01.06.2023

Fallen Phil and Teflon Don

With the Stormy Daniels indictment, the E Jean Carroll civil verdict and the whole eight-year-old campaign of lawfare against Trump, Paul Demarty asks why it makes no difference to his political prospects. Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have Phillip Schofield

Two news stories - on the face of it completely unrelated - have stolen headlines, one on each side of the Atlantic: the abrupt downfall of the blandest man in British showbiz, Phillip Schofield; and the sentencing of Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right American militia, for his role in the January 6 events.

We can deal with poor old Phil first; a cascade of disasters has led to the discovery that he promised a 15-year-old a job at ITV when he finished school, twisted arms to make it happen, and eventually had a love affair with him (by which time the young man was 20, a mere three decades Schofield’s junior). We do not need to litigate this any further; suffice to say that legal-but-icky May-December romances are still very much in the crosshairs of the post-#MeToo media regime.

One could not imagine a greater contrast between Schofield - somehow both omnipresent in daytime TV and utterly forgettable, and until last week so squeaky-clean by reputation that he almost seemed AI-generated - and Stewart Rhodes. The latter is the very model of the modern militia ringleader: ex-military, pudgy, white, middle-aged and middle-class. His eye patch gives him a touch of the grotesque, but he lost his eye not in some act of military heroism, but an oopsie with his own .22 at home.

Rhodes was handed an impressive 18-year sentence by judge Amit Mehta; his comrade, Kelly Meggs, got 12 years. Both were on charges of seditious conspiracy - originally put on the books to deal with pro-Confederate traitors in the civil war. These gentlemen are likely to appeal, but on what grounds? Perhaps they will find some technicality - but they seem quite comically guilty as charged.

Picaresque

They are merely the biggest losers in the post-coup rounding up of the usual suspects. A badly shaken federal government is very keen, it seems, to make an example. But surely that is the result of the most obvious incongruity - why the hell is the most obvious conspirator of all, Donald J Trump, not in the dock for this? Trump indisputably ordered this crowd of deluded middle Americans to march on the Capitol. Close flunkies of his like Rudy Giuliani are known to have come up with the plan for the event, so as to intimidate Mike Pence. It certainly smells like a seditious conspiracy to me.

That is before we get to all the other stuff - the Stormy Daniels indictment, the further indictments to come, the civil verdict against him, which found he had sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll - indeed the whole eight-year-old campaign of lawfare against him. Not to forget obviously fraudulent ventures like Trump University, serial bankruptcies, grabbings by the pussy, payment of lawyers’ bills in sport memorabilia; in short, a whole picaresque career of crimes and misdemeanours.

Yet he is still standing - not only that, but, saving some drastic change of circumstances, he is odds-on to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for the third time in a row. Recent polls have him smoking the Floridian vampire, Ron DeSantis, in the Republican primary when the circus begins in earnest later this year (voters seem unable even to name any other candidate, which sucks for Nikki Haley, I guess). Nothing sticks to Teflon Don, except the improbable aura of success.

We brought up poor old Phillip Schofield for the sake of contrast, of course. It seems remarkable that some public figures are so easily offloaded for relatively mild infractions - cheating on your wife, and using star power to obtain sex - when others seem to end up ‘too big to fail’. Many will consider Schofield a bit of a creep after his confession; probably some will talk themselves into believing that he is a paedophile, but know - deep inside - that they are stretching definitions a little. Before all that, it was not exactly the case that half of British society was clamouring over many years for his ejection from public life. There was no anti-Schofield “#resistance”, no Mueller report, no Russiagate fantasies for our Phil. Poor thing, it is quite possible that nobody in Britain had any strong feelings about him at all.

Yet his storied career in the world of British light entertainment - at once utterly bland and profoundly odd - is terminated in the blink of an eye. Nobody will touch him now, in case he turns out to be a new Jimmy Savile. It seems that the system works in the case of the most boring man on earth, but somehow not a technicolour supervillain.

It will be objected, not unfairly, that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Indeed that is true. This demands the further explanation - how are these cases different? In innumerable ways, naturally: about the only thing Trump and Schofield have in common are a teaky tan. Both were targeted for denunciation on the basis of sexual misconduct; it is now strange to think that people really thought that the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape would be the killing blow, but they did.

At the mere cultural level, Trump had a survival advantage, which was that his whole political schtick was based on crude masculinism and open contempt for the rules of propriety that supposedly governed US politics before 2015 (but really now). At some point in the autumn of 2016, some Trump superfans were photographed in T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, “America needs a president with balls”. His excuse for the Access Hollywood tape - that it meant nothing; it was just “locker room talk”, empty braggadocio - was derided by the liberal media, and the few remaining never-Trump holdouts among the neo-con right; his goose was well and truly cooked. So far as anyone can tell, it made no difference; red states voted red, blue states voted blue, and swing states swung red by mere tens of thousands of votes.

If Mitt Romney had beaten Barack Obama by the same electoral map in 2012, liberals would have been disappointed, but would more or less have just got on with their lives. They could not do the same with Trump: they had become too attached to the idea of his illegitimacy. This was plain to see for Trump’s supporters, however; and so every subsequent attempt to ratchet up the picture of illegitimacy resulted merely in strengthening his position among the American right. This dynamic has held firm all the way to the present day - on an ascending scale of action that literally included his self-coup attempt and its inevitable backlash.

Political appeal

Trump survives, therefore, because the political appeal of Trumpism is undiminished by attacks on his character. That appeal is well-documented: the fraying of American society at the edges, the devastation of deindustrialisation bearing the bitter fruit of pauperisation and deaths of despair, the inability of the liberal ideological fig leaves to hide what he called - to widespread outrage among the great and the good - “American carnage”. Indeed, the carnage is distinctively American, though it was exported around the world - first by eager students like Thatcher and Pinochet; then by the dismal operations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the global south; and finally by agents of “shock therapy” in the former Stalinist countries.

From that point of view, Trump is a case of Malcolm X’s chickens coming home to roost. Liberals liked to think of Jair Bolsonaro as the Brazilian Trump, and not without reason; but one might just as well call Trump the American (oh-so-American) Modi, Netanyahu or Putin. Anomie, atomisation and despair is projected outwards onto convenient scapegoats. Life never gets better, of course - the US was quite as rickety, if not more so, after his presidency than before. Yet failure only ever calls for more of the same medicine. The multiplication of preposterous moral panics in American political life is like a trashy TV dinner: all empty calories and momentary buzz, before you need to pack down another.

Anti-Trumpism served the same purpose for the liberals. Satisfaction was always just around the corner, but never came. There is good reason to suppose that the state machine is on their side, for now, and a successful January 6 is likely to have been met with a serious counter-coup. This is still not enough.

It seems that prissy moralising is enough to get rid of a bland daytime TV presenter; indeed, it was enough to get rid of a serial predator like Harvey Weinstein. Trump has globbed onto something real, however. Unless he meets a Robert Maxwell-style end - mysteriously off the side of a yacht, or crushed under the wheels of a Mar-a-Lago golf buggy - he will die with his base.

The liberals have no plan for that.