Donald Trump just bit off more than he can chew
Even as Donald Trump keeps getting overturned in court and his team of thugs keeps making embarrassing messes on the national stage, Trump has tried to portray himself as being too powerful to stop. He’s announced that he doesn’t have to follow court rulings. He’s announced that nothing is illegal if you’re doing it to ‘save your country.’ His goal, pretty transparently, is to demotivate everyone into giving up the fight against him. After all, if you convince yourself you can’t get anywhere by fighting back, you won’t bother fighting back.
To that end, yesterday Trump (or whoever might be ghostwriting for him on social media) referred to himself as “the King.” This is obviously his way of saying “don’t bother fighting me, I’m omnipotent.” It’s aimed at psyching you out. But I think Trump just made a mistake.
Right now the hardest aspect of our fight is that so many mainstream Americans in the middle won’t want to believe what we’re saying about Trump. They don’t want to believe the situation is as dire as it is, or that he’s as psychotically out of control as he is. After all, these are the people who don’t want to have to pick a side in politics, so of course they don’t want to believe there’s a need to pick a side. Anything we warn them about regarding Trump, they’ll be inclined to want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But when our argument is that Trump wants to be the King, and then he goes and publicly refers to himself as the King, benefit of the doubt goes out the window. We no longer need the people in the middle to take our word for it; they can take Trump’s word for it. He literally just declared himself King. This kind of on-the-nose insanity makes it a lot easier for the people in the middle to 1) understand that this is a crisis and it’s time to pick a side, and 2) pick our side.
More to the point, Trump’s “King” reference gives us an easy one-word argument to make against him. Already, New York Governor Kathy Hochul – who up to now has been rather muted – seized upon the “King” thing during a press conference in the New York subway. She announced that she’s fighting Trump in court over congestion pricing, and that the city will keep it intact while the battle plays out. Hochul aptly made her argument by stating that Trump is not a King.
Hochul is finally coming out swinging, and it appears the Trump “King” thing has given her an angle for doing so. We’re going to see other Democratic leaders seize upon the “King” narrative as well. Trump did us a favor by using that word. He just handed us a very easy to understand, and very convincing, narrative to use against him.
