Why Trump the Performer is Facing His Final Act
The president’s genius was always making his production obscure reality. Now, the curtain is at last coming down.
Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty
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Donald Trump’s political career has been finely delineated between performance and accomplishment. His success has been that his performance—capturing and holding the attention of the world—has been so much greater than his accomplishments, or lack of accomplishments. We don’t dwell on what Trump has done, but rather on who he is. His performance has even managed to obscure the reasons he lost the 2020 election, in fact, actually managing to obscure the loss itself. As his performance constantly reiterates, he won.
President Donald Trump looks on as he attends a midterm campaign rally at Salina Regional Airport in Salina, Kansas, on November 1, 2026.
Evan Vucci/REUTERS
The first year of his second term seemed to merge performance and accomplishment—his power grab was the performance. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan built their book, Regime Change, around the thesis that his personalization of virtually everything had redefined and vastly expanded presidential power in an epochal way.
But, in fact, this performance came to rely so much on illusory accomplishments that Trump seemed to actually believe he had accomplished something. Or, in that always fatal mistake, he came to believe his own bulls--t. So much so that, by the second year, the accomplishments, or lack of, came to overshadow the performance. His power grab made him believe he was all powerful—but his performance kept highlighting what he had done, or failed to do, with his power.
This, then, is what tomorrow’s election is about:
- Failing to relieve the economic situation he promised to fix.
- Exacerbating it with tariffs and war.
- Promising to end the Iran war in weeks and then having it go on for months and months with no end in sight.
- Closing the border down and thereby solving the border crisis, a clear win—but then shifting the issue to masked men in the streets terrorizing American citizens, the immigrants they personally know, and much of the Hispanic population.
- Lavishing attention and favor on the very rich.
- Making billions of dollars in the White House for himself and all the members of his family. Billions!
- In the dead of night, tearing up the White House, and key sites in Washington, D.C. in a tone-deaf effort at immortality.
- Controlling the Justice Department and using it as an instrument of his own grievances and desire for personal retribution.
- And when these efforts at retribution failed, continuing to try, calling ever-more attention to his failures and his bitterness.
- And yet, asleep at the switch, having his own Attorney General fumble the Jeffrey Epstein issue and thereby opening the Pandora’s box of “Epstein files”—fatefully joining him to his former life as Epstein’s partner and wingman.
- Linking his brand with Musk’s.
- Linking his brand with Putin’s.
- Linking his brand with Netanyahu’s.
- Surrounding himself with dislikeable ignoramuses and giving them enormous power, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel, Vance ... every dummy word out of each of their mouths at his expense.
- And, too, the women around him: Natalie Harp, Alina Habba, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Oy.
- The scorn of his own wife.
- His age, and its increasingly obvious ravages.
Because the Republican Party has been so abject in its brown-nosing obedience to him, its brand is fatally linked to his; all his misfires, inattention, incompetence, lack of concern, grift, truly crazed utterances and man crushes, hang around the neck of every Republican whose career is in the balance tomorrow.
History will rightly be awed and confounded by Trump’s performance, but he is about to be booed off the stage.
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