DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY
Sometimes I wonder what history will see as the worst thing Donald Trump has done as president. The environment, the Supreme Court, kids in cages – the list of damages is depressingly long.
But when all is said and done, I wonder if the most lasting damage may come, not from policy screwups (which, after all, can be replaced by better policies) but from Trump’s attempts to obliterate traditional political norms and replace them with his own personal brand of greed, narcissism, and paranoia.
I’m an old guy. Donald Trump is the 13th president of my lifetime. From Eisenhower to Obama, Trump’s predecessors used their first weeks in office to at least try to unite the country behind their agendas. Why not? It doesn’t cost anything to be magnanimous. What the heck, it doesn’t cost anything just to fake magnanimity. The speech writes itself: “Let us put aside partisan differences and work together to make this a better country.” Americans love a good winner. Or we used to, anyway.
But Trump doesn’t know how to be a good winner. He absolutely cannot tolerate criticism. Critics are enemies. Enemies must be destroyed, or at least subjugated. So as soon as he was inaugurated, he started his re-election campaign, staging rallies in Deplorable strongholds and inciting his base against Democrats and the press.
MAGA true believers love it, but outside those fever swamps, it appears that two years of constant turmoil is beginning to wear thin. The outbreak of “Clinton fatigue” in the late 90s was largely confined to members of the D.C. punditocracy who had developed a personal dislike for Bill Clinton. Twenty years later, though, Trump fatigue is a widespread phenomenon, as demonstrated by the results of last November’s mid-terms – and also by the fact that every time Trump delivers another pro-shutdown speech, his popularity drops. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there appears to be an irreducible 25-30% of the nation that will stick with Trump come hell or high water. That cohort amounts to a cancer on the body politic that will plague future presidents of both parties (or hypothetical new parties) as they try to restore the country’s health.
And the thing that will make treating that cancer more difficult is the Trumpian concept of fake news. I’m not talking about simple dishonesty. I’m a grownup. I know that all politicians spin events to reflect favorably on them. They stretch the truth, and sometimes tell outright lies. Even politicians I like. Even the one who said he’d never lie to me. I’m not perfect myself, and I don’t demand perfection from the politicians I vote for. Nevertheless, I’d like them to know the difference between truth and fiction, and to serve the truth as best they can.
Donald Trump, however, has showed his followers how to ignore inconvenient facts and construct narratives around current events that match their prejudices. Take, for instance, the image that accompanies this post. It’s a political cartoon by a right-wing propagandist that not only distorts what actually happened in last week’s now-famous confrontation between Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann, but turns it upside down and inside out. And since news is fake and truth is simply a matter of opinion, I fear that there’s a non-trivial chance that the original image of the MAGA smirk will disappear down the memory hole, and this cartoon’s version of the event will wind up as the last word on the incident.
Ten days after the 2016 election, St. Louis-based reporter Sarah Kendzior wrote an open letter to Trump voters in Missouri. She asked them to “Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.”
That strikes me as a pretty prescient description of the formerly respectable faction of the Republican Party, who now find themselves living in existential dread of Donald Trump and his base.
We haven’t achieved peak 1984 yet, but the Trump-Fox-McConnell axis of evil is doing its best.
I’ll give George Orwell the last word: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”