Denouement

“These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career!” Donald Trump exclaimed last week, unveiling a collection of $99 NFTs on Truth Social. “Would make a great Christmas gift.”

I’ll confess that for the first time, I felt something like pity for the former president. The NFTs, which he called a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT,” were widely and mercilessly lampooned. The cards featured poorly Photoshopped images of Trump dressed as, among other things, a sheriff in a white trench coat, a shotgun-wielding pheasant hunter, an astronaut, a fighter pilot and a race car driver. In some cases, his neck and head were out of proportion to the torso upon which they were placed. And not on purpose. The NFTs doubled as raffle tickets for opportunities to interact with Trump, virtually and in person.

The cards were a grift, sure, but whether he realized it or not, the reputational cost far outweighed the monetary gain. The NFTs sold out quickly, just as he said they would, but the blowback was equally swift and generally revolved around the idea that Trump is “losing the plot,” as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump put it.

Trump’s heard that before. In fact, an article published by The Atlantic on May 12, 2020, carried the title “Trump Has Lost The Plot.” But that piece was about his failures during the pandemic and penchant for regaling a nation dying from a then mysterious disease with tales of political victimhood. Arguably, those talking points (“deep state” conspiracies and so on) still served a purpose. Similarly, Trump’s nascent 2024 White House bid may be a gambit designed to inoculate himself against prosecution.

By contrast, it was difficult to explain Trump’s digital trading cards by reference to any “three-dimensional chess.” They were, simply put, the pitiable culmination of a life spent indulging a boundless, narcissistic delirium. Even for a famously shameless self-promoter, the stunt stood out as exceptionally ridiculous and, I’d argue, symbolized the end of Trump as a phenomenon.

It’s hard to fathom the sort of denial and audacity it took for Trump to portray himself artistically as the GOP’s heroic, laser-eyed savior just a month removed from a midterm election in which Republicans woefully underperformed expectations due almost solely to losses incurred by Trump-backed candidates. He’s well and truly lost the plot. Trump is now completely untethered from anything that even approximates reality. Suddenly, it’s difficult to imagine him winning the nomination, regardless of what betting odds suggest, and it’s even harder to imagine Trump winning a general election, even against an 82-year-old Joe Biden.

But just in case, the US may bring criminal charges against him, as recommended by the January 6th panel this week. Those charges could include, according to the panel, conspiracy to defraud the United States and inciting or assisting an insurrection. The panel is now sharing evidence with federal prosecutors and cooperating with Special Counsel Jack Smith.

As discussed here at some length earlier this month, there has to be a threshold beyond which common sense compels rational people to take the steps necessary to avert existentially bad outcomes, even when those steps are seen as dangerous in themselves. As I wrote in the linked article, the balance of evidence, as well as his own words and actions, suggest Trump may be an ongoing threat to democracy and/or to national security.

The vast majority of Americans including, I’d argue, some of the undereducated voters who support Trump, understand that, even if millions would still happily install him in the Oval Office if they could. Unfortunate as this is, scores of Americans are amenable to being governed by an autocratic Trump with the Constitution suspended or “terminat[ed],” as he explicitly suggested on Truth Social earlier this month.

The House Ways and Means Committee voted to release Trump’s tax returns this week. It was a side show, but it did underscore the notion that there’s a limit on litigation and that, eventually, Trump’s avenues for obstructing inquiries into all aspects of his life, personal and private, will close. Trump’s tax bill was $0 in 2020 and, as previously reported, it was just $750 in 2016 and 2017. His adjusted gross was negative in four of six years (figure below).

Trump paid $1.1 million in taxes over the first three years of his presidency. His core businesses reported large losses, including carryovers. The IRS, the House Committee said, didn’t audit Trump’s returns during his first two years in office, and only began auditing his filings from the years during which he was president after he left the White House.

All of this — the digital trading cards, the House panel criminal referral, the vote to release his tax returns, the new Special Counsel and the Trump Organization tax fraud conviction in New York — feels like a denouement. Trump, I’m newly confident, is for all intents and purposes finished in American politics. His decision to seek and, ultimately, to win, the presidency, cost him everything, and the price for the country was nearly as large.

Somehow, it all feels anticlimactic. Trump is almost a footnote. Even the biggest Trump news is now routinely subjugated to the latest developments in the Sam Bankman-Fried case, and on any day when Elon Musk is making headlines, the former president struggles even to land above the digital fold. Ironically, Trump is more likely to garner media attention these days for something Musk said about him or revealed about Twitter’s decision to ban him nearly two years ago, than he is for something he’s said, done or been accused of recently.

On December 17, just after 7:30 in the morning, Trump took to Truth Social to complain. “Our Country is SICK inside, very much like a person dying of Cancer,” he wrote. On that point, at least, Trump is correct.