Trump may never leave the White House

There is a real possibility of Donald Trump, president for life

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Rauluminate/iStock, Alex Edelman- Pool/Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons)

When President Trump responded on Monday to reports about the contents of Bob Woodward's Fear with the suggestion that one day he would write a "real book," I shook my head. Not because it is impossible to imagine him finding a ghostwriter willing to collaborate on The Art of the Deal II: How I Saved Our Tremendous Flag, Our Booming Stock Market, and Our Beautiful Steel From Fake News CNN and Made America Great(est) Again. Rather because the idea of a post-presidential Trump has become unthinkable.

I cannot be the only person for whom this is true. The degree to which Trump has saturated American media is unprecedented. Only some of this can be said to be the result of technology and parallel developments in journalism; we had a 24/7 news cycle and Twitter during the Obama administration, but days and even weeks could go by when the president was very far from the major stories of the day. No public figure in the history of this or any country has ever figured so prominently in the lives of its citizens, not even in the great authoritarian regimes of the 20th century, as President Trump. The cult of personality established by the Kim dynasty in North Korea is, at least in terms of its sheer reach, a jacket blurb in comparison with what cable news and our major newspapers have created, ostensibly in the spirit of independent reporting and criticism, for the former host of The Apprentice.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.