50 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
A REAL PATRIOT
McConnell says his
top priority as Sen-
ate minority leader
is making Barack
Obama a “one-term
president.”NO GUN CONTROL
In the wake of
Sandy Hook, Mc-
Connell filibusters
to block bipartisan
gun-control mea-
sures that would
expand background
checks and ban
assault weapons.JUDICIAL
SABOTAGE
McConnell leads a
successful effort to
block 79 Obama
nominees, com-
pared to 68 blocked
under all other pres-
idents combined
since 1967.REAL THREAT
“You’ll regret this,”
McConnell warns
when the Dems
abolish the rule
requiring a 60-vote
majority for lower-
court nominations,
to overcome GOP
obstruction.SUPREME COURT OUTRAGE
Now majority leader, McConnell blocks Su-
preme Court nominee Merrick Garland, re-
fusing even to hold hearings, arguing, with
no basis in the Constitution, Obama did not
have the right in an election year. “One of
my proudest moments,” said McConnell.COUNTRY FIRST?
McConnell ques-
tions CIA report on
Russian election
interference and
threatens political
retaliation if Obama
releases the
findings before the
election.VOTER MOTIVATION
Twenty-six percent
of Trump voters say
filling the Supreme
Court seat McCon-
nell managed to
hold open was the
most important
factor in why they
voted for Trump.E
ARLY EVENING, August, Cincin-
nati, Ohio. The Queen City’s
many bridges are sealed off, its
sky is dirty with helicopters,
and seemingly every cop for 100
miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way
along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or
more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter
U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down
the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will
get in to see Donald Trump.
“Can we just get in for a minute?” complains
a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot
of kids here.
Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America.
He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome
spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills.
If NASA traveled the country holding showings
of the first captured alien life-form, the turnout
would be similar. The pope driving monster
trucks might get this much attention.
Almost everyone in line is wearing 45 merch.
Trump is the most T-shirtable president in his-
tory, and it’s not even close. Trumpinator tees
are big (2020: I’LL BE BACK), but you’ll also
see Trump as Rambo (complete with head-
band, ammo belt, and phallic rocket-launcher),
Trump as the Punisher (a Trump pompadour
atop the famous skull), even Trump as Super-
man (pulling his suit open to reveal a giant T).
Slogans include TRUMP 2020: GRAB ’EM BY
THE PUSSY AGAIN! and the ubiquitous TRUMP
2020: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.
One merch hawker — an African American
man with a visor, wraparound sunglasses, and
spiked, dyed-white hair — is snaking through
the crowd, pushing a T-shirt: DONALD FUCKIN’
TRUMP. On the back, the shirt reads BITCH I’M
THE PRESIDENT! “Five bucks for hats, 10 for
tees!” he yells. “Bitch, I’m the president! Make
America great again!”
“Four more years!” someone in the crowd
yells back, to cheers.
Two and a half years into his presidency,
Trump has already staked a claim to a role inhistory usually reserved for hereditary mon-
archs at the end of a line of inbreeding. Histori-
ans will list him somewhere between Vlad the
Impaler and France’s Charles VI, who thought
his buttocks were made of glass.
Much of America loves its Mad King, whose
works are regularly on display. Russians under
Ivan the Terrible used to watch dogs being
hurled over the Kremlin walls when the tsar’s
mood was bad. Americans have grown used
to late-night insults tweeted at nuclear powers
from the White House bedroom.
Royal lunacy is traditionally a secret, but in
Twitter-age America it’s a shared national expe-
rience. We are all somersaulting down and out
the sanity chute. The astonishing thing about
Trump is that he wasn’t foisted on us by a coun-
cil of Bourbons, or by succession law. We elect-
ed the man, and are poised to do it again.
History will judge us harshly for this, and will
look with particular venom at Trump’s political
opponents in both parties, who over the years
were unable to win popularity contests against
a man most people would not leave alone with
a decent wristwatch, let alone their children.
Trump’s original destiny was the destruction
of the Republicans as a viable entity in modern
American politics. Then he ran a general elec-
tion like he was trying to lose, and won. Now
his legacy is the spectacular end of America’s
fragile racial consensus.
Ten years ago, an African American won the
White House in a landslide; today, the president
is somewhere between a Klansman and Jimmy
the Greek. The media legend is that Trump
succeeds because he’s a racist, but this under-
sells it. Trump is 50 years behind the worst el-
ements of the Republican Party, which spent
dec ades carefully stuffing race under bromides
like “states’ rights” and “free stuff.” The GOP
now is in an all-out bucket brigade to rescue
the dog whistle.
The rescue is failing. We’ve gone from Trump
being skeptical of Obama’s citizenship to mus-
ing about “very fine” neo-Nazis to a Twitter ver-sion of “Go back to Africa.” In Cincinnati, even
his most hardcore supporters talk about want-
ing him to shut up. “I wish,” says one fan, “he
would edit himself a little bit.”
For all this, every time Trump seems headed
for the dustbin of history, he bounces up again
off the messageless paralysis of his Demo cratic
opposition. When Trump vanquished a giant
primary field of Republicans in 2016, Demo-
crats cheered. When they lost the general elec-
tion, they acted like it was an unrelated sur-
prise event, an outrage to decency itself. They
remain ineffective as anything but a punchline
to the Trump story.
This cycle has led to more alienation and
made the 2020 election a gruesome, exhaust-
ing black comedy. This is our penance for turn-
ing the presidential campaign into a bread-and-
circus entertainment. Middle Americans got so
used to getting nothing out of elections, they
started treating national politics for what it had
become to them, a distant, pretentious sitcom.
Now they’re writing their own script. They
can’t arrange for Jake Tapper to be fed to a
shark, so they’ll settle for rolling Donald Trump
into Washington. It’s hard to see right now, it
being the end of our society and all, but the sit-
uation is not without humor, in a “What does
this button marked DETONATE do?” sort of way.
Can America shoot itself in the head a second
time? It sounds, appropriately enough, like the
premise of a Trump TV show.H
ERE’S HOW degraded the political
landscape has become: Mike Pence
looks like a vice president now. In
2016, especially after the “grab ’em
by the pussy” episode, the genuflecting Indian-
an often came across like a man appointed pub-
lic defender to a ring of child cannibals. Now,
onstage in Cincinnati, he looks stoked to be in-
troducing His Trumpness.
“And now, it’s my high honor and distinct
privilege to introduce you to my friend” —
Pence sells it hard — “and the 45th presidentTHE LONG VIEW: MITCH MCCONNELL — THE GREAT OBSTRUCTIONIST
TIMELINEOCT. 20 10 APRIL 20 13 NOV. NOV. MARCH 2016 SEPT. NOV.
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HUTT
ERSTOCKDo you
believe
that im-
peaching
Trump
would
hurt Dem-
ocrats’
chances
in 2020?27%
Ye s73%
NoGo to Rolling
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