Perseverance in Despair

There is a saying, well-known in French, counseling resolve in the face of hopelessness: “Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer.” (Freely translated: Hope is not necessary to endeavor, nor is success necessary to persevere.”) The thought, with minor modification, has been variously attributed to both Charles the Bold and William of Orange and quoted by writers as different as Marguerite Yourcenar and Jean-Paul Sartre. It's a good motto for bleak times in general and for these times in particular.

For the first time in a long while, though, I've begun to feel the first stirrings of hope, and even if Charles and William are right that hope is something one can do without, I think they would agree that it's easier to get going if you think the winds might be shifting in a more favorable direction.

Certainly, the election results of a few weeks ago offered a modicum of encouragement. To that Republican electoral debacle have now been added signs that the MAGA movement is neither as unified nor as indomitable as it once appeared. For example, Trump has been forced to rescind tariffs on certain food items because of cries of pain from below. He has been embarrassed by the leak of derogatory items from the so-called Epstein files, challenged from within by erstwhile epigones such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and forced to back off opposition to release of the files by the growing belief that he must have a great deal to hide.

Worse still for a would-be tyrant, he has been made to look ridiculous by repeatedly changing his tune: at first, the Epstein files were going to lay bare the perfidy of the Democrats; then, through his mouthpiece Pam Bondi, he asserted that there was nothing in them and everyone should just move on; still later, he ordered the same Bondi to use this supposedly non-existent evidence to go after his enemies Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, et al.

In a Times column published yesterday, Michelle Goldberg evoked these various fissures in the MAGA edifice, to which she added the noteworthy observation that even stalwarts of the movement such as Mike Cernovich, who helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, were appalled by the magnitude of MAGA corruption. And how could one not be appalled, with the Trump family profiting so handsomely from presidential decisions on matters ranging from cryptocurrency to defense contracts to brokering pardons to wheeling and dealing in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond? Although the shamelessness of it all is breathtaking, until now none of it seemed to have been noticed by Trump's “base.”

What has changed? Perhaps no more than my mood. I hope I'm not allowing the wish to become father to the thought. But it's just possible that the “audience” of Trump's slickly produced reality show has begun to notice that things aren't going according to script. The war in Ukraine, which was to have been settled on Day One, rages on. Meanwhile, after expending a great deal of firepower to dispatch a few small motorboats to Kingdom Come, a great armada has been assembled for the apparent purpose of bringing Venezuela to its knees. Venezuela! In the heyday of American imperialism, a gunboat or two would have sufficed, but our self-designated Secretary of War has chosen to deploy our “largest and most lethal aircraft carrier,” as ABC's Martha Raddatz describes it, along with a B52 redeemed from mothballs presumably because it cut a more impressive figure for the cameras than one of the smaller jets arrayed on the deck of the carrier below.

At the same time, heavily armed and masked ICE brigades have been unleashed on city after city, while Homeland Security officials boasted of the arrest of ”81 illegals this weekend, our biggest haul to date.” It may have dawned on television audiences that 81 is a small number compared with the 12 or 20 or 30 million “illegals” (the number keeps rising) said to be in the country. Symbolic shows of force wear thin after a while.

At the same time, doubts about Trump's management of the economy are growing. The tariff policy is an incoherent mess. Its justification in the name of national emergency has been questioned in the federal courts. There is suspicion that the job market stagnated while statistics were not being collected owing to the federal shutdown. Investors have begun to pull back from the stock market for fear that the AI-driven bubble is about to burst, and without the winds of AI driving it forward, the economy could soon find itself dead in the water.

The Trump Show has always depended on illusion, like the professional wrestling shows that inspired it. Is it too much to hope that viewers are beginning to tire? I'm not sure, but il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre.