made corporations pay a minimum tax. No one understood any of the provisions but it all sounded good to Democrats.
***Unemployment is down.
***Inflation maybe slowed.
***Gasoline prices are down.
***There is voter backlash against the red-state abortion laws.
It was Biden's moment, but it is over. The FBI handed the spotlight back to Trump.
Midterm elections are traditionally a referendum on the president. American consumers and voters worried about inflation and thought the economy was bad. Biden and Democrats were likely to lose badly. Then, a change. The Supreme Court took center stage, reversing Roe and laying hints that gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, and a total nationwide ban on abortion might be on the national agenda. Red state legislatures showed this wasn't an idle threat. This made the 2022 election a referendum on runaway red state MAGA extremism. Now Republicans might pay the price.
Then the FBI search. Trump and the GOP seized the narrative. They immediately made the story a choice over whether the tyrant thugs at the FBI were doing it out of Deep State instinct to preserve its own corrupt secrets, or whether the FBI thugs were carrying out the bidding of Biden.
In the after-dinner conversation I sided with the lawyer. Trump will ignore the crimes, and say "So, what!" proudly and shamelessly. I argued that the search managed to do the near impossible: Make Trump look like a victim. That is how he is selling it, and he sells louder and harder than the proper and reserved Attorney General. This elevates Trump and crowds out DeSantis and the other aspirants.
That is not the end of the story, though. All is not lost for Democrats. Biden is old, but he is not as weak as people thought. Maybe he becomes a nonentity, rather than a problem. Trump crowds out the nonentity Biden, too. Trump is interesting. He makes news. Trump is chaos, strife, and trouble. He is also exhausting.
What Americans are experiencing in real time is the setup for a mid-term referendum on Trump. The mid-term election won't be about inflation or Afghanistan or whether Biden is too old. It will be about Trump because Trump insists on it. GOP leaders could band together and end the Trump era, but they don't. Trump-endorsed candidates are on enough ballots to make the specter of Trump part of the GOP brand everywhere. Trump is spreading his scent.
Republicans will suffer for keeping Trump in place and letting this be a referendum on Trump. Senior GOP leaders and people close to the former president could take charge and lance the boil, but until then it is all about Trump. Trump won't be removed by the law. Only by voters.