Staying Loud
I am here on the day after the indictment of Donald Trump on 37 federal criminal counts ranging from conspiracy to obstruct justice (one of Trump’s specialities) to willful retention of national defense information (not to mention sharing national defense secrets to unauthorized persons). Meanwhile a grand jury in Washington D.C. is hearing testimony from two fake electors from Nevada, which is part of the ongoing case by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith to bring Trump to justice over inciting the January 6th attack on the capital and the related attempts across the country through a centrally coordinated conspiracy involving people like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman (and perhaps Ginni Thomas) to overthrow a valid and legal presidential election. Under any definition, that is called an attempted coup d’etat and as serious a crime as can be committed by any American. The comments on cable news today are that the arraignment in Miami of Donald Trump yesterday on that federal indictment was such a blockbuster bit of news that it drowned out all the advances underway on the other federal criminal investigation for which those Nevada fake electors were subpoenaed, the steady progress in the Fulton County Georgia criminal investigation about Trump and his acolytes interfering with the Georgia election results from 2020, and even the forward progress in the new E. Jean Carrol civil suit against Trump for ongoing defamation. Of course let’s not forget the existing criminal indictment against Trump in the Manhattan District Attorney’s case about illegal hush money payments and the ongoing civil case by the New York State OAG Latitia James about Trump’s civil breaches against banking and insurance concerns via his gross overstatement of his personal balance sheet through bogus valuations of over 200 property parcels. That’s an awful lot on anyone’s legal plate, even for Donald Trump.
The country is facing another sixteen months running up to the 2024 election when we will all be hearing more and more about Trump’s legal woes. The battle lines have been clearly drawn. On the one side, you have the Department of Justice backed up by a wide range of liberal and Democratic folk saying that Trump’s violations are serious and the evidence is overwhelmingly against him and that it’s about time that such an irresponsible man has to face up to the accountability we all must face for our missteps. The war cry is “Long live the rule of law!” The other side is split and really all over the board. It ranges from those who have had enough of Trump and are happy to state that he is hurting their conservative cause and should be set aside (think Asa Hutchinson and the more outspoken Chris Christie) through those who are trying to straddle the issue by either not saying anything (Mitch McConnell) or hedging with negative sentiment and still talk of pardon (Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott), all the way to bald-faced support by the likes of Kevin McCarthy, who is clearly on the ropes as Speaker of the House.
This morning I am hearing an expression about the Republican Party tactics for dealing with what would once have been an immediately disqualifying issue, given the unflinching and seemingly unassailable support of Trump by his shrinking but still strong base. It strikes me as a very apt expression. It is that the Republican Party must take an approach of “Staying Loud”. In history, it seems to have been ancient Sparta that invented the idea that elections should be decided not by voting, but by shouting. The people that were the loudest, won the arguments and won the elections. Aristotle talks of the issue in less than complimentary fashion, but he was somewhat powerless to stop the practice. This practice did not end with the Greeks. Coming back to U.S. history, our Congress has a history of passionate debates during the Civil War era. And then Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction engaged in shouting matches regularly with his vocal audiences. Some say that it was those loud debates that led to Johnson’s eventual impeachment. During Barack Obama’s State of the Union address a few years ago, Republicans found their voice when Joe Wilson (Republican from South Carolina) shouted “you lie” during the speech. The Republican Party was embarrassed and condemned this unruly action but his action got so much press after the speech that someone in the GOP obviously thought that this may be a more interesting tactic than not. A lot has changed in the past eight years since that moment and the biggest is the presence and inexplicable influence of Donald J. Trump on the American psyche.
Anyone who has ever met Donald Trump or has even seen him on TV knows one thing for sure about the man, and that is that he is loud. He doesn’t seem to do anything quietly or subtly. And it is hard to deny that there is a cadre of politicians that have decided that following the Trump model is the way to go. None of the legal woes that have visited the man has dissuaded his followers from thinking that he can do no wrong. Given the normal fallibility of humans and especially politicians, that is a very favorable profile that many aspire to. Who wouldn’t want to never be accountable for any missteps or conscious defalcation? Those people watch Trump and his habit of doubling down whenever he gets caught out and they see him getting away with it. He might even gain momentum from that tactic, which is almost unbelievable. The more he sinks into a legal morass that increasingly seems inescapable, the louder he shouts. It doesn’t seem to matter that what he shouts is illogical or simply false, it all just makes him stay loud.
Right now the chorus behind his loudness is still in tune, but increasingly this libretto they are using as their Trump songbook is getting worn and dog-eared. Every day that goes by, Trump loses a few more supporters to either the anti-Trump camp being led by Christie and Hutchinson or at least to the quieter middle-of-the-road crowd that prefers to straddle. Fewer and fewer members of the chorus are prepared to throw their heads back and sing his tune. The first big traitor was Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, who’s legal opinion is that Trump is “toast” based on the clarity of this indictment. Then there was Jack Kelly, Trump’s long-time Chief of Staff, who laughs about how guilty Trump is of the charges. And today, I see that Mike Pompeo, Trump’s ex-Secretary of State has swung over to the side of saying that what Trump did was not consistent with the best interests of the country and that he is guilty of the charges.
When the chorus gets smaller behind you, a good performer knows that you have to sing louder and louder to make up the difference. The only way to keep distracting the audience is to keep up the decibel level. That says to me that over the next sixteen months, Trump will be staying loud.