Trump Can’t Escape the Laws of Political Gravity

Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. Time may seem to run backwards; solid things turn out to be insubstantial; black holes swallow up the light; the dead may walk the Earth, ghouls crawl out of cleft rocks, velociraptors not only reappear but learn to speak and, alarmingly, open doors.

That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.

Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption.

Gravity still works—if somewhat unreliably. Politicians who overinterpret narrow wins in a divided country get pulled back to Earth, usually by the midterms. But not just that—the federal system of government gives a lot of power to the states, and although Congress has become anemic and irresponsible, most state governments have not. And so the governor of Florida has declined to appoint the president’s daughter-in-law to a vacant Senate seat, and the governor of Ohio has passed on one of the president’s more socially awkward tech billionaires for another. These are small but interesting indications of gravity reasserting itself.

Lawyers, by the thousand, in and out of state governments, create their own gravitational field. The poorly paid lawyers of the Justice Department can sue only so much, and the Supreme Court will turn out to be—as it did during the previous Trump administration—less reliably Trumpist than the president would wish. (The most pro-Trump justices are Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two of the conservatives he did not appoint.) Even the appalling sweeping pardons of the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists have their limits. If any of those people attempt violence in Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else outside of D.C., they will discover that assault and other crimes there are tried in state, not federal, courts. And the presidential-pardon power does not reach state prisons, which means that some ghouls will go back to their cleft rocks if they go out looking for revenge.

Newtonian physics also has it that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely so. Pardon every criminal who clubbed a police officer, and police unions will be unamused. Impose high tariffs, and working-class voters will encounter higher prices and possibly unemployment. Blow up the national debt to cut taxes, and sooner or later the markets will react. Give way to vaccine skepticism, and epidemics will break out. Turn the intelligence community and military upside down by purging women and other undesirables, and you will produce not only big, embarrassing, consequential failures but also pushback from those large populations, their families, and those politicians who still care about national defense.

And then there is retribution. Political physics runs along the lines of the lyrics composed by Johnny Cash: “That old wheel / Is gonna roll around once more / When it does / It will even up the score.” Or, as Shakespeare has Shylock put it rather more pointedly: “The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

The reckless, violence-feeding mass pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists were evidence of Trumpian lawlessness. The orders to end the security clearances of scores of former senior intelligence officials who criticized Trump, and the stunning decision to remove security protection from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook—three former senior officials of the first Trump administration—were pure personal meanness. Suspending clearances was intended as a humiliation and a blow at pocketbooks (many of those targeted serve on corporate boards where clearances are a prerequisite), and cutting security protection against Iranian death threats was even worse.

But Trump’s appointees, who will carry out this and other acts of payback, should consider that before very long they, too, will be out of government. They, too, will want to keep their clearances. And they, too, may incur the wrath of state and non-state enemies who want to kill them. They will wish to consider just how exposed they will inevitably be, once their triumph, like all others, passes into memory. If decency and respect for norms do not motivate them in the right direction, fear may have to serve its place.

Biology also will have its say. Inebriation—with power and success, in this case—invariably leads to hangovers, no matter what family remedies or magical cures one imbibes. That usually hits at the midterms, as the Obama and George W. Bush administrations found out the hard way. More to the point, certain biological realities, including age and its accompanying physical and mental decline, will operate during Trump’s 80s. The flunkies and toadies who surround the president will seek to deny this elemental reality—the Biden team was egregious in this regard—but sooner or later it will take hold too.

Primatology, in this case, offers a useful guide. In most troops of baboons, an alpha male dominates all the others, who exhibit submissive behavior if they know what is good for them. The dominance may be so pronounced that all the alpha male has to do is bare his fangs and snarl to get the behavior he wants. But baboons age, and although he may not notice, the alpha male’s muscles will atrophy, his fangs will fall out. He may continue to snarl, but the younger male baboons will notice and begin to sense the possibility of a succession crisis. And then they pounce.

So, too, here. Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He is, by any measure, old, which is one of many reasons that comparisons with Hitler or younger contemporary European authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán are misplaced. He will be an even lamer duck in two years, at which point the troop of Republican politicians will begin to struggle for the succession. Former friends—Donald Trump Jr. and J. D. Vance, for example—may fall out, and the coalition of differing subclans may fight more openly. Republican unity in several years is highly unlikely.

It’s a bad time in American politics, to be sure. But we need to remember that natural laws still apply, and things could get better if even just one piece of fantasy biology were to hold true: a large class of political invertebrates were to grow spines.