"Let's not drop our guard too quickly then"

 Ever since the first state primary defeats of Donald Trump back in 2016, commentators and journalists have been holding their breath to write one version or another of the same think piece: "Don't get too comfortable," they long to say—"Trump may have been defeated; but look at these other Republican frontrunners! Many of them are just as bad! Look at this Ted Cruz fellow! What an extremist! Would a Ted Cruz candidacy really be that much better than a Trump campaign?" 

In short, they long to utter the type of prophetic warning that concludes Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (in the Tabori/Beaton translation): "So let's not drop our guard too quickly then:/ Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard/ The b—— that bore him is in heat again." That is to say: "Trump may have gone down in justified defeat; but the larger tendencies toward quasi-fascism and authoritarianism in the modern GOP are just getting started!"

The problem with this think piece—which we have planned so many times over in our heads, or even published (here's one I wrote along these lines at a moment in the 2016 election cycle when Trump seemed on the ropes)—is that it always proves premature. As a result, what we had intended to seem prophetic comes to appear exactly the opposite: we, not the American people, were the ones to declare victory too soon, and to breathe a sigh of relief too early. We had thought that whatever recent development had just occurred—the Access Hollywood tape, say—had finally doomed Trump. But it hadn't. 

We seem to be doing the same thing again this cycle. Ever since the 2020 election we have been saying: "Don't get too comfortable, America! You all may have stood up and stopped the bastard, but the party that installed him is just as unhinged as ever! Get a load of these MAGA congressional candidates! Check out this Ron DeSantis character, with his efforts to become the Viktor Orbán of American state government. They are the coming menace!"

Yet, every time we try to shift the conversation over to these new dangers, we end up with egg on our faces. The MAGA midterm candidates fizzled. And Ron DeSantis, for all the danger he poses to the people of Florida, may turn out to be a big nothing on the national stage. So far, he has lagged far behind a candidate who launched his campaign by meeting with a white nationalist and a Neo-Nazi, whose only sustained attack on DeSantis has been a series of anti-Italian-American slurs, and whose only real political advantage appears to be the mysterious, unquantifiable evil magic of being Donald Trump. 

The current news cycle about the Trump indictment has all the makings of a repeat of the same pattern. "Trump has finally been defeated; but watch out—this DeSantis fellow will come soon after!" After all, we were assured that the indictment would be bad political news for Trump. A Politico column from a few weeks ago declared: "Stop overthinking it: An indictment would be bad for Trump." Yet, now that the indictment has come, the over-thinkers may be proven right. Politico followed up this article last week with a new headline: "The data's clear: The indictment makes Republicans like Trump more."

In short, it's still premature, even after all of this, to start trying to shift the public's attention away from "the bastard" and toward "the b—— that bore him," to borrow Brecht's pardonably vitriolic phrase. The "bastard" is still very much with us, and the world has not yet stood up and stopped him. The indictment, far from bringing the interminable saga of his demagoguery to an end, has given it new ballast. After all, we are doing what Trump wants us to do again: we are all talking about him. And the coverage that follows will unavoidably amount to more free advertising for his political brand. 

All of this might have been worth it, if the criminal case against him were rock solid, and if the wrongdoing it promised to expose to the public were sufficiently severe that it could change public attitudes to him at the margins. But neither seems to be true. The case appears to have multiple legal holes in it, and the crimes at issue—falsifying business records—amount to little more than misdemeanors under New York law, which can only be elevated to felonies through overly-clever and largely circular prosecutorial maneuvers that may not hold up in court. 

Those of us desperate to write the "Start paying attention to DeSantis" think pieces, who have been longing for years to hit publish on the "Don't get too cozy about Trump's downfall, America" op-ed or blog post, may have to hold our breath a bit longer still. DeSantis may not seriously be in the running; and Trump's downfall may still be a long time coming. Maybe, once he has actually departed from political life, we can start warning again about the party that bore him and the threat posed by his epigoni and his Tamburlaines and his Grima Wormtongues and the scouring of the Shire. 

But for now, hold your tongues. Save the think piece for another day. Because from where we stand now, Sauron has still not been defeated. Genghis Khan is still at large. The world, alas, has not "stopped the bastard" yet.