How Trump’s Getting Away With Being So Trump

medium118739230Trump is demonstrating just how much America has changed over the past eight years, and Democrats don’t know what to do about it. The first time Trump entered the Oval Office back in 2017, a combination of people power, an independent judiciary, and the presence of Republican establishment “adults in the room” prevented the demagogic president from fulfilling his campaign promises to block Muslims’ entry into the country and to repeal Obama-era healthcare programmes. This time around, an unelected billionaire is cutting congressionally approved foreign aid and anti-disinformation programmes while a collection of unqualified political appointees work to degrade institutions, including Pentagon, FBI and department of health and human services.Trump’s address on Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress contained his typical mixture of untruths, half-truths and convenient truths. He claimed that the first month of his second term was the most successful since the days of George Washington, he repeated the lie about US support for Ukraine totalling $350bn (the real figure is barely over $100bn), and he cited several real-life examples of illegal immigrants committing heinous acts while ignoring the fact that many of his small- and medium-sized business owner supporters depend on the labour of workers who crossed the Mexican border without the necessary documentation.As usual, Trump did not offer dispassionate arguments. He highlighted the facts that he had signed an executive order making English “the official language of the United States of America”, that he had “renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America”, that he had “ended the tyranny of diversity, equality”, and that he had made it “the official policy of the United States govt that there are only two genders: male and female”. It was theatre, but the past three US presidential elections have offered a choice between outrage and substance, and Trump has won two of them.It’s still not clear what Democrats can or should do to fight back. The most forceful response Trump’s opposition could muster to the presidential address either came from Texas Congressman Al Green, who seemed to deliberately get himself ejected from the hall, or else it came from the handful of Democratic lawmakers who brought along signs reading “False”, which they waved whenever Trump said something even more inaccurate than usual. Neither tactic seemed to work.The Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s speech, delivered by newly sworn-in Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan, was a sensible, intellectually coherent argument that Trump is taking actions that will benefit his “billionaire friends” while materially harming the tens of millions of American voters who participated in last Nov’s election — regardless of which candidate they supported. The problem is, the past two elections out of three, my neighbours have opted for Trump.An old axiom advises belligerents against bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it’s not clear exactly what sort of fight Trump is waging, nor what approach Democrats ought to take in order to prevent his movement from transferring its power to the very smart, almost supernaturally cynical JD Vance in 2028. Trump’s nearly two-hour speech was not boring, but it was also not realistic. His first special guest in the audience was a female volleyball player who, according to the president, had suffered a traumatic brain injury after a male player spiked a ball that hit her in the head. However, as CNN political analyst Van Jones noted, “There are more measles cases ripping through Texas than there are transgender athletes in the entire country.”American politicians have always spun the truth, but what is happening today is something fundamentally different: one party remains largely rooted in the world as it is, while the other conjures up an alternative reality in which its rule has brought about “golden age” despite its opponents’ purported efforts to plunge the country into a dystopia of “diversity, equity and inclusion”.My wife is still a Russian citizen, and as we watched Republican after Republican come on Fox News after Trump’s speech to compete over who could heap the most praise on the president, her reaction was simple: “Yours are just as bad as ours are.” Almost on cue, Republican Senator from Texas Ted Cruz came on the air. “They are a command and control authoritarian party,” Cruz said, speaking of Democrats.In 2016, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife and hinted that his father had been complicit in the assassination of John F Kennedy. Back then, Trump was referring to Cruz as “lying Ted”, and to the current secretary of state as “little Marco”. Back then, Vance was comparing Trump to Hitler, and Elon Musk was telling journalists that Trump “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well” on the country.Over the past eight years, something changed. And there’s no indication that Democrats have any better idea of how to resist it than they did back then. In the meantime, Trump has only gotten better at his demagogic game. “I was saved by God to make America great again, I really believe that,” America’s billionaire president said from the podium. I laughed, even though none of it is funny.The writer contributes to Newsweek and other American news outlets