The presidential election freed us from the year-long sinking feeling that nothing good was ever going to happen again, not in America — that doom and darkness had settled forever on a tormented republic. It was a real relief to see urbanites dancing in the plague-emptied streets, to see Joe Biden’s hopeful, convincing smile replace the soulless grimace of the strange orange animal that he will, God willing, replace in January.
Donald Trump’s pathetic, graceless refusal to accept his defeat was just more of the predictable same, the eight-year-old warlord of the sandbox howling and swinging his pail and shovel at imaginary enemies. It was the exit we expected from this prodigious fool, this self-obsessed simpleton whose dotage, well under way, could never have been less than absurd.
Are we truly rid of him? A couple of years ago I described him as “an inoperable tumor” lodged in the body politic, and as I write the surgery is indescribably messy, a stomach-churning necessity that will leave indelible dark stains on the democratic process. It seemed unthinkable that he would never concede, but we were forced to consider the possibility that his corpulent corpus might be dragged kicking and screaming from the White House, by men in uniforms cursing and injecting him with tranquilizers. I heard assurances that cooler heads would prevail, but which cooler heads would they be?
The ghastliest of the Republican leaders, like McConnell and Graham, were encouraging Trump. November reports from inside the White House indicated that traffic was minimal, with the chief of staff on COVID leave and half his team in quarantine. A disquieting vacuum there at the nerve center of a superpower, with just a few sullen staff toadies avoiding the raging president and updating their resumes.
That’s what we’ve come to, that’s where the monstrous mistake American voters committed in November 2016 has brought us now. If my own prayers are answered, this will be the last time I ever type the word “Trump.” For me, maybe for every journalist, that’s like an impossible dream of paradise. But even with Trump’s gruesome figure fading in the rearview mirror, America has a rocky, ghoul-haunted road ahead. The good news is that 79.8 million citizens, nearly a quarter of the American population and the most voters any party ever turned out for a presidential election, have made getting rid of Donald Trump their priority. That would be sensational, but … 73.8 million citizens voted to keep him in office. That’s the second-largest vote a presidential candidate has ever received.
This is not, as it might have been before the Republican Party was devoured by the radical Right, a normal difference of opinion, a philosophical split. It’s not about liberal versus conservative, big government versus limited government, or even urban versus rural worldviews. It’s not about policy any more than President Trump, who ran without a platform, is about policy. It was a referendum on the man himself, and the result is as great a cause for alarm as it is for encouragement. For four years in the White House, he performed fathoms beneath the lowest levels of dignity and integrity we used to expect of a president, a public servant or even a reasonable adult. Every night they mocked him on late-night television, and every day he did or said something more ridiculous than anything the satirists could devise.
Our most gifted editorial cartoonists couldn’t draw caricatures of this president that were as grotesque as the face in the news service photos—-that great jack-o-lantern carved with a sphincter-mouth, flaking chips of orange shellac and forever haunting schoolchildren’s nightmares. He wasn’t just the worst president in our history, he was one of the worst and most unattractive human beings who ever walked across one of history’s main stages. After he had served one year in office, I listed, alphabetically, the virtues and desirable qualities a democracy might hope for in its elected leader: compassion, courtesy, curiosity, dignity, empathy, generosity, humility, humor, intellect, insight, integrity, irony, learning, loyalty, restraint, tact, taste, tolerance. I challenged readers to argue that Donald Trump was blessed with any one of them. I got no response. Three years later, I can report with confidence that none of these 18 virtues have subsequently emerged.
An insane Twitter troll won 73.8 million votes. Historians will long struggle, as I’m struggling now, with the mystery of Trump’s appeal to these voters, this fabled “base” that he seems to own outright. When I was a young man, most of us were in awe of presidents, of the office itself, no matter who occupied it. If you saw a president in the flesh, you recorded it in your diary (though I once dropped out of a reception line when I realized that the last hand I would be shaking was Richard Nixon’s). Now, at least until January, we have a president half the nation’s voters would never invite into their homes.
A president whose little hand they wouldn’t shake, a man they wouldn’t leave alone for 10 minutes with their wives or daughters. This is no exaggeration. Yet, there’s another half who will risk the deadly virus to howl their mindless approval at maskless rallies, and even wear Trump’s silly red hats.
Who are they, what in the world are they thinking? (Wasn’t it Bill Maher who said “Watch Fox News if you want to know what people who aren’t thinking, are thinking.”?)
Abraham Lincoln is credited (tentatively) with an archaic piece of political optimism: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.” Maybe not, Abe. But Trump has proven that he can fool half (48%) the people all of the time, a shocking achievement that brought America to its knees. How did he do it? Is it now possible, with the vast variety of partisan media spewing disinformation, conspiracy and Republican propaganda, for tens of millions of voters to shut out street-level reality entirely? Setting all ideology aside, I won’t concede that anyone exposed, however slightly, to reality-based professional journalism could still admire or support such an outrageous madman.
Which groups can we confidently include in the huge minority that shields itself from the faintest shadow of reality? America is now hopelessly tribal, and there must be a disturbing number of tribesmen who blindly follow their chieftain of the moment, without attempting to assess his ability or suitability. Back before the Republican Party started recruiting successfully from the remnants of the Old Confederacy and the Third Reich, its success relied heavily on avarice, on Americans who would have voted for Attila the Hun or Vlad the Impaler if they promised to cut taxes and privilege the rich.
There are still plenty of cynical wallet voters in the GOP. But I don’t think either blind tribesmen or grasping misers are critical elements of the coalition that has kept Trump’s ragged banner aloft.
Even citizens who’ve never heard a word about Trump’s crimes, blunders and atrocities, or only heard him exonerated by Sean Hannity, have seen him perform in the (abundant) flesh. His is a crude act, a pitch as subtle as the guy on the sidewalk shilling for a Bourbon Street strip club. It’s the lowest, meanest form of demagoguery, aimed at the cheapest seats in the house. What he projects, beyond dementia and the outer reaches of venality and narcissism, is a core that is feral and cruel. A core with which, I’m afraid, millions identify. Racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and homophobia are all deep and powerful strains of hatred common to poorly educated white Americans. But under intelligent progressives like Clinton and Obama, these white citizens felt shamed and compelled to share their ugliest impulses in the darkest corners of the Internet. And then came Donald Trump, a leader as bigoted and ignorant as the worst of them, to liberate them from their shame.
It’s my best guess that this great liberation, this shock of recognition — “my god, he’s dumber and meaner than I am, or even Uncle Vic” — accounts for most of the enthusiasm that has kept Trump in business. The driving wheel of Trump Nation is the passion of the vicious and potentially violent. Nothing I’ve seen of the alt-Right thugs and cartridge-belt bubbas who terrorized Charlottesville and marched on the Michigan statehouse has convinced me that they’re made of softer, sweeter stuff. These are not people who will be won over with kindness and respect.
Which brings me to a relentless irritant during the last months of the campaign, all those liberal pundits and make-nice social “healers,” who kept telling us to listen carefully, sympathetically to the angry voices on the other side, the Trump side. The worst of this was a news service column I read last week, by a kind liberal lady from New York. Headed “We Need Empathy,” it concludes “I can no longer ignore the half of the country that thinks differently. I need to understand them. Empathize with them. And desperately try to move forward. Together.”
What naïve, passive rot, I thought. I was pleased to discover the perfect response in an Al Jazeera column by a prominent Canadian journalist, Andrew Mitrovica, who writes, “I am through listening to or tolerating any more nonsense by liberal Sigmund Freud wannabes who have implored us to understand, please, the scarred and delicate psyches of Trump’s legion of willing accomplices who have, without fail, offered angry and violent succor to their dear leader.”
The election, Mitrovica continues, “revealed the biggest lie of all — not about Trump, but America. Turns out, the so-called shining city on the hill is, instead, a black hole where hope, optimism, reason and the future go to die. Last night was not a referendum on Trump’s character, but America’s character.”
As an American whose personal fate might be hard to separate from the republic’s, I suppose I cling doggedly to a more hopeful prognosis. But I see why Canadians are so scared of us that they’ve closed the border. It’s not just the pandemic.
Sane countries the world over were horrified when they realized that a white nationalist party had won 50% of America’s popular vote. And let’s face it, except for the pandemic — a quarter of a million deaths, a harsh price to pay to decontaminate the White House — that crazy bastard Donald Trump would have won again.
Empathize, hell. It’s a grim possibility that we have nothing in common with the Tribe of Trump, nothing to learn from them, no way to educate them. Missionaries of diversity and civic responsibility are never going to convert Cro-Magnons with assault rifles and swastika tattoos. Too many liberals, I’m afraid, have forgotten the old fable of the frog and the scorpion. Imagine that we, as a nation, have something clinging to our body, something frightening we can’t shake off. It’s poisonous, and it stings and kills, because that’s its nature. And it could easily cause the death of the democracy.
Don’t ask me what we must do to save ourselves, and don’t expect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to have it figured out. Not every dilemma has a solution, and not every political crisis has a happy ending. Ask the historians. Or dismiss them, like Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz (1929-2016), the Hungarian novelist who survived Auschwitz as a teenager. He spent the rest of his life and his fiction trying to come to grips with that nightmare and with the enigma of human nature. In the end Kertesz declared, “History undeniably can find no explanation for anything.”
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest 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, December 15, 2020
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