The Real Reason Donald Trump's Legal Dramas Can't Touch His Popularity | Opinion

Another week, another Donald Trump legal scandal.

The latest, an indictment handed down by Georgia's Fulton County, charges the former president with orchestrating a "criminal organization" to spread falsehoods about the 2020 election. It's likely to meet the same mixture of responses that every other Trump legal drama has: unalloyed glee from liberal commentators who seem convinced that Trump is (finally) toast, accusations of biased prosecution from scattered conservative voices, and silence from the general public.

Why don't these repeated scandals seem to make a difference in anyone's perception of the former president? It seems that no matter what happens, he remains the GOP frontrunner. That's because our media environment turns Trump's greatest weakness as a person into an invincible strength as a politician.

With news of the latest indictment, as with all the other Trump legal dramas, there are two distinct things people could react to: the real event and the media event; the thing itself and the image. With an indictment and arraignment, real papers are filed in real courts. They contain claims about what did or did not happen. There is, somewhere in all this, the objective truth about events, decisions, and consequences.

But there is also the presentation of those real events, and the average American is media-literate enough to know the presentation can operate independently of the reality. After all, we all use social media, we know things get embellished, and we know today's Earth-shattering viral post is long forgotten tomorrow. That doesn't mean it necessarily contradicts the reality; it's just a different thing.

So when someone says "the indictment," they could be talking about the actual legal event, or about the discourse surrounding it—the intense media coverage and its symbolic resonance. The force of the latter drives, for instance, the well-rehearsed argument that every new legal drama "only helps Trump." The argument is that all press is good press for the Trump campaign, and that keeping him in the news only enhances his symbolic resonance for supporters. This is a comment on the media event, not the real event. For all the legal trouble Trump has undergone, his defenders never feel much need to address the substance of charges or underlying facts.

The only surefire way to force people out of that habit is for there to be some consequence other than one more media circus—for reality to break through the image. In the case of the latest Trump indictment, that might mean the government putting Trump in jail, the GOP taking him off the ballot by fiat, the next president pardoning him, or some other unpredictable event with unknowable consequences for the country. Short of such an event, all the hearings and accusations and indictments are just talk, and they give people permission to talk about the talk and nothing else. All that will—or can—matter to anyone is the image, not the thing in itself.

Donald Trump thrives in this environment for one inescapable reason: he is a media event himself. Other candidates need to try to generate headlines and deliver speeches about issues or policies. He never has. He needs only to show up in person and riff, and he always riffs about himself. There are no news stories about Trump, and there is no ideology or set of goals behind what he says; there is just Trump. Headlines about his misdeeds tell voters nothing they didn't already know from looking at him—he's sleazy, he's kitschy, he watches too much TV and reads too many social media posts.

The nice way to put it is to say he's "authentic." In a world of images pretending to point to deeper realities, he's just image. Any "real" Donald Trump behind what's plain to see couldn't possibly be as interesting, if it exists at all. It's not that he has lots of glitz and little substance underneath; it's that he is glitz, plain and simple. There is no "underneath" to talk about. He's an Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup can that ran for president.

And that's a superpower, perfectly suited for our times. Stories trying to reveal some secret truth about Trump always ring hollow because they posit the absurd: that there is something more to the former president. The Fulton County indictment assumes Trump didn't really believe what he was saying about fraudulent or missing votes, and only said what he said to pursue an ulterior goal. Jack Smith's indictment from earlier this month, in lodging charges of fraud and conspiracy, also requires us to believe that Trump "knew" his challenge to the 2020 election result was fraudulent; that when told he had lost the election he believed it but orchestrated a conspiracy anyway.

This is to posit a "real" Trump behind the facade, who heard and believed the evidence that he lost the 2020 election. But what if there is no such Trump?

All this is the sign of an age where "real" politics seems impossible and all that's left for democratic citizens to jockey over are images. In a postmodern America where the economy trades in symbols unconnected to the average family's actual well-being, where "there is no alternative" in politics, where we're one generation removed from "the end of history" and two from "the end of ideology," Trump is the perfect—or rather, the only—politician.

Take it as an insult or a compliment to the former president, but Trump's one-dimensionality really is the whole story. Anything you attribute to him—whether plans to launch a coup or a policy agenda to uplift the common man—is going to sound speculative at best, not because it isn't factual but because it needs to posit some "real thing" hiding behind the appearance. But the impossible secret is that all we have is appearance. The tragedy of 21st-century American democracy is that there's nothing more to it than that.

Philip Jeffery is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.