Donald Trump and Joe Biden are each in their own dangerous bubble. We’ll see which pops first

Wandering the city, it felt at times like I was moving from one bubble to another, to different worlds, with different rules, each orbiting different stars, all threatening to go nova at any time.

To cover an American political convention in 2024, in other words, is to find yourself stepping endlessly between different bubbles where different crowds are breathing very different gas. And what you see in each can be a kind of reality-bending Rorschach Test.

There is, for instance, the atmosphere inside the convention itself, all joy and fantasy. In that America, the Trump presidency wasn’t a melee of chaos and cruelty. Children weren’t stripped from their parents at the border and locked in cages. No one suggested anyone else inject any bleach. It was a time instead of peace and riches, one that will come once more when the chosen son, who has survived his four years of trials and persecutions, returns from the wilderness to rule again.

In that bubble, the metaphysics of logic don’t always apply. There is no paradox in calling for unity one moment, as Republicans did over and again this week, and waving placards promising mass deportation the next. There is nothing strange in that bubble about cheering attacks on trans people one night — keeping “men” out of women’s sports was easily the most reliably popular line for speakers all week — then buying a flight of pour-overs from a person with they/them pronouns in a coffee shop just outside the bubble the next morning.

(The most enduring image of the convention for me won’t be anything that happened inside the arena. It will be an elderly couple in matching cowboy hats and “Texans for Trump” shirts munching happily on avocado toast in that same coffee shop while Chappell Roan’s Red Wine Supernova — a joyous dance-pop celebration of Queer sex — boomed through the speakers overhead.)

Inside that bubble, the lines between rhetoric and reality had collapsed. Inside that bubble, J.D. Vance — a Yale-educated venture capitalist who has written extensively about such Byzantine fare as Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire — could wax on about his Mamaw and her guns. Inside that bubble, Donald Trump, one of the most famously hated New Yorkers of all time, could be recast as a New York icon. Inside that bubble, the Real America is the America of Hulk Hogan — who spoke on the final night in Milwaukee (and tore off his shirt onstage) — the most popular fake fighter of all time.

But there were other bubbles in Milwaukee this week, other planets wrapped in atmospheres of beguiling gas.

There is the media bubble, of course, centred this year on the convention grounds in a converted restaurant redubbed for the week the CNN-Politico Grill. Inside the grill every morning, Politico reporters gave gentle interviews to Republican stars while journalists and convention VIPs enjoyed bagels, green juice and, on the last morning, a bottomless Bloody Mary bar.

“Just to go back to former president Trump,” Politico’s Rachael Blade said in an interview with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on Tuesday morning. “You could tell watching him (on the convention floor last night) that he is a changed man after Saturday.”

That was a theme all week in the media bubble, that Trump had changed, that he had softened, that he had become a new man. One story quoted allies calling him “emotional,” “serene” and even “existential.” Trump’s every gesture from his box in the Fiserv Forum became like a hint from an oracle, his smiles dissected for new signs of emotional depth, his waves taken as proof that he was different now, that he was the same, that it was the party that had changed, no the country, no nothing at all. “The sort of swagger you see, that emanates from him wherever he goes, wasn’t there,” Blade said. “I swear there was a point where I was watching the TV screen (and it) looked like he’s about to start crying.”

A bartender in the grill told me the convention didn’t have the weirdest crowd she’d ever served. The costumes at fan expos were stranger, she said, (although I did see a man in an Uncle Sam costume handing out ear bandages and another dressed as Trump’s big, beautiful wall.) You see “some of the same kind of people” at both events, the bartender said with a laugh.

Strangely, the Trump bubble was not the defining bubble in Milwaukee in this week. By the end of the week, Trump, who just days earlier had survived an assassination attempt, wasn’t even the biggest story on the floor. Instead the talk, among Republicans and reporters and even among normal people outside all the bubbles in the city itself, was about Joe Biden and his ever-shrinking world.

Trump’s speech Thursday was a reminder of just how weak he can be as a candidate. He rambled and muttered. He whispered and carried on. But for all the pundit speculation, he was also manifestly unchanged. That isn’t a bad thing for his campaign, necessarily. I say this is as someone who grew up in Ralph Klein’s Alberta, who covered Rob Ford’s city hall and who has sat in Doug Ford’s RV: There is an honesty to Trump’s bull that many voters recognize and even admire. He lies constantly. But he is also forever and indelibly who he is.

Many voters, for better or worse, are comfortable with that now. Many more are just resigned. One of the most striking things about the convention this week was just how little protest was visible anywhere near the site. I saw one demonstration Thursday that was so small I could count the marchers as they walked by. There were 13 of them in all.

That Joe Biden thought that it would be enough this year to just say, ‘Don’t vote for that guy. He’s full of malarkey!’ is a sign of just how insular his bubble has become. That as of this writing he is still waffling about stepping down suggests the atmosphere inside that bubble has perhaps grown a little thin.

Eighteen years ago, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from the ninth planet of our solar system to dwarf status. Pluto, astronomers had discovered, did not have the gravitational force necessary to clear its orbital neighbourhood of rivals. Instead, it circles on the periphery of our world, one planet-ling, with a thin, gassy atmosphere, among many.

Trump, for all his faults, is a celestial giant. Everything in the Republican world orbits around him. If that wasn’t clear before this week, it certainly is now, after even his fiercest intra-party opponents, such as Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, appeared at his convention on bended knee.

Biden at this point isn’t even a planet. He can’t clear his rivals. He certainly can’t take on Donald Trump. The only question now is whether the people inside his bubble can convince him of that reality before it’s too late, before Trump takes power again, before he has another opportunity to burn out and collapse in on himself, to become fantastically dense and inescapable, to create the closest thing there is, in a universe where nothing can ever be truly created or destroyed, to an end.

Clarification - July 22, 2024

This article was updated from a previous version to make clear that it is referring to Pluto’s gassy atmosphere when it described it as a gaseous planet-ling.