The best way to ascertain if a place has become a banana republic is not to look at the news headlines, rather you should focus on what doesn’t make the headlines. Consider:
1. The leading candidate for a party’s presidential nomination is arrested for stealing secret documents, and refusing to turn them over when asked.
2. He publicly denies they were classified, suggesting that he had declassified the documents.
3. According to that leftist rag the National Review, he then goes on Fox News and admits that the documents were in fact classified. He also admits that he refused to turn them over when asked. In other words, he admits that the federal charges are . . . true.
And yet this bombshell story didn’t even make the front page of the NYT. (Where the headline reported that Hunter Biden admitted guilt in a tax case.) That’s how you spot a banana republic.
To be clear, I don’t think Trump would be convicted by a Florida jury if he shot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Calle Ocho. Nor would he lose a single vote in the GOP primary. Don’t worry Trumpistas, your guy is safe. Don’t waste your time defending him in the comment section—I agree that he will be found innocent by jurors and voters.
But here’s what I find so amusing. Everyone who tries to help Trump gets screwed. Political allies like Pence are called traitors. His lawyers and campaign aides get sent to jail. And now he turns on his voters. In thousands of bars across America, Trumpistas have insisted that Trump had declassified the documents, because he told them so. And now he stabs his supporters in the back by admitting the documents were not declassified.
When I told you back in 2016 that America had become a banana republic, you thought I was hysterical. When I told you the day after the election that Trump would be back you told me he was finished. Now even sober news outlets like The Economist are coming around to my view:
All of which means that you should take seriously the possibility that America’s next president will be someone who would divide the West and delight Vladimir Putin; who accepts the results of elections only if he wins; who calls the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6th 2021 martyrs and wants to pardon them; who has proposed defaulting on the national debt to spite Mr Biden; and who is under multiple investigations for breaking criminal law, to add to his civil-law rap sheet for sexual assault.
The next 18 months will be great entertainment. Only one thing could make it even crazier—Trump running against this guy.
PS. This FT essay by Janan Ganesh (my favorite columnist) is about Boris Johnson, but it’s one of the best explanations of Trumpism that I’ve read:
Back in 2016, some of us had to sit through sermons about the need to “listen” to “legitimate grievances” against “broken capitalism”. Perhaps, at one stage, populism really was a howl for a fairer economy. That passed a while ago. It is now a tribalist game.
In retrospect, Johnson and Trump should never have been bunched with Putin and Erdoğan under the “strongman” tag. They converge on tactics — rule-breaking, institutional subversion — but the difference in substance is unbridgeable. The eastern demagogues are nationalists. If the western ones have an -ism, it is nihilism.
And what a mercy that is. Better a chancer than a zealot. Better Johnson than Orbán. Better, in the end, politics as team sport than politics as something all too thoughtful.
Read the whole thing.