“I love my country, I just don’t care very much for many of the people in it right now.” — John Lithgow as Joseph Alsop in the Broadway play “The Columnist”
By the time some of you read this, this country will have narrowly escaped or tragically suffered the worst self-inflicted wound in its history. Sane people have predicted that we will be fighting a second Civil War. There’s more than a subtle suggestion that Donald Trump would welcome one, to postpone the inevitable bankruptcy and probable imprisonment that would follow his return to private life.
This obese dimwit, this golf club proprietor and reality TV actor is now hailed by his most unrestrained critics as the greatest threat to the United States of America since Hitler and Mussolini, which may well be true. Thomas L. Friedman of the Times, never considered an excitable columnist or a man of the radical left, warns us that “our democracy is in terrible danger, more danger that it has been in since 1861.”
“Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule,” Friedman predicts, “will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.”
On the day before the president’s hospitalization with the COVID-19 virus, Friedman’s conservative colleague David Brooks published a column calling Trump “first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.” A fair reaction to Trump’s performance in the first presidential “debate” Sept. 29 came from Moira Donegan, writing in The Guardian: “Debating Donald Trump is like debating a chimpanzee: he is less likely to deliver a thoughtful and substantive answer than he is to throw his own feces at you.”
No one who watched that humiliating debacle would reject her verdict—-but she’s writing, God help us, about the president of the United States. Animal metaphors offer a colorful new approach to coverage of the madman in the White House. I’m tempted to try some. But there are only so many expletives in the English language, only so many philippics launched at the same sordid target before we begin to feel sordid ourselves.
My contempt and my outrage, like Donegan’s, are inexhaustible. It’s my vocabulary that’s been pushed to its limits, and even my thesaurus is looking dog-eared. One of the things that shields Trump to some extent is that he isn’t merely bad or even dreadful but unspeakable, a creature so warped and repugnant that even the coolest, most matter-of-fact recital of the reasons we should fear and despise him makes his critics sound like extremists and rabid partisans. When I call him a criminal and a senile racist moron, people might well question my objectivity — even though there’s overwhelming and constantly evolving evidence that he’s all those things and worse. This is a man, according to USA Today, who re-tweeted (to 86 million Twitter followers) some lunatic’s accusation that Joe Biden is a pedophile. And then taunted Biden about his son’s drug habit on national TV.
In the wake of the worst of this, it was interesting to see journalists, long dismissed and disparaged by Trump as “the enemies of the people,” try to rein in their irony when the president fell ill. Hardly anyone mentioned “poetic justice,” and they all struggled to show Trump and his wife more compassion than he has ever shown anyone else.
There is little left to say about the colossal fraud, the one-man carnival of shamelessness and toxic psychopathology that is Donald J. Trump. You’ve seen him, or had the chance to see him, for yourself. The truly profound mystery, on this eve of the election of our lives, is represented by the tens of millions of Americans who will vote for him — who have already voted for him, and would do so again.
In the name of all that’s holy, why? My confusion was echoed, eloquently, in “One Veteran’s Bewilderment,” a guest column for “Working Waterfront’ magazine by a man who appears to be at least my age (Trump’s, roughly), a veteran and former Republican who lives on a small island off the coast of Maine. What bewilders this observer is the failure of other Republicans and veterans to respond with appropriate outrage to Trump’s immeasurable insensitivity and vulgarity, his unbroken stream of brutal insults and gaffes so flagrant that each one would have destroyed the career of any other politician. “Why, when he mimicked a handicapped reporter, was there any but the shallowest support left?” Mr. Crossman ponders. “I don’t understand and I didn’t then why his campaign failed to derail. What am I and others missing? Clearly something. I’m completely baffled.”
I wish I could answer Mr. Crossman’s questions, but there’s comfort in sharing our bewilderment. The more grotesquely Trump behaves, the more he flails and fails and falls far beneath the lowest expectations, the more enthusiasm he seems to elicit from certain people — as if taking this sorry lump of solid waste and setting him on a throne is a grand magic trick they’ve achieved together, and regard with pride.
Who are these voters, what do they pretend to have in common with a failed thug, a make-believe Tony Soprano whose employees, associates, and prominent supporters are nearly all in jail, indicted or under investigation? Or implicated in a sex scandal? Make your own count, I don’t have the time or space. Then consider each demographic group Trump has counted on, and often wooed successfully. Women? At least 26 women, at last count, have accused him of rape or sexual assault. Christians? His whole life has been a frontal assault on the moral foundations of the Bible, from the Ten Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount. Patriots, veterans? He mocked the service record of the war hero John McCain; he eluded the Vietnam draft and called America’s dead and wounded warriors “suckers” and “losers. Poor people, the working class? Don’t make me laugh. And now we’ve learned that there’s another group, one with which most of us identify, that has nothing in common with Donald Trump. Taxpayers.
It appears that he has nothing in common with any of the people who vote for him, except the hardcore racists. And he has begun to court them assiduously as his team of last resort. Consider only what can’t be denied about the president: he’s a sexual predator, an admitted and even boastful adulterer, a crooked businessman and tax cheat, a pathological liar, a racist, a draft dodger who talks like a field marshal — and all that with a grotesque, belligerent senility on top, like frosting. Who are these Americans who find all this acceptable in their president, or even endearing? Am I baffled, or what?
Besides the hopelessly misinformed and deceived — a demographic that has expanded dramatically since the invention of social media — who would vote for an agent of chaos who has encouraged armed white nationalists to intimidate voters at the polls? Only the most cynical of the filthy rich, who nurse their portfolios through the pandemic while less fortunate Americans bury their spouses and parents.
For integrity, competence, and basic decency, the worst day Joe Biden ever had in his life was better than Trump’s best day. Everyone knows that, and that’s all we need to know, or discuss. This isn’t about Biden, who at 78 is willing to sacrifice a tranquil old age for a ghastly job trying to heal a nation of warring tribes and fading credibility. I understand that anyone who ever coveted the presidency is a far different animal from you or me. Yet Biden is essentially taking one for the team. If he wins he may alleviate some of our anxieties, but his own sleepless nights will be just beginning.
The alternative is too grim to contemplate. Many foreign observers characterize the Trump cult as a mere symptom of the swift decline of the American empire. It isn’t just Trump the rancid personality—-many of us have a sense that the USA’s cultural water table is falling so rapidly that a president who presents and behaves like a low-budget pimp is simply singing harmony in the national chorale. Think of professional wrestling, ultimate fighting, beauty pageants and reality television, all downscale cultural phenomena that have aroused Trump’s interest and helped to define his brand. Then there’s Jeff Zucker, now the president of CNN but in his low-rent heyday at NBC the brains behind Trump’s hit reality show, “The Apprentice.” And also reality shows like “Fear Factor,” which featured half-naked contestants in pits full of live rats, and, in a finale that was judged too gross to broadcast, two sets of identical twins drinking donkey semen.
If you think that’s hard to swallow, consider four more years of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose most recent essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020
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