Slowly, we can at least hope, political gravity is returning to America.

You very rarely see President Trump address the nation the way presidents used to. You know the drill: seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, talking candidly and intimately to the American people. Trump tried it with Covid in 2020 and it didn’t quite work. Stiff, awkward, rote, interspersed with sniffs, it’s a bit sad in retrospect. He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline.

This is a real weakness for a president, who may, from time to time, be required to comfort — as Clinton did after the Oklahoma bombing, Bush after 9/11, and Obama after the church mass shooting in Charleston. It’s also a serious flaw if you need to rally people in tough or challenging times. But Trump just can’t do that. He can do other things. But not that.

Then there’s another Trump weakness in a situation like this, i.e. normal economic anxiety. Because he cannot acknowledge any fault on his own part, if the economy drags or disappoints or worsens, he’s got nothing. Except to insist it’s not dragging. In his first term, this never came up because there was only a huge boom (fueled by his tax giveaway) and then a pandemic for which he could not be blamed — both (just) within Trump’s skillset. But now, when discontent is due increasingly to his own policies? That’s a whole different story.

On Wednesday night, we saw someone drowning, not waving. Underwater by 18 percent on the economy and 28 percent on inflation, he barked at us for 18 rushed minutes behind a podium, telling Americans that any economic anxiety is entirely because of Joe Biden, and that a new Golden Age is at hand. He then did a breathless Greatest Hits weave. I imagine the core base loved it, but browsing the web afterward, the reaction of this MAGA-friendly reader of Erick Erickson captured a more common response, even among the faithful:

I can’t believe I rushed home from dinner (7:00 here in AZ) only to hear Trump yelling at me in a speech accurately characterized … as “full of accomplishments: some real, some perceived”; after about 3 minutes I had enough and started to do housework.

It was a whiff when he really needed to avoid a whiff.

No, the wheels aren’t falling off the Trump clown car quite yet. His approval rating nudged up a bit in the last couple of weeks; Gallup had him this unpopular in his first term. But for an ideologically fissiparous and cantankerous movement that is only held together by the cult of one man’s economic infallibility, evidence of fallibility is a real problem. The Midas-touch cult was ingrained by “The Apprentice” and cemented by the pre-Covid boom, and a whole lot of swing voters backed him last year because of it. Take that sense of infallibility away — and a lot can unravel.

And so political gravity is returning a little. The Republican Indiana legislature boldly rebuked his gerrymandering project; special elections portend a Democrat wave next year; SCOTUS could well strike down his tariffs soon (inshallah); the House recently rebelled against him on the Epstein files; MAGA diehard Marjorie Taylor Greene split with him and accused him of “gaslighting;” yesterday’s Turning Point USA confab was a pillow fight among the Israel fanatics, the old-school antisemites, the Epstein maniacs, and the Groypers.

With Trump term-limited, the factions are going to get even more restless and the incoherence of the coalition increasingly exposed. And then we have Trump’s chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, blabbing damning takes on this year’s chaos on the record — as if to signal that she, at least, is not bonkers. Trump himself gets loopier: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the DoD, and now the Kennedy Center; appending embossed deranged rants against previous presidents in the White House; making his own birthday the equivalent of a federal holiday in the National Parks, all while enriching himself and his family in a Putin-style orgy of oligarchic corruption.

But it’s the latter that could bite him in the ass. When Plato dissected the appeal of a successful strongman in late-stage democracy, he homed in on the kind of figure who might emerge: a member of the upper class who becomes a traitor to it. And that was indeed part of Trump’s appeal. But all year, the visuals and the substance have broadcast the direct opposite. He’s gone native with the billionaire class.

Out goes the McDonalds campaign schtick. In comes jetting around the world to receive luxurious gifts, including a 747, from kleptocrats and tyrants; turning the White House into a classless White Lotus where he can dine with crypto-kings and AI machers; throwing a Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago; appointing the world’s richest man to consign thousands of the very poorest children to agonizing deaths; brazenly ratcheting up healthcare costs by ending the Obamacare subsidies, even as he implausibly tries to pivot on “affordability”: this is Gilded Age shit. It’s more John D Rockefeller than William Jennings Bryan; more Louis XVI than Henry VIII. At some point, more in the persuadable faction of American public opinion will notice.

Trump still, of course, has one thing going for him: the Democrats. Their bench is weak for 2028; they are unable and unwilling to drop their most toxic policies — from open borders to transing children to race and sex discrimination against whites, men, Jews, Asians. The woke still run the joint. Don’t delude yourself.

But they may not matter much. It’s the soft-Republicans and Independents who are now beginning to sour on Trump: the ones who want immigration control but not masked men abducting people on the streets; who despise the left elite but didn’t luxuriate in Rob Reiner’s murder; who want fewer overseas wars (not a new one against Venezuela) and don’t want to surrender Ukraine to Putin.

My main fear right now is how Trump could react to this drift downward if it continues, as it well might, absent an economic miracle. He may go completely nuts. His greater and greater grandiosity requires ever greater claims, and when those claims fall flat with the crowd, Trump’s psyche melts down. Recall him after the election in 2020. Since defeat was intolerable for his self-image, he nearly brought down the entire system to preserve it. God knows what he might do if he sees the economy sliding or the Congress moving decisively against him next November.

But to be honest, after a decade of this, I’m tired of despairing, aren’t you? So fuck it. It’s Christmas and perhaps we need to believe in the return of sanity before it can arrive again. So here goes one more time.

Know hope.

Home News

This year marks the 5th Anniversary of The Weekly Dish, if you can believe it. It’s been an incredible ride — and none of it would have happened without you. Many of you have been there for us since the beginning, and many more have joined these past five years, for which Chris and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We’re especially grateful given how routinely I piss you all off, on all sides. That says a lot about why Dish subscribers, in our view, are the coolest on the web.

I’ve also decided to save string on my faith memoir until we’re done with Trump, and devote my energies here through 2028. I’ll be researching and sketching the book, but not at the expense of the Dish. We started this journey together in May 2016 and I feel an obligation to see it through to the end. It’s that simple. I hope you’ll keep me and Chris company.

Which brings me to a more prosaic note. We haven’t changed our price for five-and-a-half years, even though inflation has eroded 25 percent of the value in the interim. So to keep up a bit, we’re raising the price for new subscribers — to $6 for a monthly plan and $60 for an annual. No current subscriber will be affected — so don’t worry.

But we’re not doing it till the New Year!

That gives all of you who keep telling us you mean to get around to subscribing a golden opportunity. Here’s your chance to lock in the low current price before it goes up. We really, really hope you do.

If you’re a longtime subscriber and have the means to help us keep up with inflation, we’d also be deeply grateful if you choose to increase your sub. It’s easy to do. Just click on the “Upgrade to founding” button at the very top-right of this page, and pick a price higher than $50 a year. Or, if you’re reading this page over email, click here to find the “Upgrade to founding” button. Upping the price only takes a few seconds, since your payment info is already loaded as an existing subscriber.

And here’s why we’re asking. The Dish is a special place in our view: we’re not purely on one side or the other; we air dissents every week; we’re in no one’s pocket; we’re ad-free; and we’re devoid of the toxic excess of so much else online today. If you think that’s worth supporting in today’s toxic media climate, please help. These are dark times for liberal and humane values, and even tougher for a sane and moderate conservatism. If you want to help bring brighter days for both, subscribe!

You have until January 1 to lock in the current low price of $5 a month or $50 a year. Don’t wait or you’ll miss the window! Or again, if you’re already a subscriber, increase your current price by becoming a Founding Member. And as always, gift subscriptions are available if you still need to get something for a friend or family member for the holidays.

Merry Christmas from me, Chris, and Truman. With love. And Dishness.

New On The Dishcast: Simon Rogoff

Simon is a clinical psychologist who writes about the connections between “Narcissism, Trauma, Fame, and Power” — the name of his substack. He has over 20 years experience in the field of treatment of personality disorders and complex PTSD — the field of psychology in which narcissism is most invoked. We talked about what narcissism is, healthy and unhealthy; and we discuss some famous narcissists — Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, Hitler, Churchill — and the childhood patterns they have in common. Then of course you-know-who: our Malignant Narcissist-In-Chief.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how narcissism is formed in childhood, my own struggles with it, and when narcissism turns malignant. That link also takes you to a ton of dissent and other commentary on my pod debate with Shadi Hamid on US power abroad, along with a smattering of emails on last week’s column on marriage equality, and other recent columns.

Yglesias Award Nominees

“That was perhaps the most pointless primetime presidential address ever delivered in American history,” – Matt Walsh.

“ROB REINER WAS A LEGEND. His work as an actor and director entertained generations and will live on. We strongly disagreed on politics, but when I ran into him at a Brentwood restaurant years ago, we had a respectful conversation — and he agreed on the spot to come in studio the very next night,” – Laura Ingraham.

“This is putrid. … Hard to be shocked by how gross the president can be, but he sure did get me this time,” – Rod Dreher.

“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful. Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood, and as a patriot? I most certainly did,” – James Woods, Republican gadfly in Hollywood.

“All those people who lost their jobs for their disgusting tweets about Charlie Kirk’s assassination are staring at the President of the United States’s social media account in disbelief,” – Erick Erickson.

“Horror, absolute horror. … That should never happen to anybody — I don’t care what your political beliefs are,” – Rob Reiner on the assassination of Kirk.

Money Quote For The Week

“I don’t do ongoing commentary about everything that’s said by everybody in government every day,” – Mike Johnson asked about Trump’s comments on Reiner.

The View From Your Window

Madison, Wisconsin, 11.09 pm

Dissent Of The Week

A reader writes:

Your work generally is an important answer to much of what is wrong about political discourse today, but on gender issues you fall into the common trap of amplifying the most radical voices in order to marginalize, if not dismiss entirely, the existence and significance of gender. Your most recent column, “Ten Years Of Marriage Equality,” is an example of this.

I, like most people who take gender theory seriously, believe that biological sex is a scientific fact that is often (though not always) very significant. At the same time, the distinct but interrelated term “gender” — the existence of which your column seemed to entirely deny — is a social construct that is also real and often (though not always) very significant.

I would love for you to engage more meaningfully with less radical ideas revolving around gender, giving fair consideration for the valid concerns raised while giving reasonable voice to your valid counter-concerns. Yours could be an amazingly important voice in trying to balance some of these (probably not entirely resolvable) tensions. Instead, by amplifying the most radical voices around gender, you diminish the potential for real and reasonable discussions — and worse yet, you increase the vitriol surrounding the issues. This is far from the brand of discourse your readers know and love you for.

I’ve become very leery of the term “gender” because of the way in which some have tried to use it not as a synonym for sex, or as a social construction related to sex, but as a replacement for sex entirely. In the process, maybe I’ve become too dismissive of its rightful usage — and I take your point. The way we express our sex is distinct from the sex itself — and I have no problem with and admire the many who play with it, invert it, as well as those for whom it is largely irrelevant. I just hate the way it has been used to deny the reality of biological sex.

Many more dissents — over my debate with Shadi Hamid on the role of US power abroad — are on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Sometimes you need to stop and smell the apples — in Cornwall:

In The ‘Stacks

• Claire Lehmann reflects on her country’s deadliest terrorist attack ever. Australia’s Jews shudder.
• Ukrainian forces are hitting back hard in Kupyansk, but Zelensky still faces an “impossible dilemma” in peace talks.
• Glenn Kessler singles out 10 of Trump’s biggest lies this year.
• Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer review a year of executive madness.
• The McCarthyite chill intensifies.
• It’s staggering how dishonest the Biden Dems still are on child sex changes. The groups that re-elected Trump still concede no error.
• What is Heather Cox Richardsonism? Nate Silver warns Dems against it.
• Ed West explains “why Starmerism failed.”
• Tim Noah remembers Norman Podhoretz as “the ultimate neocon.” RIP.
• Dr Hannah Spier details the ways narcissism differs for women.
• Freddie deBoer grapples with falling testosterone as a new father.
• A discussion of love and loneliness in the modern world.
• James Marriott, whose piece on “the post-literate society” went viral, recommends books.
• An ode to baked beans on toast.
• Alex Ross, a music critic for The New Yorker and friend in the ‘90s, starts a ‘stack. And the WSJ just launched “Free Expression.”

The View From Your Window Contest

Recommend The Weekly Dish to your readers

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – George Orwell.