Trump's superpower is plausible deniability

How a floundering clown normalized treachery and the prospect of an American dictator

I get it. Donald Trump still feels like a joke, a clown, an escaped puppet from Genesis’ Land of Confusion video, especially to those old enough to get that Mesozoic reference.

So you might be able to laugh it off when he, for the 239th time, “jokes” about ending American democracy.

I don’t have that luxury—not after completing the most recent episode of Ball of Thread. Listening to Marcy Wheeler explain how Donald Trump turned Republicans against the rule of law and brought us to the brink of fascism has convinced me of something bleak. Anything Donald Trump sticks to could work, especially when no one is willing to stop him.

In case you missed the last eight years:

Trump, with the help of amoral and soulless allies, evaded any lasting consequences for his obvious and growing conspiracy with Vladimir Putin, which he fired his campaign manager to hide in 2016 and his National Security Advisor for the same reason in 2017 and his Attorney General for the same reason in 2018.

He has now normalized that abominable conspiracy to the point the press refuses to even cover it as the moral outrage and treachery that it remains.

We now all are expected to just graciously accept that the Republican nominee for president is not only holding an American reporter hostage with Putin, but he is also essentially promising to pull America out of NATO and surrender Ukraine to a despot who has sent brutal hordes to rape and pillage that nation for no reason other than the pleasure of his power.

And Trump did it by conjuring up the repetition of two words: “dossier” and “collusion.”

Please listen to the episode if you want to know what I mean.

You could say that repetition is Donald Trump’s superpower. And it’s definitely a strength. Anyone could do it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could do it! But we just don't. And I think you get why.

Trump's fearlessness in repeating the same drab, ill shit over and over makes it far more persuasive and polarizes his enemies into thinking he’s flailing. You could say that’s part of his superpower of shamelessness, as Chris Hayes long has.

But there’s an even more potent and invidious power that has brought this vile freak within a coin flip of ending American democracy while dooming the planet to boil and America to endless domination by the fundie freaks on the Supreme Court.

And it’s a power that almost no one talks about, which makes it even more powerful.

Someone who does talk about it is Ian Haney López, who wrote the book Dog Whistle Politics, where I learned about this strategy that has propelled Republicans into generations of political success. It’s called “plausible deniability,” which I think most people think of or discuss as “normalization.”

It’s the cloaking mechanism that makes all of Trump’s strategic division work, including the birther’s one real innovation in dog-whistling: the “triple move” that Haney López calls “racist theater.”

Here’s what Haney López told me recently:

So dog whistle politics in the sixties, seventies, eighties, it was also regarded as morally suspect as tainted as cynical. And so a lot of the strategy behind dog whistling politicians--I think about Ronald Reagan talking about welfare queens and whatnot--part of the strategy was to pretend that they weren't doing that at all and to really push back against the press or any sort of suggestion that they were. But that has shifted under Trump.

What Trump understands is that if he can provoke the press, provoke the Democrats into calling him a racist, that actually helps him because he is telling a story to his base in which they are not racist, they are acting out of high principle, they're trying to defend country and community and family. But one of the core claims that's being made on the right is that demands for racial justice demands for integration demands for affirmative action demands for diversity, equity, inclusion, that those aren't actually animated by a sense of justice, but rather they're motivated by a sense of revenge and a sense of hatred of white people.

And in this telling the right is constantly saying to white voters, "People are racist against you. They blame you for things that you weren't responsible for. And they also think that you're racist just because you're white and that's racism against you."

In that context, Trump and J. D. Vance understand that there's this kind of complicated triple move that they can make. They can say something outrageous: “It's an invasion. They're poisoning the blood of the country.” That's move number one. Move number two, wait for people on the left to say, "Hey, invasion and caravan and blood of the nation. That's racist language.” And then they respond to that by saying, “I never mentioned race. I was just talking about immigrants. I was just talking about protecting our country and securing our border.” That's move number two. “I didn't, no racism here, nothing to see here.” And then comes move number three. Then they go on to say, “But, hey, wait a minute. You just accused me of racism. And that's the real racism. You're racist against me by thinking that I'm a racist, even though I'm just trying to protect the borders. And you're not only racist against me, you're racist against all my supporters.”

So when this happens:

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” he said at The Believers’ Summit, an event hosted by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action, in West Palm Beach, Fla. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

It triggers what we now have to call “Fascist Theater” in which the plausible deniability that’s gained from Trump’s constant blather, digressions, and weirdness serves him.

You get even his “critics” defending him:

You don’t need to guess if Donald Trump wants to be a dictator!

Forget anything he’s ever said; he got several people killed, TRYING TO MAKE HIMSELF A DICTATOR.

And then, using plausible deniability generated from soulless and power-hungry allies, he got the Supreme Court, which her personally packed, to give him effective immunity for the crime of trying to end American democracy.

The time to take Donald Trump seriously has long passed; it’s heading toward middle school. He is a threat to everything you love. He wears makeup and a wig like a clown, but the clownishness itself is part of the plausible deniability. Even his fiercest critics feed that power by assuming there must be some harmless explanation for his laser focus on dividing and conquering America. There’s not.

You’re just part of the normalization of this lunacy.

If we don’t see that, we’re just extras in the spectacle that threatens everything we love.