Trump and the paranoid style
By 
This is a grimly amusing article, in which the correspondent interviews former politicians — Elliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Trent Lott — whose careers ended because of scandals of one sort or another. The reporter asks them to comment on the striking fact that an almost countless array of vastly worse scandals have actually helped Donald Trump’s political career:
In another era, a politician would have walked away.
For decades, American elected officials facing criminal charges or grave violations of the public trust would yield their positions of power, if only reluctantly, citing a duty to save the country from embarrassment and ease the strain on its institutions.
Then came Donald J. Trump. The former president isn’t just forging ahead despite four indictments and 91 felony charges, but actively orchestrating a head-on collision between the nation’s political and legal systems.
The ramifications continued to accrue this week, when the fundamental question of the former president’s eligibility for office was all but forced upon a Supreme Court already mired in unprecedented questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.
But the heated legal debate over whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection obscured the extraordinary reality that he is running for president at all — returning with fresh vengeance and a familiar playbook built around the notions that he can never lose, will never be convicted and will never really go away.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Trump phenomenon is that supporting his re-election campaign requires buying into the most extreme paranoid framing of American law and politics, in which Trump — Donald Trump mind you! — is nothing but the victim of an indescribably elaborate deep state conspiracy, designed to destroy an innocent man (again, we’re talking about Donald Trump here).
That the dynamics at play are those of a cult ought to be hard to deny, although I don’t doubt that our establishment media are up to the challenge.