What Have We Done?

We're all branded now

This is a disaster.  America has just been dealt a terrible blow, and it’s not clear how we’ll recover.  Donald Trump is as fit to be President of the United States as a rabid gorilla is to drive a school bus.  He’s an ignorant, bigoted, bullying, narcissistic clown, and that personal instability in conjunction with the policies he’ll likely implement (with the eager help of a thoroughly Republican Congress) will do the country, and quite possibly the world, great damage.  In fact, this is such a comprehensive disaster that it’s hard to fully appreciate it.  But let’s try.  Let’s take a stark look at the likely ramifications of America’s self-inflicted wound.  Let’s face up to what we’ve done.

You don’t have to be a liberal to contemplate Trump’s coming presidency with dread, but it sure helps.  Trump ran, particularly in the early days, as a genuine populist, promising to raise taxes on Wall Street, to protect Social Security and Medicare, to fight for American workers – all things economic liberals heartily endorse.  But as time went by he became increasingly co-opted on these issues by the Republican establishment.  Now much of his economic program looks like it was written by Ronald Reagan or – admittedly the same thing – the Chamber of Commerce.  It delivers huge tax cuts that go almost exclusively to the investor class, it relieves 20 million poorer Americans of their health insurance, it removes constraints on the financial markets that delivered us so effectively to the Great Recession.  The plutocracy’s favorite ideologue, Paul Ryan, is even claiming that the now comprehensively Republican federal government has been given a mandate to privatize Medicare!  So much for populism.

Trump has become, in effect, a special case of the investor class’s master strategy for turning populist anger to capitalist advantage.  The typical Republican presidential candidate wins by pointing angry fingers at liberal snobbery, black thievery, and gay buggery; and once elected proceeds to treat the country as little more than raw resource for capitalist ingestion.  But Trump ran against the script, attacking not just racial, sexual, and religious minorities, but Wall Street and big business too!  But the establishment that could not stop him was able to work him.  Usually the conservative populace is duped into supporting an investor-class stooge, but this time the candidate himself was duped.  So much for tough negotiation.

But it would be unfair to say Trump has become completely co-opted.  For the most part he still holds his ground on the issues of immigration and trade.  American workers will be better off if immigration, illegal and legal, is more tightly controlled, and if the American negotiators of trade deals are actually concerned about them.  But collecting up and tossing out millions of immigrants who are here illegally would be a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable proportion, one that no thinking or feeling person could remotely defend.  That is, the typical Trumpian brainless barbarism spells disaster even on those issues in which he genuinely is looking out for the American worker.  If Hillary had become president, thoughtful patriots of all ideologies might have pressured her to moderate her globalist attitude.  But tempering Hillary with practical concerns would have been much easier than moderating Trump with humanitarian ones.  So much for reasonable policy.

But our new Trump World isn’t just a unhappy place for working people, it’s also not particularly welcoming for blacks, women, Jews, Muslims, gays – basically anyone who isn’t a white Christian male.  The Trumpistas, like good right-wingers, rose to power denouncing the ways that all those non-white-Christian-male types are ruining things for regular Americans.  Black are criminals, Mexicans are rapists, Muslims are terrorists, Jews are evil conspirators, women refuse to be mere playthings.  It’s true that Trump hasn’t targeted gays, but the restive crowd on his right clearly has no sympathy for the sexually unorthodox.  And that’s the real point: It doesn’t really matter all that much if Trump himself is a bigot; what matters is that he has encouraged bigotry, he’s unleashed it.  It’s hard to judge how serious this particular threat is, but you don’t have to be a minority or a liberal to see real danger here.  So much for equality.

And the way that Trump has re-legitimated these sorts of hostilities is particularly dangerous.  That is, he’s made white identity politics central to his appeal.  He tells whites that they’re victimized by those other groups, that their primary loyalty is to each other, and that their problems can only be addressed if they understand and act upon their interests as white people. But this is an invitation to levels of racial hatred which we can now only imagine.  If white Americans come to broadly think of their own interests in racial terms then every contentious issue will come to be seen as a zero-sum dispute over limited resources.  America would devolve into constant and bitter infighting, into a war between the tribes, probably leading to greater and greater violence.  Identity politics has been both a miserable failure for non-whites and huge source of polarization and discord for us all.  If whites adopt it too, it could mean the desolation of America.  So much for national unity.

And Trump’s authoritarian sensibility is a dagger pointed at the heart of self-government.  He admires foreign tyrants and autocrats.  He hopes to curtail press freedom.  He threatens political rivals with lawsuits and prison.  He thoughtlessly undermines the democratic process.  He’s unhappy that freedom of expression hampers ardent pursuit of the terrorists.  He advocates torture for its punitive value.  He blithely dismisses the norms that make our system function.  He embodies and encourages the authoritarian trends growing on the right side of America.  You don’t have to a liberal or a minority to find this alarming: A corrupt, amoral megalomaniac has just been given control over our military and our enormous federal investigative apparatus, one that already monitors our emails and phone calls.  And he’s certain to face no resistance from rival centers of power in a Washington completely controlled by a cowed and fawning Republican Party.  So much for democracy.

And he has no character.  He successfully ran for president without any solid convictions, without any knowledge of the issues, with no respect for our democratic traditions, with no compunction about misrepresenting opponents or himself, with no generosity or ideals or compassion.  The American people should have kicked this pathetic man-child to the curb for his impossible ignorance and gurgling malice.  But as payment for his lies and his threats and his ungodly vanity he will get to sit in the office once occupied by Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelt’s and delight in his own true brilliance and awesomeness.  So much for accountability.

And that leads to what’s arguably the scariest aspect of the Trumpian calamity: his instability.  He clearly suffers from something like clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  He has little or no control over his own impulses.  He responds bitterly and vindictively to every slight.  He can’t sit still long enough to read or to learn anything.  He feels no obligation to conform what he says to what actually is.  He casually spreads lies and conspiracy theories.  He feels no responsibility to anything but his own ego.  He’s incapable of reasoning and speaking like an adult.  The combination of authoritarianism and recklessness is particularly frightening.  Is it too far-fetched to worry that he might use official force against political opponents, or impulsively start a war, or even casually employ nuclear weapons?  Maybe it is, but consider that we can’t be sure.  So much for security.

An American flag recovered from World Trade Centre site after 9/11

So much for America.  So much for our hope and our promise and our potential.  Almost everything we admire in ourselves – our commitment to justice and freedom, our generosity, our common sense, our openness, our honesty, our idealism, our optimism – has been besmirched or undermined or threatened by Donald Trump.  In effect, he’s promised to turn America into a shambles and now he’s been given the power to do so.

And now that he has won, there is enormous pressure to treat this as just another election and Trump as just another president.  As if winning excuses all his sins, or makes them irrelevant, or means they’re not indicative of how he’ll govern.  Wishful thinking, respect for the democratic transition of power, and the need to feel the world is safe, all these conspire to lull us into seeing things as not fundamentally changed.  But it’s just not true, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  The disaster is real.  We may not have seen it coming, but we should damn well recognize it now that it’s here.  As Jonathan Chait so nicely put it:

To submit to a world where we say the words President Trump without anger or laughter is to surrender our idea of what the office means.

But what’s threatened by casually accepting Trump’s win isn’t just our idea of what the presidency means, it’s our idea of what democracy, justice, and decency mean.  Of what America means.  Trump did legitimately win and he will be president for at least 4 long years, that’s a fact and we need to respect it and accept it.  But we shouldn’t just treat it as part of the normal course of events and get back to our private lives.  History has taken a terrible turn.  The name TRUMP is being stamped upon us in 10 feet tall gold-plated letters.  We should grieve, deeply. 

And we should fight back!  We should organize and peacefully march and argue and persuade and vote and keep tight in our minds the profound seriousness of our situation.  And we should remember that America is always at its best when things are at their worst.  We need to rededicate ourselves to the best promises of America, while accepting that those promises are now much farther from our reach.  We must fully face the disaster and in facing it find the strength and the determination to fight it.  And one very important way we fight it is by refusing to treat it as anything other than the terrible disaster that it is. 

The Devouring

I am ego, hear me roar!

Donald Trump is actually quite a simple person.  All he cares about is his ego.  He knows he’s just so amazingly awesome!  And he has the garish wealth and the hot babes to prove it.  Is there another way to measure a person’s value?  To him the world is only raw material waiting to be consumed, just a collection of objects to be possessed and people to be dominated.  And anyone who declines is an enemy to be crushed, a small person who can only be motivated by petty spite and envy, a loser.  This simplicity is sometimes lost in the blizzard of his abusive and blustering speech, but it’s always his essential motivation, his bottom line.  Everyone must worship him as he worships himself.

And that leads to his defining feature as a public figure: his utter disregard for anything else.  The demands of his ravenous monster-ego are so overwhelming that he literally can’t stop to consider any other principle, including civility, or reason, or truth.  And this gives him a kind of grotesque transparency.  He seems to have no ability to censor himself, to control his impulses, to consider the consequences of his actions.  All that matters is that his ego be sated, which, of course, it never can be.  But his comprehensive irresponsibility also gives him an advantage in any confrontation with critics, since words utterly unconstrained by meaning or consequence are tough weapons to fight against.  It’s hard to argue with someone who doesn’t care about anything but winning.

Let’s consider some of the things he doesn’t he care about.  He quite obviously feels no responsibility to civility.  He crudely denigrates Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, etc.  He brags about how beautiful women are toys created for his pleasure, and how less attractive ones rightly earn his scorn.  Their feelings, their hardships, their dignity – those matter nothing.  Trump has even encouraged violence among his followers.  He doesn’t understand that civility matters because society cannot function if we don’t respect each other, even when we vigorously disagree.  That’s ridiculously obvious, yes.  Well, to you it is.

He feels no responsibility to the Republican Party.  When that tape appeared in which he makes dehumanizing comments about women and brags about sexually assaulting them, party leaders urged him to do everything he could to control the damage.  They begged him – in his own interests and those of down-ballot candidates – to fully apologize, to drop the issue, and to not dredge up similar actions by Bill Clinton.  Instead he doubled down, holding a press conference with Bill’s accusers from the 90’s and before, even giving them seats in the audience at the second debate.  In response, many of those party leaders, notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, have publicly distanced themselves, out of varying degrees of self-interest and moral revulsion.  But Trump’s responses throughout were never in doubt: he went on the crude offensive, first against Bill Clinton, then against those unhappy party bosses, attacking them as weak, pathetic, disloyal non-leaders.  This is an egotism so overwhelming that it can’t even get out of its own way!  A shrewder nominee would have conceded some small amount of stature by being conciliatory with his fellow party members.  But Trump can’t do that, even though it would help him win the presidency.  His narcissism is so short-sighted that it even subverts itself!

And that’s a recurring theme. There was, for instance, absolutely no electoral advantage in deliberately and repeatedly denigrating the Hispanic judge in his fraud trial, or an overweight Hispanic beauty queen from the 1990’s, or the father of a slain Muslim American soldier.  Indeed, in each of these three feuds he came off as bullying a sympathetic figure, and in each case he persisted in his attacks, thereby keeping the story alive in the public mind long after it would otherwise have died.  In each case he was incapable of doing the smart thing: ignoring the criticism and moving on.  And that almost certainly lost him votes with minorities, and probably with moderate whites as well.  But that just wasn’t as important as protecting his vanity.  His ego simply would not let him back down or let it go.

And there’s another recurring theme, his inability to apologize, to consider that he’s done anything wrong.  That is, he feels no responsibility to morality.   Right and wrong are for suckers, they are only distractions from winning.  Consider his leading part in the birther conspiracy.  For years he spread vicious rumors based on flimsy non-evidence that Barack Obama was not born in America, and was therefore unqualified to be president.  He continued to do so long after Obama released his long-form birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii.  And when in this election year the pressure to recant grew too great, he made a mealy-mouthed non-apology in which he falsely blamed the 2008 Hillary campaign for starting the rumors and took credit for finally laying them to rest.  He took no responsibility for the damage he had done to race relations and to our political discourse more broadly.  He just blithely acted as if none of that had ever happened.

And this may be the worst of all: he feels no responsibility to the truth.  To Trump words need not correspond to reality; they’re only tools for achieving whatever his goal is at that moment (and it’s ultimately always the one goal).  Consider his remarks last August in which he called Obama and Hillary “founders” of ISIS.  When interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who understood it made no sense to take Trump’s bizarre locution at face value, tried to prompt him to be a little more circumspect in his word choice:

Hewitt: Last night, you said the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.

Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.

Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. The way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, okay?

He doesn’t care.  And why should he care about trivialities like meaning? He casually contradicts what he said last month, or yesterday, or five minutes ago, or even earlier in the same sentence.  He contains multitudes!  He emits his unacquainted-with-reality verbiage and smirks at the camera defiantly, as if sneering at the truth, “You can’t make me care.”

We could go on like this all day and all night and all day and all night tomorrow.  Consider: By telling Hillary he will put her in jail if he’s elected, and by inviting an unfriendly foreign despot to interfere in the election, he shows he doesn’t care about democracy. By repeatedly promoting false crime statistics that wildly overstate black-on-white violence he shows he doesn’t care about racial harmony.  By celebrating waterboarding for its punitive value, and advocating the summary killing of the innocent wives and children of terrorists, he shows he doesn’t care about humanitarianism or justice.  By pre-emptively warning that he can only lose if the Democrats cheat, he shows he doesn’t care about public trust.  By refusing to prepare for the debates, and by stubbornly maintaining ignorance on even the most basic subjects, he shows he doesn’t care about expertise or competence.  Everything he says and does shows he feels no respect or responsibility for anything.

Except maybe the forgotten white working class, and their understanding of America. Trump at times seems to genuinely care about these people and the way conservative economic dogma and liberal cultural disdain have wounded them.  He sees them the way they see themselves, as hard-working people fighting a system that’s working against them, and in his dismissal of all the normal considerations of politics he is their defiance, and their denial.  His supporters are mostly good people wronged by their own elites, and in those moments when he champions them he rises a little above his own squalid vanity.  He comforts them with the same fairy tale he tells himself, that his amazing awesomeness will conquer all.  He extends to them his own irresponsibility, licensing their bitter refusal to face up to the realities of modern America, and to their part in our continuing racial discord.  His ego devours them, too!  And when push comes to shove and his concern for them conflicts with the demands of that implacable ego, he casually hurts their cause by undermining his own electoral chances.  Ultimately he doesn’t really care about them, at least not enough to deserve their support.

And in the end he doesn’t even really care about being president.  Does anyone actually believe he’d like to hold all that responsibility?  He would love the power and adulation, of course.  But he would be incapable of evaluating heavy decisions, or making concessions to unfriendly realities, or controlling his impulses when his buttons are pushed.  That is, he can’t really be the President, and he knows it.  He seems to have decided to run for president partly to avenge Obama’s insults against him over his birther-ism, maybe even on a dare.  If his ego trumps even his own self-interest, is there any reason to think it won’t trump American interests as well?  This is not someone who should be let within a hundred miles of the presidency.

Obviously, anyone whose policy preferences run conservative would find it hard or impossible to vote for Hillary, even in the grim face of Trump’s blithering unfitness.  On policy, Hillary is a fairly standard professional-class liberal, with all the knee-jerk cosmopolitanism, acquiescence to inequality, and condescension toward working whites that that implies.  She’s more slippery than the average politician, but that makes her less so than a constant dissembler like Trump, just as being more corrupt than the typical politician makes her less corrupt than a dirty Manhattan real-estate developer.  And she is capable of controlling herself, of considering the consequences of her actions, of understanding her own motivations, of learning and growing, of weighing multiple considerations, of compromise, of conciliation, and of responsibility.  She is an adult; he is a screaming baby.  The choice for an honest conservative must be hard, and that conservative can only choose Trump over Hillary if he believes her policies will be so harmful to the country that they out-weigh Trump’s monumental and destructive foolishness, immaturity and irresponsibility.  And that’s a hard argument to make.

It’s not clear how Trump became the genuinely toxic character he is.  It seems likely he was born with narcissist tendencies and 70 years of yes-man sycophancy and moneyed unaccountability have drilled that narcissism deep down into the bedrock of his psyche.  But he is, in a strange way, to be pitied, like a compulsive psychopath, or a Kardashian.  He’s the bellhop of the world’s most superficial and tyrannical ego.  He’s a lost little boy at the mercy of a reality-devouring monster, and whatever was once human or touching about him is long, long gone.  There is no hope for the little Donald, his ruthless ego enslaves him and ruins him.  But it’s quite easy to keep it from ruining us.  Don’t vote for it.