Trump’s demise has been greatly exaggerated

This time they’ve surely got him. Pack your bags, Mr. President. The game is up. Because this week we learned that . . . that . . . well, there’s this tape, see, recorded by Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in September of 2016, during which the then-presidential candidate discussed setting up a company for the purpose of paying off alleged former paramour Karen McDougal to make her go away.

Did Trump and Cohen actually pay her off? No, but . . . but . . . c’mon, it would have been a campaign-finance violation! If it had happened. Or it was sort of a campaign-finance violation once removed, because the company that owns the National Enquirer paid for the rights to the McDougal story but then never ran anything on it, and maybe Trump knew about this!

Trump-is-doomed stories are one of the media’s favorite fairy tales. Remember when you saw “Peter Pan” when you were 4 and you actually thought that clapping for Tinkerbell would bring her back to life? Pundits think that if they cheer loudly enough for Trump to get eighty-sixed, it’ll happen. His (first?) term in office is more than a third over, and the Very Serious Commentators have been ushering him out the door the entire time. Or at least they’ve been trying to. It turns out that Trump doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the usher-pundits.

“Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency,” ran a headline in The New Yorker. That was back on April 14. Writer Adam Davidson gravely averred, “This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.”

Can something really be a “certainty” if its odds are still “increasing?” Death is a certainty. The likelihood of it occurring is, however, quite stable.

But, hey, Davidson could be right. Remember when Karl Marx said it was an inevitable historical fact that capitalism would die? It’s only been 150 years — give the man time! By contrast, recall that, a year before Davidson turned The New Yorker into his personal prophecy-delivery system, The Independent promised (May 18, 2017), “This is how Donald Trump’s presidency will crumble in the next year.” Amateurish. Never supply an expiration date that could falsify your claim. Be thunderously certain, pundits — but be vague in your certainty.

Another favorite pundit trick is the “closing wall” metaphor. Stand clear of your closing walls, Mr. President! New York City Congressman Jerry Nadler said on May 21 that Trump “is very upset that the walls are closing in, and that the investigators are closing in on him.” Nadler was echoing Stephen Colbert, from April 11 (“The walls have been closing in on the president, and he’s not happy,”) and The Daily Beast of March 12 (“The Walls Are Closing in on Trump”).

These walls are certainly taking their time. “The walls are closing in on Donald Trump — and he’s starting to lose it,” claimed The New Republic back on May 18 of 2017. That was a year and a quarter ago. Have you ever heard of closing walls that moved so imperceptibly that after 15 months there was still no movement discernible to the naked eye? These walls are moving more slowly than the plot of “Blade Runner 2049.”

There’s really no need for the walls to smush Trump, though, because the noose will surely get him first. Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC said on Jan. 10, “The noose is tightening around the Trump White House and the Trump family.” Trump is “shocked that the noose is tightening,” said Mika Brzezinski on “Morning Joe.” That was back on Dec. 5. Senator and not-quite-vice-president Tim Kaine detected the noose way back in May of 2017, when he said, “We have a deeply insecure president who understands the noose is tightening because of this Russia investigation.” This was about 65 weeks ago, when Trump fired James Comey. Remember how that was absolutely definitely certainly going to bring down Trump?

It was the Daily Kos that really had Trump nailed, in a piece called “Trump Endgame.” This one warned us that “events are escalating rapidly with the Trump regime” and that “Trump is not capable of a slow stripping of democratic norms, processes and rights . . . he wants to win it now . . . we are in a struggle, the fate of the nation is at stake.” Etcetera. Etcetera.

This piece (which speculated hopefully that maybe “Trump is forced out in a coup”) ran on Jan. 30, 2017: Ten days into the Trump presidency.

Don’t despair, activists and fantasists and rageaholics. Keep clapping like you did for Tinkerbell when you were 4. If you ever lose faith in fairy tales and it occurs to you that Trump isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, though, there is something you can do. You can keep smashing up Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a pickaxe. That’ll show him!