At Long Last, the Rules Apply to Donald Trump

One of the first columns I ever wrote about Donald Trump appeared in the Daily Beast, where I worked at the time, in the summer of 2015. As I recall, it was not long after Trump said of John McCain that he preferred heroes who weren’t captured. I sized up the situation—a draft dodger making a breathtakingly ugly and arrogant statement about a man who spent nearly six years in brutal captivity—and argued (correctly) that the McCain comment would not finish him off but predicted (quite incorrectly) that he would fade from the scene in time.

Obviously, I underestimated three things. First, the depth of people’s anger at the establishment, and Trump’s relentlessly cynical hunger to tap into and feed it. Second, the appalling weakness of leading mainstream Republicans, who from Reince Priebus (apologies for reminding you that he exists) on down will be remembered in history for their cowardice and pusillanimity. And third—ah, the third one. I didn’t understand how someone like Trump could create his own reality and get so many people to believe it.

I didn’t see that coming because no one had ever done what Trump was doing in American politics before. No one had lied so consistently and flamboyantly and obviously. No one running for America’s highest office had ever been so openly racist (okay, not “ever,” but in at least 60 years or so). No one had said such outrageous things about people like McCain. I told myself: There’s just no way this can work.

But it worked. One can overstate, and many pundits do, the extent to which it worked. He barely won in 2016. He lost in 2020. His approval numbers have always been lousy: Trump has been president for a total of 57 months, and in all that time, he’s almost never been north of 50 percent. His party got whupped in 2018 and is apparently about to get whupped again. But he came back and won in 2024, and he’s gotten away with crimes that should have gotten him banished from politics and landed him in prison three or four times. The normal rules—the ones that you and I play by—have never applied to him.

But finally, it looks like they’re going to apply Tuesday.

Finally, it looks like you can’t wreck the economy and tell people it’s the greatest economy in the history of the country.

Finally, it looks like you can’t impose a boatload of tariffs that crush farmers and tell farmers they’ve never had it so good.

Finally, it looks like you can’t start a war and lose it and try to tell people the other country actually started it and say over and over that you won it.

Finally, it looks like you can’t support something that 80 percent of the American people oppose—the greased-lightning construction of hundreds of data centers—and call that 80 percent ignorant and backward.

Finally, it looks like you can’t hire thousands of masked goons and have them gun people down in the streets and call it patriotism.

Finally, it looks like you can’t make billions off the presidency and expect people not to notice.

Finally, it looks like you can’t desecrate the White House, ruin the Reflecting Pool, and destroy one of the country’s most beloved cultural institutions, all in flagrant violation of settled rules and/or laws, and think people will be okay with that.

Finally, it looks like you can’t put the world’s oldest democracy on the side of the world’s most malevolent authoritarian dictator who invaded a democratic neighbor and tell people it’s the right thing for the United States of America to do.

Finally, it looks like you can’t order the clearly vengeance-driven prosecutions of people you don’t like and call it justice.

And finally, it looks like you can’t hire a bunch of incompetents and conspiracy theorists to run the federal government and think that people won’t eventually realize that they’re incompetent and conspiratorial.

We don’t know for sure yet, obviously. We could be surprised. Nervous liberals—now there’s a redundant phrase!—worry that the polls are under-counting Trump loyalists, or that MAGA-ites are intentionally not answering polls as part of a vast, elaborate plan to shock the world Wednesday morning. These things could be true. I have no idea.

It could also be true that in some races, either the desperate Republican attacks or the occasional Democratic own-goal will yield some surprises. Maybe just enough Texans will agree with Ted Cruz that James Talarico believes God is gay, or whatever his latest effluence is. Maybe just enough Michiganders have been terrified into thinking they can’t put a guy who was a captain of his high-school football team—sorry, I mean a scary Muslim—in the United States Senate. Maybe doubts have been raised in just enough Alaskans’ minds about Mary Peltola’s judgment and honesty. In Minnesota, maybe just enough voters could decide the fraud case that ended Governor Tim Walz’s re-election plans are a bigger violation of the public trust than ICE’s bloodletting.

Maybe all those things and more. But as I write on this Sunday before the voting, it doesn’t feel like it. Ken Paxton canceled a rally over the weekend. Kansas looks like it’s leaning Democratic. Haley Stevens’s act of betrayal looks desperate, petty, and personal. The House seems to be a done deal for sure. One forecaster released its final assessments of House, Senate, and gubernatorial races over the weekend. It changed a total of 64 ratings—63 of them in favor of the Democrats.

If those ratings and all the others are right, it’s going to be a big Democratic night. But actually, I think it’s more accurate to put it the other way. It’s going to be a resounding repudiation of Trump and Trumpism. Because let’s be honest—it’s not as if the American people are in love with the Democrats. And there’s no good reason they should be. If they are given congressional power, Democrats are going to have to earn the public’s respect by trying to do real things about the cost of living and by being relentless in their pursuit not only of Trump and his minions but of the billionaires and corporations who are screwing working people into the ground every day.

So, most people won’t be voting for Democrat X. They’ll be voting against Trump. Yes, it’s mostly about the very real but rather mundane matter of gas prices. But don’t let anyone get away with saying it’s only about that. It’s about corruption and lawlessness and arrogance and, well, reality. Trump has lost the power to create it. Finally, it looks like the rules apply.