Trump Demands the Worst of Us

A deal with the devil comes due.

Gage Skidmore

There is a line I used to hear people on the right use in reference to Donald Trump, typically as a way to cope with his awful moral character: “He fights.” It’s a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s defense of Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War amid attacks from detractors.

“I can’t spare this man; he fights,” Lincoln said of Grant. “I’ll try him a little longer.”

I thought about that again after Trump shared a post depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as apes. It’s not even the most bigoted thing he’s done, but it seems to have broken through and brewed into a proper scandal. For the longest time, these incidents rolled off Trump’s back because right-wingers told themselves, like Lincoln told Grant’s critics, “He fights.” That is, the man is not perfect—in fact, he is deeply flawed—but he is crusading for America and, therefore, deserves a lot of latitude. Call it a deal with the devil made by self-described hardboiled political realists. Well, the devil is a liar and less delusional than the realists.

The right sacrificed its virtue for Trump’s vice, believing that he would deliver America. Instead, he ran the country into the ground while enriching himself, his friends, and his family in a way that no other president has in our history. He has the worst moral quality of any man to hold the office, and is far and away the most corrupt. Now, the right is faced with accepting the fact that MAGA was an enormous scam that brought out the worst in us, or locking itself into a death spiral with Trump.

Matt Stoller quipped that Trump’s racism always seemed to go down smoother when inflation was low and Bitcoin was high. It’s funny, but it’s not really a joke. If the country were being governed well, it would be easier for some to stomach brazen displays of bigotry from the president of the United States. Vice doesn’t cause as much indigestion when prosperity has people fat and happy. But Americans feel worse about their prospects than they have in a long time, and it has become impossible to ignore. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll published Feb. 2 found that 51 percent of those surveyed said Trump was doing a worse job than Joe Biden. More than that, 53 percent said the economy is worse now than when Joe was in office. Only 39 percent approve of the way the Trump administration is handling inflation.

All that, it seems, has made it much harder to ignore the fact that Trump is the worst person to ever occupy the White House.

I don’t mean to say that the “walls are closing in” on him. Any other politician would be destroyed by Trump’s overt displays of racism and ultimately resign. Trump will survive, as he always does. But whatever conditions that, in the past, made it so he wouldn’t even have to think twice about showing people that he is a terrible human being, either aren’t in place at the moment or have been severely attenuated by the catastrophe that is this administration. How do we know that this is the case? Look at the reaction from the White House and the GOP.

The knee-jerk move was predictable: downplay, downplay, dismiss.

“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the press.

That’s usually where a news cycle about Trump’s bad behavior stops. Not this time. Within hours, several Republican lawmakers in the Senate and House made the rare move of publicly condemning the post, albeit in the most pathetic ways possible. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate and a key Trump ally. Of course, it wasn’t fake, and it probably also wasn’t the most bigoted thing we’ve seen from Trump. Scott isn’t stupid. He sees how the country has soured on the president. There’s no upside to defending it, and it’s impossible to look away now—but he also can’t attack Trump as forcefully as he should and so has to create a way out, give Donald room to excuse himself and, by extension, the GOP.

As more notable Republicans—including looking at midterms with trepidation—piled on, I think it caught the White House by surprise. Trump’s team quickly shifted gears from “fake outrage” and trying to get people to laugh along with Trump’s racism, to deleting the post and blaming a faceless staffer who supposedly went rogue. Or at least that was the spin the administration sold Semafor:

Amid swift backlash from some of the president’s closest allies to the Obamas post, the White House sought to distance Trump from the evening post. A person with direct knowledge of the situation told Semafor that Trump “had not seen the video before it got posted.” Trump later said he had seen only the first portion of the video, a conspiracy-type post about voter fraud, before giving it to a staffer who posted without watching it through the end.

According to Semafor, that did little to stanch the bleeding:

One retiring House Republican told Semafor that Thursday’s Trump post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes validated the choice to leave Capitol Hill. Not long after that, Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei announced his retirement — the second House Republican this week to do so, and the 30th of this election cycle.

“Another reason to increase the intensity of my job search,” an aide to a different House Republican said of the now-deleted Obamas post.

One of the only nice things I’ll say about Trump is that nobody excels at humiliating his sycophants the way he does. And so, after it seemed that maybe the damage had all been done, he kneecapped his own side by insisting that, actually, he did see the post, found it alright, and just had someone else post it for him. The secret is that there is no mystery staffer, and even if there were, Trump said he wouldn’t fire them and refused to apologize himself, and then later did anyway, long after the damage had been done.

Again, I do believe Stoller’s prosperity theory does help explain why things are different this time. But there is another key factor working against Trump: the enemy of his movement in 2026 is everything good about America and the majority of Americans. MAGA is a movement that thinks of itself as patriotic but in fact is personalistic rather than patriotic. Its allegiance is to Trump—not America, and it hates everyone and everything that reminds them of that.

Unfortunately, we needed to live through another round of Trump to be reminded that he represents the worst of our nature, but I do think that this reality has begun to hit even a few Republicans, like the three-time Trump voter who called into C-SPAN to comment on the racist post.

“I voted for Trump, but I really want to apologize,” the man said. He described himself as a lifelong Republican and has never been more ashamed of it:

I’m looking at this awful picture of the Obamas. What an embarrassment to our country. All this man does is tell lies. He is not worthy of the presidency. He takes bribes blatantly, and now he’s being a racist blatantly. He’s pathetic as a president, and I just want to apologize to everybody in the country for supporting this rotten, rotten man.

Not a few replies to this story on Twitter were uncharitable to the caller. To some degree, I get it. As a former supporter who got off the train a few years ago and never looked back, I did spend a lot of time trying to understand why I ever hopped on. The simplest explanation is that I was angry, and right-wing populism became a distorted vehicle for that anger. I imagine the caller felt the same way. Most people who support Trump do or did.

They’re angry about things in their personal lives or angry about the direction of the country. The latter is understandable, and to an extent, healthy. But then along comes Trump, and he makes you a deal: you look the other way from his vice and corruption, or even embrace those things, and in return, America will be set right, and all your problems will be solved. Then you look around and start noticing things. Maybe you notice that the Trump administration canceled 145 enforcement actions against 153 corporations facing accountability measures for alleged lawbreaking. Or maybe you notice that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also known as the “Spy Sheikh,” quietly purchased a 49 percent stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial right before Trump’s inauguration, resulting in the sale of 500,000 advanced artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates. The latter, I presume, is what the caller was referring to when he mentioned bribes.

“But he’s taking our country back,” the people around you say, even as Trump sells it for parts. “He fights,” just not for you.

Then you remember that America has always been great. Imperfect, yes, but great, and that the “solution” you agreed to was burning it down and building in its place a god-awful casino where you would partake in all manner of vice. You look down and notice that you’re sitting on a stool in a row of people who are mindlessly slapping slot machines through dimmed eyes. The walls are yellowed and peeling. There’s something sticky on the ugly carpet. You realize you’ve made a terrible mistake, and now have two choices: admit you got it wrong and bolt for the door, or let yourself get locked into a sordid business where the management consists of sex pests and criminals.

Most Americans, I hope, are going to run for the exit, and many already have. Maybe Trump knows it, too, and that explains his increasingly bizarre and vulgar behavior, as if he needs to ensure everyone still with him is committed to going down with the ship by getting them to purge themselves of every last glimmer of decency and shame, like a purification ritual. That’s going to alienate more people, but it’s also going to make his movement embrace vice even more.

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