Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon just unwittingly gave away why it’s all over for Donald Trump
If you’re a washed-up villain who’s out of power, and you’re trying to keep yourself relevant, you do it by talking about all the evil things you’ll do once you’re back in power. It evokes such a panicked response in people, they start obsessively and fearfully talking about how awful it’ll be when you’re back in power. And now you’ve tricked your own haters into doing your bidding for you, because you’ve got them painting your return to power as inevitable. And that alone keeps you relevant in the conversation even if you’re, for instance, toxically unpopular and senile and on your way to prison.
This is precisely why Donald Trump’s people are putting it out there this week that if he ever gets back into power, they’ll essentially put undocumented immigrants into concentration camps. It’s horrific and it needs to be denounced. But we also have to be smart enough to understand how Team Trump is trying to play us by putting this out there. Their sole goal is to get us to go out there and talk about the possibility of Trump being back in power, so as to distract everyone else from the fact that he’s too senile and too prison-bound to make it to 2024.
And it’s working. Team Trump, through its mouthpieces like Maggie Haberman, has managed to get a New York Times article out there about Trump 2024 immigration policies that has everyone cowering to Trump. “Oh no, he’s going to get back into power and we’re doomed!” In other words, all the usual stupid, panicked, defeatist responses that right wingers are so good at baiting us into adopting.
But here’s the thing. Even so many gullible folks on our side are now doing Trump’s bidding by “sounding the alarm” about how he’s going to get back into power, this New York Times article actually reveals why it’s all over for Trump politically. He’s still relying on the extremist white supremacist policies of people like Stephen Miller, even though that went horribly for him in 2020. And Steve Bannon, who thinks he’s still on Team Trump even though they threw him overboard a long time ago, is now openly gloating over the extremist positions that Team Trump is proposing.
There is no more surefire sign that Donald Trump is 100% finished in politics than the fact that he’s still allowing extremely unpopular people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon to control his extremely unpopular messaging on things like immigration. Trump talked like this in 2016 and as a result he lost by three million votes. Then he carried out policies like this for four years, and as a result he lost in 2020 by seven million votes. Now he’s once again hyping these kinds of policies heading into 2024, and all it can possibly do is cost him even more votes.
But that’s because this isn’t about gaining votes. It’s not about winning a year from now. It’s about being 95% dead politically, and trying to find a way to keep yourself alive for another day. It’s about putting terribly unpopular positions out there, knowing it’ll cost you votes on election day, in a desperate attempt at keeping yourself relevant for another week.
If Trump wanted to have any faint chance at viability in 2024 at all, step one would be to ditch unpopular extremists like Miller and Bannon, and at least pretend to move toward the more popular middle on these issues. But this isn’t about 2024. Trump is going to prison. He’s not going to make it to 2024 anyway. This is about Trump trying to find a way to remain in the 2024 conversation here in 2023, when his criminal trials and his senility both threaten to finish off his viability before we even get to the election.
