The scariest thing about Trump? Nothing he does can shock us any more

The Age

20 hours ago

For a president famed for his shock value, the dog days of June have actually been some of the least shocking of his tenure. The break-up of Donald Trump and Elon Musk must have been on everyone's bingo card. Surely no one was surprised when their divorce exploded on social media, and we feasted on a pass-the-popcorn moment writ large in Trump-scale signage.
A trope of the Trump years is that a Hollywood scriptwriter would be laughed out of town for authoring such a madcap screenplay. America is in its final season, goes the joke, and the showrunners have completely jumped the shark. On this occasion, however, they would have been sent back to the writing room, and told to try harder. The personal insults. The threats of cancelled government contracts. Even Musk's taunt about the Jeffrey Epstein files felt cliched. I would not even have been surprised if either Trump or Musk had sought to monetise their row by launching a crypto coin in the shape of a broken heart. That is a measure of how, in the 10 years since Trump descended that golden escalator, the abnormal has been normalised.
The chaos in Los Angeles was also entirely foreseeable. A crackdown on protesters in a Democratic-run city in a Democratic-run state was always going to be an obvious Trump play. Better still, the faux flashpoint came when agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tried to arrest and expel unauthorised immigrants. For Trump, the staging for this American passion play could hardly have been more perfect.
And what a dramatis personae and props. An African-American Democratic mayor, Karen Bass. A liberal Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, with a surname that lends itself to the playground slur 'Newscum' which Trump rejoices in using. A Democratic US senator, Alex Padilla, being bundled out of a press conference and then handcuffed after trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. Protesters waving the national flag of Mexico. And a big beautiful battalion of federalised National Guard, under the president's command and control, with 700 US Marines standing by on the fringes of the city.
'Lights! Camera! Action!' A Hollywood summer blockbuster executive produced by the country's most powerful executive.
Nor should we overlook how the Democratic Party, and the Biden administration in particular, was crucial in the plot development. 'Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice,' wrote W ashington Post columnist David Ignatius, a frequent Trump critic.
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The Musk meltdown and Los Angeles showdown are, of course, linked. Trump, whose personal approval ratings have slumped sharply, needed a distraction after the breakdown of his billionaire bromance, and Musk's complaints that the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit.
So Trump became the first US president since 1965 to federalise the National Guard without the agreement of a state governor. Back then, in one of the most climactic showdowns of the civil rights era, president Lyndon Johnson did so to protect black protesters marching between Montgomery and Selma, who had been bludgeoned by Alabama state troopers on 'Bloody Sunday'. Johnson's opponent was George Wallace, the white supremacist governor of Alabama, a 'Dixie' demagogue often viewed as a populist forerunner of Trump. Wallace would have applauded the president's announcement this week restoring the names of seven army bases which honoured Confederate leaders.