Douthat: Trump tries to sell a normal-ish second term

In the debate about what a second Donald Trump term would mean for the stability of American democracy, parsing the “true” meaning of any given Trumpian rhetorical flourish — Was he just predicting a “bloodbath” for the auto industry if Joe Biden wins, or prophesying civil war? — is about 60 times less useful than figuring out who will actually staff a second Trump administration.

Will it be a reprise of Trump’s first few years in office, when a collection of Wall Streeters, generals and stock figures from the pre-Trump GOP filled his Cabinet, creating a parallel reality of normal-ish Republican governance alongside White House chaos and presidential rants? Or will it be a reprise of the first term’s last two months, when the normal people slipped away and Trump was left alone to play the authoritarian with a set of enablers and kooks?

After Jan. 6, 2021, it seemed hard to imagine the first reprise happening. Surely nobody normal or establishmentarian would want to work for Trump again, and surely Trump himself would want a team of ruthless populist avengers, eager to push the system to the breaking point. So to envision a second Trump term was to envision an administration staffed by Steve Bannon acolytes and run by acting secretaries too strange for Senate confirmation, all eager for brinkmanship and constitutional crisis.

But that isn’t what Trump is signaling right now. His desperation for donor money as he deals with mounting legal bills has him kissing up to Wall Street financiers. And in a similar spirit, his campaign just leaked its desire to put Republican senators such as Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio — classic hawkish internationalists, not Tucker Carlson guests — in charge of the national security bureaucracy.

We’ll know more about how far Trump is willing to take this sales pitch when he unveils his vice-presidential pick. But we won’t know just how many senators or businesspeople are willing to make themselves hostages to Trumpism by joining his administration unless and until he actually wins.

For now, though, whether you find it believable or not, the intended message to Republican donors is clear: Stand by me, open your checkbooks, and I’ll give you the same kind of administration I gave you back in 2017. The populists get the mood music and wild rhetoric and maybe immigration policy, but mostly, those guys still get to run the show.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.

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