8/21/20
At a White House signing ceremony this month, President Trump lamented the “deep-swamp things happening” in the nation’s “deep state.” Speaking to workers at a Whirlpool plant in Ohio a few days later, he promised to “drain the Washington swamp once and for all.” There’s just one niggling complication: More than 3 1 / 2 years into his presidency, Trump is the straw-haired avatar of the swamp. Typically, presidents run for reelection on the achievements of their first term: the policies deployed, the gains notched, the victories achieved, the goals to fully realize in the next four years. But Trump has, from that first golden-escalator ride, campaigned, governed and wallowed in grievance, never once wavering from his outsider ethos. He is relentlessly on brand about the forces arrayed against him. It is not unusual to run for office on those terms, from the outside. But Trump appears unwilling — or unable — to abandon his burn-it-all-down cri de coeur, even when the establishment he lambastes is run by himself and his appointees. He insists firmly, and implausibly, that while he may be in Washington, he is not of it. Refusing to take ownership of his own administration's record allows Trump to jettison responsibility.
Trump's sense of himself — as an outsider with something to prove — doesn't just propel him. It also binds him to his core supporters, who also feel spurned by the establishment. His appeal to his base — and it's such a visceral one — is largely through the shared experience of feeling aggrieved, feeling like they're not being treated fairly. "I do find it kind of funny that he makes that argument that this is Joe Biden's America and the country is on fire," said one outside adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. "Well you're the president, so I guess it's kind of your America right now." Recently, even in interviews with friendly media outlets, the president has struggled to articulate his top priorities should he win a second term. When Fox News's Sean Hannity asked him about this in June, Trump betrayed the difficulty of running against the establishment. He boasted about his "experience," explaining that while he had never even spent the night in the nation's capital before his election, "now I know everybody." He had come full circle, becoming the self-described politeratti he disdains. Trump seems to know that his outsider ethos is a kind of performance.
