Yes, Trump’s sound and fury will signify nothing

A classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” from 1961, “It’s a Good Life,” features a telepathic, malicious 6-year-old brat named Anthony who holds an entire town hostage. Anthony transforms one adult who crosses him into a jack-in-the-box. Everybody else who wants to survive kowtows. “It’s real fine that you’ve done that, that’s real fine,” the local grocer tells Anthony after the boy gives a gopher three heads and then kills it.
Nobody musters the courage to take on Anthony, and the episode concludes with one of Rod Serling’s knowing voice-overs: “If, by some strange chance, you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk, because if you do meet Anthony, you can be sure of one thing: You have entered ‘The Twilight Zone.’”
Like little Anthony, Donald Trump is testing us — just as he did when he rolled down a Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential bid in a flurry of venom and dingbatics and just as he is now by gesturing towards a coup and convincing a nation of traumatised worrywarts that he might pull it off.
Let’s let go of these fears and anxieties, shall we?
President-elect Joe Biden will be ushered into the White House on January 20 and President-reject Trump — the man who lost the recent election by more than 6 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes — will be sent packing.
Trump isn’t departing without a titanic fuss, of course, and given his druthers he’d be quite content burning down the house rather than leaving it intact for someone else. But he’s not going to burn it down. And not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t.
It’s worth recalling that none of Trump’s grotesque and damaging behaviour of late was unexpected. He’s spent most of the year telegraphing his desire to stain the Constitution and stave off relinquishing the presidency. He labeled the electoral process fraudulent before the election even took place, and everything he’s done since has been in character: deploying a squad of incompetent, tragicomically bonkers stooges led by Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell to challenge the legitimacy of the vote and continuing to threaten and corrupt the Republican Party so it enables his caudillo act.
At the end of the day, Trump at his core is who Trump has always been — a vaudevillian bully. His history is also chock full of examples of people and institutions that not only stood up to him but batted him back after he puffed his chest and swung his fists.
His parents shipped him off to a military academy when he was 13 because, as he once told me, he was “very bad” and “bratty.” None of the teachers at the school brooked his garbage. “They’d go pow! And smack you,” he confided. “And you know, all of the sudden a spoiled kid says, ‘Yes, sir!’”
When he became the enfant terrible of New York real estate in the 1980s he tried browbeating an entire neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side and made ludicrous threats against the city’s mayor so he could build a sprawling development capped off by an abominable, ill-conceived skyscraper. New Yorkers and their mayor grounded the project. When he stiffed his bankers in the 1990s for billions of dollars he couldn’t repay, he savaged them in the media and pretended they needed him more than he needed them. The bankers corralled him for a spell so they could use him to help liquidate his portfolio and then excommunicated him permanently as a client.
Trump spent his term as president flagrantly embracing financial conflicts of interest and abusing the powers of his office. When he tried to strong-arm Ukraine’s leader to dig up dirt on Biden, several civil servants and soldiers, including Alexander Vindman, William Taylor, Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill, fought back and helped stop it. The House of Representatives impeached Trump for those misdeeds.
While Trump also used his time in the Oval Office to exploit racism and bigotry for his own political purposes, the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets to protest systemic racism. While Trump threw his hat into the presidential ring again this year, voters denied him a second term — with Black voters in big cities providing a decisive push. There are more examples of the bully being thumped, just as there are myriad examples of Trump manipulating institutions and making end runs around the law. At the end of the day, however, Trump didn’t make the media crumble, the courts acquiesce, law enforcement look away or Democrats succumb.

—Bloomberg

Timothy L O’Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion