Wayne O'Leary

Après Him, le Déluge

Until the disastrous reign of Donald the First, we used to hear a lot about American exceptionalism. The US was not like other countries; it was uniquely successful in every way — first in war and first in peace. We had, Americans told themselves, the best governing institutions, best economic arrangement, best health-care scheme, best educational structure, and so on. In particular, we had the uncanny capacity to produce exceptional leaders at moments of national or international crisis, leaders who rose almost magically to meet the exigencies of the times.

The names are familiar. Washington led the country through its founding revolution and formative years. Lincoln guided it through the Civil War and saved the Union. Wilson and the first Roosevelt provided a needed response to the rise of monopoly capitalism. FDR emerged as the indispensable man for the Great Depression and World War II. Kennedy was there when the Cuban missile crisis threatened Armageddon.

And so it went. Presidents with vision, judgment, inspirational qualities, and coolness under fire appeared almost on cue as needed. Then came the era of Trump, and everything changed. Not only has America the exceptional become unexceptional, it’s become downright dysfunctional. In the midst of the worst public-health emergency in a century and an economic calamity rivaling that of the 1930s, the system has failed in a major way for the first time.

Thankfully, Trump is leaving, but he’s leaving in an unprecedented manner, attempting to burn the country down around him as he exits. If he can’t win, his successor Biden can damn well inherit the wind.

Trump has done everything imaginable to destroy American democracy, while doing nothing at all to deal with the horrific pandemic and its catastrophic economic effects. Now, he’s off to Mar-a-Lago to golf and stew in the juices of his own resentments and grievances, not least of these the failure of his fellow citizens to make him dictator by acclamation. If they die in their thousands, the victims of his herd-immunity pandemic fantasies, or fall into joblessness, homelessness and poverty, he appears not to care — nor, it seems, does his captive political party.

The president’s deranged mindset in his final month in office is reminiscent of Adolph Hitler’s mad dream during his last days in the Berlin bunker of a scorched-earth policy for Germany that would take the fatherland down with him, since it didn’t deserve to survive his passing. It also brings to mind the remark attributed to Madame de Pompadour, confidante to France’s failed King Louis XV, whose inept reign (1715-74) paved the way for the French Revolution: “Après nous le déluge” (After us the [biblical] flood). Simply put, once the regime implodes, nothing else matters.

The borderline-insane parting shots Trump levelled against his countrymen over the Christmas holiday (pardons for convicted felons, war criminals and murderers; threats to close down the federal government, failure to approve funding for the national defense; refusal to act promptly on a desperately needed, last-gasp economic-stimulus plan) pretty well summarized the contemptuous attitude of the departing occupant of the White House.

Evil is a word rarely associated with American presidents, but Trump is brushing up against it. Several previous chief executives headed corrupt administrations — Ulysses S. Grant and his Crédit Mobilier spoilsmen, Warren G. Harding and his grasping Ohio Gang — but the principals themselves were personally honest; they just looked the other way when their friends took the money. Another, Richard M. Nixon, was not seduced by lucre, content to merely subvert the Constitution to destroy political enemies; he never tried to literally overthrow the democratically elected government.

Trump is a different sort. He reeks of depravity, personally and politically, projecting a psychopathic personality that contaminates everything it encounters. Over four years, the Donald’s public behavior has evolved from garden-variety immorality in the service of narrow self-interest to an absolute willingness to end the American experiment in popular self-government; it culminated in his extended middle finger to the country at large on Christmas Eve aimed especially at those less fortunate than him, his family and his associates.

On the road to Trump’s eventual descent into sullen, revengeful irrationality, evident to all by the post-election period, there were numerous signposts predicting what lay ahead: the grotesque tax cuts beneficial to him and his class; the elevation of hand-picked Supreme Court sycophants intended to guarantee his continuance in office; the cultivation of thuggish native fascists selected to intimidate social minorities and political opponents; the family-separation policy geared to using cruelty to slow migration at the southern border; the long-dormant prisoner executions suddenly accelerated to exact some form of twisted psychic revenge.

Above all, there was the ignored and unaddressed pandemic fatal to thousands, including a willful policy of demeaning preventive measures, discounting scientific and medical expertise, and sponsoring super-spreader election rallies responsible (according to one estimate) for 30,000 infections and 700 deaths. And now, as the surging pandemic shifts into overdrive, a negligent Trump obstinately refuses to use his closing days to facilitate vaccine distribution or cooperate in any way with his successor to save lives. A distinct sulfuric aroma surrounds the 45th president that no amount of rhetorical air freshener administered by the monarch of Mar-a-Lago or his apologists can dissipate. Evil is as evil does.

It has to be acknowledged that Trump did momentarily pull back from the brink with his delayed signing of the economic-rescue package he had held hostage in an adolescent fit of temper. His last-minute demand that individual stimulus checks be increased from $600 to $2,000, an obvious self-promotional device, was interpreted by one cable news commentator as evidence he would leave a legacy as the modern “Huey Long of populism.”

The idea that this representative of oligarchs everywhere should end his term in office celebrated as a “populist” of any stripe strains credulity. Trump the populist is a pose concocted by the subject himself and uncritically accepted by portions of the media. Huey Long, the genuine article, treated democratic norms and fiscal proprieties carelessly, but unlike Trump, he fought the corporate interests of his time — the oil companies, the railroads, the utilities — and taxed them for the benefit of the public, building infrastructure, boosting education, and enhancing health care. The Kingfish would have punctured Trump’s pomposity in an instant.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2021

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