5 Ways Trump Is, Unfortunately, A Genius

5

Trump Has A Brute Force Understanding Of The Legal System

Trump has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits involving trademarks, labor issues, personal injuries, divorce, defamation, you name it, as both plaintiff and defendant. Some are the kind that any business has to deal with, like suits from people who slipped and hurt themselves on his property. But there have been many nastier issues, like his companies not paying taxes, not paying employees overtime, or not complying with the ADA, and he's insisted on fighting it all in court.

Trump's critics have produced endless headlines and rants about how he considers himself above the law. And probably, somewhere in the moldy pile of cottage cheese that is his brain, he does. He certainly couldn't care less about his administration's blatant conflicts of interest. But the endless lawsuits present a larger, more nuanced problem: Trump has the resources to bludgeon people with a legal system that favors those who can afford to engage with it.

Lawsuits of course cost money, often lots of it. But they are also cumbersome, time-consuming, stressful affairs that wear down both the people involved and the media that reports on it through sheer attrition. Even if someone is willing to take on Trump, it's difficult to keep the public engaged with years of piecemeal updates while so many new stories unfold. How many of you are still following the saga of Trump's tax returns? He said he would release them, then came up with inane excuses not to, then got belligerent, and finally he's thrown every possible legal obstacle at the proceedings, to the point where he may not even still be president by the time it's resolved.

Trump's court record is mixed, and his administration's record specifically is awful. But winning a lawsuit is tangential to the aims of launching one, which is to drag issues out until they're forgotten, or at least distanced from the Trump who lives in the present. As a bonus, lawsuits let him bluster about how great he is, like when he presented a suit against the city of Minneapolis over the cost of security for a Trump rally as the mean old Democratic mayor trying to suppress his followers' free speech. Then, if he's proven wrong, he never has to mention it again.

So in 2019, Trump sued Deutsche Bank, Capital One, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and many, many more in an attempt to kill inquiries into his finances. The suit against the committee chairman was described as both "unprecedented" and "not likely to prevail." But analysts also pointed out that all these suits dropped the issue into a complicated legal morass from which it may not emerge until after 2020, at which point it would barely even matter.

Trump's lawsuits have included hundreds of cases in which his employees and contractors were never paid. He could have just paid his damn bills -- some of the claims were for only a few hundred dollars -- but he instead insisted on dragging the claimants through the courts until they gave up, went bankrupt, or finally settled on the condition that they could never discuss their cases. When these stories came out in 2016, they did absolutely nothing to his presidential campaign. Why do stories like these not break Trump like they have so many other candidates? Well ...

4

Trump's Brand Is Still Being Hammered Into Our Skulls

It may still feel bizarre that Trump is president, but we have adjusted to the sheer novelty of electing a reality show host. It was barely a novelty to begin with for the chunk of Trump supporters old enough to remember Ronald Reagan starring in a movie alongside a chimpanzee. All of his dumb TV shows feel irrelevant, given where we are now. But forgetting that Trump's name has long been used as a synonym for wealth and power means we forget how we got here in the first place.

Jamvitter/FlickrThere are only so many times you can print your name on casino chips before an image forms.

Trump is a man who sold overpriced Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and goddamn Trump Water on the assumption that his name said all that needed to be said about the quality of the product. If one venture failed, he shat out a dozen more. The transfer of that simple branding to politics -- the distillation of one of the most complicated subjects imaginable into hats and slogans and crude insults -- was so effective that we've now accepted it as an inevitability, rather than the outlier it was.

3

Trump Knows How To Manipulate Our Attention Spans

Every politician lies, exaggerates, oversimplifies, spins, or just goofs up because they're perpetually on camera and have countless talking points whirling around their head. But Trump lies so often and so brazenly that even fact-checkers struggle to keep up, let alone the electorate that has to process all this misinformation. Lies like the dollar being the strongest in American history (it definitely was not) or the Kurds being "much safer now" as they were being displaced and killed. These aren't even questions of policy; just basic facts that the world could have maybe once agreed on.

PolitifactIt's possible that he's trying to get away with it by causing Politifact's servers to overload and catch fire.

All of this bullshit should be called out. But if you ask a student to write an essay on Moby Dick and all they turn in is "I've got a whale of a dick right here," you're not going to accomplish anything by patiently explaining while that may be true in a metaphorical sense, it's not quite what you were looking for with this assignment. Trump is a man who says "Who cares?" when people point out even his dumbest and most inconsequential lies. He could not be any less interested in being corrected. This is an administration that cut Medicaid while saying they weren't cutting Medicaid.

2

Trump Is Impervious To Shame

Remember when an American government employee's wife killed a 19-year-old British man by driving on the wrong side of the road, fled Britain by claiming diplomatic immunity, then was used by Trump in a bizarre reality show stunt where he invited the grieving parents to the White House before announcing that the person responsible for their son's death was right next door because he hoped they could all have a nice chat?

How about when Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans like he was compensating for a busted T-shirt gun at a hockey game? Or when he used a two-month-old orphaned by the El Paso shooting as a photo op, autographed photos of crime victims, politicized a talk to the goddamn Boy Scouts, or commemorated 9/11 by bragging about how he beat Crooked Hilary before remembering the occasion and solemnly segueing into complaints about the media and the Russia probe?

These are incidents equal or worse to what once killed political careers, but trying to shame Trump is like trying to shame the car that hit you. The man acts like a Terminator programmed to whine and dodge gout. He has long been called immune to scandal, but there are consequences -- Republican electoral defeats, an anemic approval rating relative to reasonably strong economic and foreign conditions, ruining his name for all time when he could have spent his golden years golfing. But Trump doesn't care. He has revealed that much of what America long thought of as the rules of the system were actually just suggestions, right up to the idea that you should at least pretend to feel a modicum of shame when appropriate.

1

Trump Has The Tools To Win Again

If you live in a liberal bubble, Trump's defeat in 2020 might already feel inevitable. His approval rating is weak, he's been mired in a Ukraine scandal that looks like it might actually stick, and he's just so, so stupid. That's certainly a nice thought to have, because regardless of the outcome, the 2020 election is shaping up to be a grim death march through bad polls, moronic hot takes, and endless screaming. There are people who would agree to another four years of Trump if it meant that coverage of the election and his second term was replaced with five years of soothing animal videos.

But here we have to note that America loves its incumbents, with only three incumbent presidents losing an election since World War II. Ford was doomed by Watergate fallout, Carter was crushed by an economic crisis, and H.W. Bush was also at the helm during a recession. And despite what social media might be shouting at you, the American economy is doing well on paper, and sitting presidents tend to get the credit (or blame) for an economy, regardless of how little influence they actually have over it.