How Trump Sabotaged His Own Apotheosis

The six days that carried Donald Trump from the stage in Butler, Pa., to the rostrum at the Republican National Convention seemed at times like the buildup to a moment of total political domination, an apotheosis for the Republican nominee and confusion and defeat for his opponents.

The hairbreadth survival of the attempted assassination. The image of Trump rising, alive and fighting and undaunted, under the red, white and blue. The cohesive and enthusiastic Republican convention that followed, complete with the anointing of a youthful vice president and heir apparent, all in contrast to the spectacle of a Democratic Party trying desperately to jettison its senescent standard-bearer. The promises of a conciliatory and unifying acceptance speech, finally delivering the “presidential” Trump that Republicans have strained to see these last eight years.

For the first nearly 20 minutes of the speech, as Trump walked the audience through the experience of surviving an assassin’s bullet, the apotheosis seemed to be on track. It was, of course, a strange and digressive narrative — the disquisition on the blood vessels in the human ear, for instance — but it was transfixing television, Trump the showman transmuting his own mortality into tremendous content. Who could stand against this? Not Joe Biden, surely; not Kamala Harris, either.

And then it all collapsed — into shapelessness and tedium, into a version of the rally speech that was cut short a week ago, into a rambling exercise in fan service, reassuring the truest Trumpists that their guy was still in there, but reminding everyone else why Trump has never commanded actual majorities, never fully seized the political opportunities that his strange gifts and good fortune keep offering to him.

The speech’s longueurs on their own were not gravely politically damaging. I agree with Bill Kristol, no great Trump apologist, that Trump “came across as more self-indulgent than scary, more boring than terrifying, more undisciplined than dangerous.” It was not a speech that gave ammunition to liberals warning about a Trumpian dictatorship or a radical right-wing lurch.

But it was an incredible waste of a political opportunity, a breath of hope for desperate Democrats, and a reminder of the ways that having Trump as a dominant figure keeps American politics in a state of unsettlement, because whenever he isn’t undermining the establishment, he’ll quickly get busy undermining himself.