Former President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters before departure from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta, on Aug. 24.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
On one day this week, Donald Trump released an interview with Tucker Carlson that warned of political violence in the United States. On the next, the former president was booked in a Georgia jail. On one day, Joe Biden boasted of the strength of the economy. On the next, his Republican rivals portrayed the country as an economic basket case.
The United States is suffering from a severe case of vertigo, making it difficult for its people to keep their balance.
It is summer’s end, the kids are heading back to school, and here’s the final chance for a leisurely sail in the lake, a picnic at the park, a walk along the shore – all amid summer wind that, as Frank Sinatra sang in a more temperate time, comes “blowin’ in from across the sea.”
But at the same time, there is a dizzying late-summer fusillade of news: a Republican presidential debate, a blast of political poll numbers, a series of Atlanta appearances for Mr. Trump and 18 indicted Trump associates who are charged with being part of “a criminal organization.”
It all makes for competing images of a country that, with unsurpassed military might and enormous economic power, might otherwise be expected to be an island of stability in a stormy world.
Few countries that have climbed the heights of international influence the United States now occupies have endured a spectacle like the serial arrests of a one-time leader, or of the dominant figure in the political opposition – or, in the case of Mr. Trump, both of those.
That phenomenon – the word is appropriate, for in the long pageant of American history Mr. Trump almost certainly will be regarded as more phenomenon than politician – was on vivid display Thursday. A day after former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser and attorney, was booked, and on the same day Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, also surrendered himself to authorities, Mr. Trump moved from the isolation of the cordon sanitaire provided for his motorcade to the crowded, unsanitary conditions of a notorious jail.
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The sombre procession through crumbling corridors, fingerprints, a mug shot – these are not the usual elements of an American post-presidency. Nor are they the customary emblems of a presidential campaign, though Mr. Trump’s flair for self-promotion has transformed the accoutrements of disgrace into talismans of popularity.
The appearance of a one-time president of the United States at Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail would ordinarily be a moment of enormous national uneasiness; instead Mr. Trump’s various legal battles have become routine, and the 45th president considers his arrests a badge of honour, even of potential martyrdom.
That is only one reason the country has been rendered dizzy. There were manifold others this week.
A summertime GOP debate in Milwaukee ordinarily might be expected to focus entirely on the record of the Democratic president, especially one with low approval ratings. Instead, interspersed among the critiques of Joe Biden was the emergence of a new generational war in the Republican Party, this one between established political figures largely from the Baby Boom and Gen X years and Vivek Ramaswamy, at 38 years old the first presidential candidate from the Millennial generation.
The loudest blasts against American elites in the Wednesday session came from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Mr. Ramaswamy, both of whom earned diplomas from both Harvard and Yale universities.
All the candidates who expressed opinions on the matter said that Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president and now one of his rivals for the nomination, was justified in his resistance to his former running mate’s entreaties to help overturn the 2020 election. That same evening, Mr. Trump told Mr. Carlson on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that people in the crowd he addressed at the raucous Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington “said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced.”
“There was love in that crowd,” he added. “There was love and unity.”
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There was neither love nor unity at the Wednesday debate, but, far more consequential, there also was no clear vision of what it means to be a conservative in the United States any more, a problem only exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s appearance at the jail.
It is the unanswered questions on that topic that are contributing to the vertigo.
Is Mr. Trump’s coalition made up of conservative ideas and conservative voters, or is it simply a populist vanguard that is at base a cult of personality? Does modern American conservatism mean engagement in the world or withdrawal from the world? Does it mean high tariffs or free trade? Does it mean national abortion restrictions, or regulations created state by state? Is Russia a mortal enemy led by a “murderer” – the term came up twice Wednesday – or is it merely a desiccated state spanning 11 time zones?
There is more. Does conservatism mean a war on so-called “woke” practices in schools, and how can that be accomplished if the next conservative president kills off the federal Education Department? Does it believe in the Republicans’ long-time devotion to fiscal restraint, or in what former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina referred to as the Trump spending excesses?
Those critical questions linger after a peculiarly chaotic but ineluctably critical week. And the events of the past several days, focused on a former president who has been arrested and a slate of candidates who offered not even the contours of a consensus, suggest that this political season may not offer a discrete answer.