The Outlaw President Goes Straight

In the March edition of First Things, Matthew Schmitz penned a provocative argument about (whom else?) Donald Trump. Mind, it’s been over a decade since the developer-cum-tabloidee-cum-nationalist pol swallowed our attention span in one insatiable gulp. What were initially “the Trump years” are fast gelling into “the Trump Age.” Shame we won’t be gifted a Schlesinger volume with gold-gilt title.

Despite enough Trumpinput to overload human consciousness, Schmitz postulates a novel argument: the President didn’t resoundingly win re-election based on much-discussed factors like Democratic incompetence, inflation, loose border enforcement, woke fads, or a general exhaustion with a doddy leader who required a squatty potty to drop dung. The warmed-over excuses bandied about on CNN didn’t apply. The persuasion was personal. Trump scrounged together a loose coterie of resentful toilers, middle-class stiffs, crypto scammers, evangelicals, screaming podcasters, stall snorters, and slouching duffers who don’t think children should have the legal right to lop off body parts.

But he also courted the infamous American underclass, the renegade, the outlier, the misfit, the scumbag, whom Matthew Waler termed the “barstool conservative.” What Trump offered was “outlaw appeal.” His arrest and mugshot. His scrape with death. His burn-the-bastards rhetoric. Put a Fender in his paws and Trump was Merle Haggard on the hustings.

All that underdog coup energy of November 5, 2024, is now dissipated. Trump’s sunk from Waylon Jennings to Milli Vanilli. He’s become the most loathed of canvas creatures: a generic Republican. The President spent a once-in-a-lifetime political surplus on feeding more sand into the war machine. Prior to the Iran War, which is the U.S.’s seventh MidEast foray this century, Vice President Vance warned that sending Uncle Sam on another desert défilé “could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition.”

So the Hillbilly Prophecy came to pass. A couple of irate X accounts tottering from MAGAbelching to Blueskyburping don’t reveal the drop in confidence. Polls paint the darkening portrait. The President’s approval rating is at a new nadir. “No new wars” was political flimflam, no better than Obama’s promise of keeping your physician. In fact, most of Trump’s strut-smashing pitch was a pantomime. He had no intention of draining the swamp, just caging the Left’s woodland fauna with his own crony menagerie.

The failure to fully disclose the Epstein Files was the first let-down. Scratch that. Was a major gut-punch, followed by a groin-kick, which went into a suplex. The entire disclosure rigmarole was an assault on decency, particularly AG Pam Bondi’s vacuous theatrics for scumsucking viralists.

Trump tossed his lot in with the decadent class, which was a shivving enough. But igniting a new war in a region America tired of back in 2006? George W. Bush seldom appears in public for a reason, and it isn’t because he’s locked in his atelier striving to be the next Raphael. Trump really was convinced, like Tobias Fünke, that while other presidents buried too many scattershot bodies under the cruel Levantine sun, he could be different. How he envisioned the war coursing lies only within his pale-pouffed head. Maybe the idea of a five-star, 40-story luxury resort rising out of the Cradle of Civilization, his surname crowning its peak, offering everything from exquisite dining to an Olympic-sized swimming pool to an all-day spa, was too tantalizing. Cry ‘DEAL!’ and let slip the Witkoffs of war!

Now we’ve reached the worst part of any conflict: a nervous stalemate paired with futile “discussions.” A long-dozen servicemen have been killed, and for what? High Exxon prices? Narrowed maritime commerce? The fiery death of an aged figurehead? Fox News highlight reels? The Iranian military has been effectively glassed, yet the country still keeps a martial grip on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the global petro supply chuffs every day. Nobody, other than the droolingest MAGA sycophants, is begging the President to stop all the winning. God still reserves a special providence for the United States of America, but the even Almighty may be tiring of our neocon hubris.

Democrats understandably whet their teeth for the November midterms. The party’s usual cast of petty mediocres are motoring around the country in prep for ‘28, convinced technocratic liberalism is renascent. Should they doubt their fortune? Only six years ago did Americans tire of populism’s jumpy, askew antics, opting for a devoid, if gentle, manager far over the hill. A redux seems determinative.

Yet another managerial neoliberal jag will hardly quiet the country’s restless and jaded attitude. The Joe Rogans, Theo Vons, Dave Portnoys, and Shane Gillises aren’t going to settle for a slickback gladhander like Gavin Newsom, or a boring schoolmarm like Amy Klobuchar, or a checkbox dress-form like Kamala Harris. They’ll keep an eye out for another angry rattler, another objector to the depleted status quo, a steel-spined man unbeholden to moneyed interests who regard patriotism as rising gross domestic product.

They wait not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—real America-Firster.