Like nearly every self-appointed critic of the American political system, I never imagined that I would still be typing that dread-laden five-letter word in February of 2024. The one that begins with “t” and ends with “p”, of course, and it isn’t “tulip.” I’ve prayed, I’ve fasted, I’ve made burnt offerings to the neglected god of common sense, a deity so many Americans have left behind. And still the T-word and the man who embodies all its mystery and menace persist.
Arguments against the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump are like arguments against infanticide, or microwaving kittens. When you offer one, and there must be hundreds, you can’t conceive of an objection or rebuttal. The case against this creature was closed nearly a decade ago, though more damning evidence seems to turn up every day. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, not a writer given to heated overstatement, refers to him as a “freakish madman” and an “onrushing nightmare.” Yet indictments for 91 felonies haven’t kept him from winning Republican primaries and drawing crowds of passionate believers. One Times headline reads “Trump Tightens Grip on National Psyche.” And another, “Trump’s Connection With Supporters Has Little Precedent: Victory Reveals a New Depth of Devotion.”
Jaws drop, teeth grind, heads spin. How is this possible, what has lobotomized people who cheer and celebrate the most transparent fraud, the most outrageous liar, the most straitjacket-ready psycho ever visited on the body politic? I’ve never met ex-president Trump. We’re roughly the same age, and years ago when I worked in New York he was pointed out to me, across the room at some kind of media party, by a colleague who described him as a self-promoting crook, an idiot who had become the favorite laughingstock of the local disc jockeys. All I can say in his favor is that he was a relatively normal-looking younger man, not an orange-hued, top-crested, 300-pound sideshow attraction as he presents today. My love affair with New York City was never intense, but its unconditional rejection of this hometown horror---Trump polls around 10% in the city---always impressed me profoundly.
It seems to be a fact that no one who has experienced him up close regards him with affection or respect. Here are some of their comments on the 45th president:
The late Maryanne Trump Barry, his older sister:
“His goddamn tweet and the lying---O my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying.”
“He has no principles. None. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
Mary Trump, his niece:
“The world’s most dangerous man.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican candidate for president:
“A phony, a fraud. Deeply weird.”
Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense under Trump:
“An existential threat to democracy.”
Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State under Trump:
“A moron.”
William Barr, Attorney General under Trump:
“A consummate narcissist, and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk…”
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff:
“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.”
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump:
“We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser:
“By the time I left the White House, I was convinced he was not fit to be president. I think it is a danger for the United States if he gets a second term.”
The late Charles Fried, former solicitor general, conservative legal guru:
“…this completely lawless, ignorant, foul-mouthed president.”
Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson (in 2015):
“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.”
Charles Leehrsen, Trump’s ghostwriter for the book ‘Surviving at the Top”:
“A complete dolt. I laughed, I cringed. I was astounded at how a human could reach adulthood knowing so little about history, geography, literature, spelling…”
Glenn Beck, gonzo rightwing media personality, after a visit to Mar-a-Lago:
“Unhinged.”
Nikki Haley, rival candidate for the Republican presidential nomination:
“Totally unhinged.”
If those eyewitnesses don’t convince you, there are plenty more waiting in the wings. And with the probable exceptions of his niece and his ghostwriter, all these warnings come from conservatives, Republicans, individuals nominally on Trump’s side of the great American divide. Only Trump would be crazy enough to claim that their strings are being pulled by President Biden. If this is the way close relatives and former associates feel, imagine what Trump’s enemies might say. In the ghostwriter Leehrsen’s account of his adventures with Trump, back in the early 1990s, there are a couple of incidents that leave the writer and his readers feeling almost sorry for poor Donald. They indicated that he had, and has, no friends.
Sad, as Trump himself has taught us to say. Sad. But Trump’s strange hold on citizens who have never had the pleasure of his company is one of the great mysteries of our collective lives. I could call him the worst man of my generation, but of course we also produced killers, rapists and child molesters (he has yet to be accused of murder, but sex crimes?). Let’s say he’s the worst powerful person of my generation, then, and by a wide, wide margin. No sane, responsible, conscientious citizen would leave Donald Trump in charge of his cat for a weekend, far less his country for four years. He’s ridiculous, repulsive, amoral, embarrassingly crude and infantile, unquestionably “unhinged.” Psychiatrists who study his behavior don’t hesitate to use the word “sociopath.” He’s 800 pounds of rancid ego in a 300-pound sack, topped by a face smeared with pumpkin pie. When you see some of his menacing expressions, you wonder, “Is he even a native earthling?”
If he doesn’t scare you, fear and horror are not in your emotional vocabulary. The beauty of fearing and loathing Donald Trump is that it has nothing to do with policy, ideology or the preposterous polarization of the American electorate. A vote for this rough beast would be unthinkable even if he was selling some benevolent form of progressive uplift. Trump has no functioning beliefs, beyond self-glorification. Whatever he spews, if it even makes sense, is just audience-tested rightwing boilerplate fed to him by Republican trolls. He benefits from the shameless scam that sustains the modern Republican Party — seducing lower-income, less educated voters with conservative culture-wars pitches and offering them nothing, not a crust of bread, in return. But Ron DeSantis ran for the nomination with the same nasty agenda and a lot less baggage, and got nowhere with “the base.”
The mystery remains. What’s wrong with Trump is absurdly obvious. But what’s wrong with you people who vote for him, wear his awful hats and wave his banners? Without you, without the power you granted him and seem eager to grant him again, this is just another mental patient with early dementia and bad hair. Books have been written, scores of columnists have struggled to explain the unnatural bond between this beast and his base. The key to his appeal is “animosity,” according to David French. “Nobody models animosity better than Donald Trump…they come home to Trump in part because they see in his rage a mirror of their own.”
The politics of rage? “I hate to say this, but I do understand why millions of people are drawn to Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, his encouragements of violence,” writes Paul Krugman. “The sad truth is that there have always been many Americans who fundamentally don’t believe in America’s democratic ideals.”
“A large segment of our body politic has in effect joined a cult of personality whose beliefs are nearly impervious to reality,” Krugman has added. “So how did this happen to us? The truth is that I don’t know.”
The truth is that no one knows. None of us. Rage, fear, violence, unreality? A cult inspired by something we might call anti-charisma, a dark force that seems to trigger devotion, among certain simple people, when a natural response to the candidate would be nausea. They all add up to the vampire-like immortality of America’s most improbable political career. Even the legitimate anti-Trump media cut him more slack than he deserves. Fear, in the case of his return? Why haven’t more journalists emphasized that his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, as she describes it, was the exact same atrocity he boasted of committing in that infamous interview?
But the most appalling, hypocritical, indigestible victims of Trump’s anti-charisma are the ones who call themselves “evangelicals.” “I know that he is picked by God for this hour,” said one woman who voted for him in the Iowa primary. “He is our David and our Goliath” said another. These ghastly fools, including the reactionary movie star Jon Voight, have compared Donald Trump to Jesus Christ Himself. Talk about blasphemy. If the universe were arranged as they profess to believe, the sky would open up and divine lightning would roast every one of them to cinders.
Not in time to save us, I’m afraid. Trump’s return to the White House would be the greatest calamity to befall America since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, at least. And the hour is late. His late wife Ivana testified that he kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table, a fact that’s open to interpretation. But if you can bear to check the record for some of the eerie points of resemblance between The Donald and the Fuhrer, read Volker Ullrich’s “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939” (Knopf, 2016). A sample:
“Hitler was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth.” An editor describes “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s answer to “Surviving at the Top,” as “a swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”
Check narcissism, false populism, scapegoating and grandiosity. Trump is no Hitler, perhaps, but America is no Nazi Germany, or so we long to believe. But when the Orange One rages about “retribution” and “retaliation,” it’s time to tremble. And a grim fact is that neo-fascist politics are hard upon us, when Trump supporters rain death threats on judges, prosecutors, state attorneys general and every honest official who tries to impose justice on a criminal ex-president. Debbie Dingell, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who voted to impeach him, reports “I have received hostile calls, antagonistic mail and death threats, and I have had people outside my home with weapons. We have to stand up to bullies in this country.”
Death threats, armed lurkers, fury on the internet, all very much in the spirit of Jan. 6, 2021, when rightwing terrorists stormed the Capitol to overturn Trump’s defeat. This is fascism at work. Alarmism is a MAGA weapon, and not usually one of mine. But this is serious. Francine Prose, reviewing a film about the Pinochet years in Chile, quotes a friend from Santiago: “We went to poetry readings, we met our friends in cafes. We went to bed one night and the next day we woke up and those same friends were being murdered in the soccer stadium.”
Prose responds, “It has always seemed like a warning, and one that’s more timely now than ever, about the alarming speed with which a democratic society can turn into an authoritarian one.”
Listen, please. Joe Biden at the age of 100 would be worth 100 Donald Trumps.
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, March 1, 2024
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us