Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
In the opinion business, there has never been a more difficult time to stay calm and positive. Cooler heads than mine — many of them — have proclaimed the launch of Donald Trump Redux as “a national nightmare” or “a constitutional apocalypse” and struggled to find a credible response. The reporters have done their job, keeping their focus on the facts and figures and the players on the field, avoiding the powerful impulse to howl “What the bloody hell?” as this bizarre cast of characters turns a stable republic into a neo-fascist Walpurgisnacht — complete, literally, with a dancing billionaire brandishing a chainsaw. There is nothing remotely resembling a precedent in this nation’s history.
It gets weirder, scarier with every news cycle. The New York Times color photograph of Trump’s first cabinet meeting, widely circulated, looks more like a satirical cartoon than a news photo. There they are, the men and women you’ve been reading about, the least qualified or accomplished, most mismatched and, worst of all, least independent crew of flunkies and oddballs who ever took charge of any government, far less ours. There’s our president with his usual smirk and his tangerine war paint, and three chairs down sits Robert Kennedy Jr. with his deep-fried face like some meso-American death mask. What a strange life this man must have led to wind up with a face like that. (But maybe he’s entitled to it — my father and uncle weren’t assassinated by madmen.) Trump has replaced deep state with creep state. And standing, hovering above them all in his black MAGA ballcap and Tech Support black T-shirt, is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Wearing a slightly glum expression, unlike the ear-to-ear smiles he’s been flashing in all of his photos with Trump.
Of course it’s rude and unkind to call attention to other people’s faces. I’m no George Clooney myself. But Trump’s strange underlings can’t even manage to look normal. Have you seen a picture of Emil Bove, one of the president’s legal hit men? You wouldn’t want to run into him on a dark night in the woods. And Rudy Giuliani? But I wish it was only their faces that frighten me. Examine the resume of Dan Bongino, appointed Feb. 23 as deputy director of the FBI. He forged his credentials in the nastiest recesses of the far-right fringe and apprenticed with the unspeakable Alex Jones of InfoWars, the monster who mocked the slaughtered schoolchildren of Sandy Hook. Then he shilled for the NRA and filled the foaming-mad militant slot for Fox News. Now he podcasts lines like “Power. That is all that matters.” Bongino calls Democrats “scumbag commie libs” and mocks them as inadequate combatants in the civil war that’s coming.
These fanatics, these undisguised fascists, are among the creatures who float up from the dark holes where Donald Trump goes fishing for his friends. The shaved-bald Bongino must be one of the ugliest. He’s also the chief operating officer of the FBI. His boss, Kash Patel, is an even more passionate Trump “fan boy” who published a children’s picture book featuring The Donald as a heroic monarch. Google Mr. Patel and you’ll find a photo with a murderous gleam in his eyes, one that tops anything I’ve seen since Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Patel’s proposal to link the FBI to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose CEO Dana White is a major Trump supporter, has to go down as the silliest idea our government has ever considered. And then there’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, the last-minute substitute for Matt Gaetz, already investigating prosecutors who brought charges against Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Rightwing women are a mysterious breed of primates, as incomprehensible to most of us as child molesters or necrophiliacs.
It’s impossible to believe that these individuals will leave the Constitution or the American legal system unharmed. Or that any democracy could maintain itself — for four years? — under the supervision of Trump’s Little Cabinet of Horrors. The agony, the unbearable regret, is that the election was so close, with fewer than 50% of American voters choosing this awful path of no return. It doubles the pain to live in a 51-49 “purple” state like my poor North Carolina, where sanity always seems just a few thousand votes beyond our reach. I take heart when liberal veterans like Ralph Nader and Robert Reich express confidence that we’ll survive the nightmare. “Why I remain hopeful about America,” is the headline for Reich’s column.
I remain less sanguine. There are really two nations here now, of virtually equal size, with almost nothing in common. I’ve seen families split down the middle, people permanently alienated from their children or their parents when the MAGA poison has struck. The post-reason Republicans and their psychopath Trump, who seasons malignant narcissism with senile dementia, leave Americans very little middle ground. Civilized compromise is a distant memory.
It’s been my great luck that no one I ever admired or respected, among the living or the dead, would have voted for Donald Trump or honored him with a handshake. None of them would have considered him an appropriate chief executive or public servant of any kind. That includes several generations of the Republicans of yesteryear. We know it’s not true that current Republican voters are all racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, homophobes, Holocaust deniers, Q Anon believers and the like. Yet it’s almost certainly true that all the voters in those categories vote for Trump. You saw the worst of this gruesome gang at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And they must have accounted for the agonizingly narrow margin that defeated Kamala Harris —2.2 million votes out of over 150 million that were cast.
It’s hard to swallow. The very idea of America, the one most of us used to believe in, is imperiled by the most gullible majority and the least honorable, least competent president this country ever produced. What is a sane citizen supposed to do, when all the power is in the hands of thugs, cranks and fanatics, supported by craven eunuchs like nearly all the Republicans now in Congress? I talk to people my age whose children are seriously considering emigration to Portugal, Panama, South Africa. And these are younger people with good jobs and graduate degrees, the ones we can’t afford to lose. In the unlikelihood that one of them asked me for counsel, I confess I wouldn’t be sure what to say. But every optimist in even partial denial needs to grasp that Trump’s rapidly unfolding reign of terror and error can eviscerate America, domestically and internationally. He seems determined to alienate every ally, even Canada, to destroy NATO and the European Union and empower Russia. In the annals of anti-diplomacy there has never been an episode more disgusting or depressing than last month’s ambush in the Oval Office, when Trump and his attack dog JD Vance abused and insulted the Ukrainian president and virtually threw him out of the White House.
Make America Gag Again. It has always been perfectly clear that Vladimir Putin has Trump in his pocket. It’s not clear what keeps him there — commercial prospects, dictator worship, the old rumor about a sex tape stored at the Kremlin? But from the very beginning of Trump’s ascendance he received and deserved Russian support, open or secret. Remember the first impeachment? Of all the wild conspiracy theories on the internet, most of them from the far Right, the one with the most supporting evidence is that Trump has always been a Russian agent.
And at home? The president was never strong on economics or any other academic discipline, but most economists agree that his policies, tariffs and taxes and all, will increase the flow of wealth to the rich and especially the super-rich, and impose increasing hardships on the poor and the working class. The culture-war rhetoric that Republicans implement to seduce poor and lower-middle class voters has been a tragic success, but it hasn’t fooled the readers of The New York Times. “President Trump’s plan could be summarized: Take from the poor and give to the rich,” one letter-writer declares. The next letter in the same column echoes him: “We have gone from war on poverty to war on the poor.”
These wars have commenced. Their outcomes may be catastrophic. Journalists are in the front line, as always. Coincidentally — or perhaps in reaction to Trump’s attacks on the media during his first term — there are at this moment two serious cultural projects celebrating media figures who rose to the occasion when politicians threatened to disgrace America. One is a documentary film, “Becoming Katharine Graham,” the story of the late Washington Post publisher whose decisions to print the Pentagon Papers and to tell the story of Watergate changed American history. The second is a Broadway play, “Good Night and Good Luck,” which reminds us that it was Edward R. Murrow of CBS who issued the first warning against the excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings. George Clooney, a newsman’s son, stars as Murrow and also co-wrote the play, adapted from his 2005 film of the same name. I take a personal interest in these stories because I used to work for Kay Graham, and because Murrow’s fearless producer Fred Friendly — Clooney played him in the movie — was one of my most memorable professors in graduate school.
Who will be the Graham or the Murrow of 2020s, in the twilight of traditional media, in the face of overwhelming dishonesty and hostility from our government? It won’t be Jeff Bezos, the current owner of Graham’s Post, who joined Trump’s recent parade of ring-kissing billionaires and refused to endorse Kamala Harris. But if we can’t be democracy’s first line of defense — no newsperson today carries half the weight or prestige that Murrow or Walter Cronkite enjoyed — we may at least serve as the canaries in the mineshaft. Every totalitarian regime begins by intimidating and eliminating critical voices. Vietnam just sentenced one of its most prominent journalists to 30 months in prison for Facebook posts criticizing the government. But the first time Bondi’s Justice Department takes legal action against an American journalist for doing his job, we’ll know that Trump and his cronies have crossed the fascist Rubicon. The Fourth Reich will be under way in the United States of America.
Good night and good luck.
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, with a fifth collection of essays, "Bible Belt Blues," to be published in November.. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
