A federal judge has declared him liable for rape. He faces paying a half-billion dollars in legal judgments for fraud and defamation. Twice impeached, then defeated for reelection, he has been charged with 91 felonies. He has been arrested and his mug shot published; he will spend much of the year in and out of courtrooms. On the campaign trail, his rambling speeches are gaffe-ridden and prone to malapropisms and meltdowns.
In a normal universe, this would not be the description of a fortunate man.
But we do not live that universe, and we must consider the very real — and infuriating — possibility that Donald J. Trump is the single luckiest politician who ever lived.
For almost a decade (though it feels even longer), we’ve watched him trip through minefields, totter on the edge of sinkholes and step on trapdoors, each time thinking: This is it. Now he’s going down. It has become a mantra of dashed hopes: The walls are (once again) closing in on Donald Trump. He’s on the brink, desperate. This time, surely this time. And yet, somehow, he escapes.
The latest example of Trump Luck was Colorado’s decision, amid all his other legal problems, to ban him from its primary ballot using a novel legal theory. The Supreme Court smacked down Colorado on Monday, handing Trump a 9-0 victory that only makes him look stronger.
Consider the good fortune that has blown his way in just the recent past:
· With a major criminal trial looming for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, the Supreme Court on Feb. 28 threw him a lifeline on his immunity claim, likely pushing his moment of reckoning past Election Day.
· The felony election-interference case against him in Georgia has been thrown into disarray by alleged prosecutorial hanky-panky.
· Trump was caught with a Florida stash of classified government documents, including war plans, but last spring he somehow managed to draw the extraordinarily friendly Aileen M. Cannon as the judge in the case.
· On the campaign trail, Trump is prone to bouts of incoherence that seem to suggest he is losing it. But, lucky man that he is, the Justice Department chose a special counsel whom Trump had appointed to be the U.S. attorney for Maryland to investigate President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents; declining to charge him last month, the prosecutor made the Biden’s memory lapses the story.
By now, this must feel like a familiar pattern.
In 2016, with Trump less than two weeks from seemingly certain election defeat, FBI Director James B. Comey decided to kneecap Hillary Clinton.
When an audio recording surfaced during the 2016 campaign revealing Trump bragging about being able to grab women by the genitals, his opponents just knew he was done. They hadn’t reckoned with Trump Luck: His evangelical supporters, it turned out, were willing to shelve their morals to win an election.
That year, Trump lost the popular vote by millions but won the presidency in the electoral college. Even he looked like the guy at the slot machine who can’t believe it when the bells clang and the coins start flying.
Indeed, Trump has been exceedingly fortunate in his opponents. In 2016, the Republican primaries ended with Trump facing only one serious challenger: Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who had the distinction of possibly being the most loathed person in American politics. In the general election, Trump faced probably the only Democrat who could not beat him. This year, the GOP’s great non-Trump hope, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, imploded under the weight of his own jerkitude. And now an overwhelming majority of voters think his 2024 opponent, Biden — less than four years older than Trump — is too elderly to be given another term.
For years, pundits wondered when the GOP would break with Trump. After Charlottesville? After his 2020 defeat? After Jan. 6? After he called for the termination of the Constitution? But, as we know, Trump has been deeply fortunate in the quality of the GOP establishment, whose feeble resistance to his various outrages was, to use H.L. Mencken’s memorable phrase, “not unlike that of a sheep trying to bark”.
In a stroke of extraordinary luck, Trump was saved from conviction in his second impeachment trial when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blinked at the crucial moment, despite his certainty of Trump’s guilt. Now it is McConnell who is heading to exile, while Trump is surging toward the White House.
So it has gone. Time and again, Trump has faced allegations that would sink any other politician but has been handed counter-narratives — often bogus and tendentious, but nonetheless useful — to deflect and distract in an endless round of whataboutism. (Hunter Biden’s laptop comes to mind.)
In his oddly charmed political life, Trump has benefited mightily from what political scientist Brian Klaas calls the “banality of crazy”, as the body politic has grown increasingly numb to Trump’s fire hose of malice.
Even Trump must marvel at his good fortune to come on the scene at a time when America’s memory has collapsed into a national amnesia where politicians and voters alike simply can’t remember the last abhorrent thing he said.
It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery.
So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden as he seeks to a return to the White House.
Has anyone ever been this lucky?
Charles Sykes is the author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind”.