One of Donald Trump’s greatest strengths is his ability to repeat himself endlessly. It takes some doing. At 9 p.m. tonight, he says, he’ll give the world a big primetime showstopper announcement. It’s expected that he will reveal something about foreign influence or operations in “the stolen election” of 2020.
Escalate, threaten, befuddle, try to find an off-ramp on more agreeable terms, and if necessary bore the enemy into submission
We don’t know exactly what, but we can be sure Trump will reiterate that he actually won three presidential elections, not two, and that he’ll use this stunt to push The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act. That’s currently his pet obsession. And Trump just keeps going until he gets what he wants.
But it’s all becoming quite boring. The public is inured to his surprises, even when they are shocks. Apathy has set in.
In the Donald’s first term, Democrats successfully latched on to the term “Trump fatigue” to describe how voters felt about his endless and often social-media-led drama. In his second term, that fatigue risks turning into exhaustion.
We are living through the Trump monotony – and everything seems to be on a loop.
He has restarted the war with Iran, which in any other time would be major news, and it’s certainly meaningful if you happen to have been on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Bahrain this week.
But now, after the apocalyptic Truth Socials over Easter, the incendiary rhetoric, the bombs and missiles, and even the possibility of an imminent global economic crisis, the public doesn’t seem to be engaged.
He stops the blockade, he starts the blockade. He announces a new 20 percent Hormuz Strait toll to be paid to the US, then drops it the next day and goes back to talking about trade deals.
It’s the same playbook as the worldwide tariffs last year, and in fact we see it in everything Trump does. Escalate, threaten, befuddle, try to find an off-ramp on more agreeable terms, and if necessary bore the enemy into submission.
Everything about Trump has been said a million times, including the point that he thinks of his presidency as a reality TV series. But the point about reality television is that it is actually quite dull, and the viewer usually gets bored and changes the channel.
Trump’s story is so extraordinary – his political success so improbable and mesmerizing – that it defies sense to suggest it has now turned dull. Perhaps he will astound us all tonight with some truly jaw-dropping allegation or plotline. Maybe he’ll declare a land war on Iran in the coming days, too, just to show he can.
But we have been saturated with blockbuster Trump news for so long that it’s hard to sense if anything is a groundbreaking development anymore. And the people are switching off.
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