Year One: Eclipsing Andrew Johnson

By HAL CROWTHER

In 45 years of making a living by responding to the news, I can’t remember a time when I felt less decisive, less certain of what to write or where my opinion might prove useful. Not because I have fewer or weaker responses, but because I have so many that seem so urgent. What can I say, what the hell can we do about this Donald Trump, this fat clown in the fright wig who is scaring the bodily fluids out of every civilized human being on the planet? It’s the dead of winter at the end of Trump Year One, with the State of the Union message looming, and we all know that asking Donald Trump to portray the State of the Union is like asking a baboon to play the Goldberg Variations.

The State of our Union is “desperate.” The government is shut down, every American minority (and one majority, females) has been thoroughly abused and alienated by the president, along with the leaders of most foreign nations, and a succession of porn actresses are waving cancelled checks, unsuccessful hush money from the family man in the White House. The short plump finger on America’s nuclear trigger seems ever so itchy, and the FBI is investigating treasonous pro-Trump election collusion between the Kremlin and National Rifle Association —- a marriage of evils no author of thrillers could ever have concocted.

And that, of course, is not the half of it. The lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times, “as part of our effort to resist the exhausting and numbing effects of living under a relentlessly abusive and degrading president,” lists 42 unfathomably awful things Trump has done or said since his election, each one more astonishing and depressing than the one that came before. Well-researched essays have already compared him to Nero, Caligula, and Kaiser Wilhelm, among other delusional autocrats. A bestselling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, offers 27 psychiatrists’ assessments of the president’s mental health, few of them encouraging.

The historian Sean Wilentz compares Trump’s Year One to the first years of America’s worst presidents. Only the ex-tailor Andrew Johnson, whom Wilentz calls “a vituperative racist,” seems to offer a real match for Trump. Johnson, often described as a boor and a belligerent drunk, wrapped up his first year in office with a veto of the civil rights bill that became the 14th Amendment, the one granting citizenship to the newly freed slaves. An angry congress passed it over his veto and retaliated by impeaching him, failing to remove him from office by one vote. But Johnson was a sharp dresser — naturally — and a compelling orator, and he represented decades of political experience.

Another candidate for Worst President, George W. Bush of recent memory, ended his first year with an 83% approval rating, better than twice the current rating for Donald Trump — the lowest ever recorded. In retrospect Bush, whose deceitful and misguided invasion of Iraq may have been the worst single decision an American president ever made, looks more presidential and thoughtful every time Trump posts another idiotic tweet.

Inspired by the Times’ list of Trump’s worst sins, I made a list of the virtues we might admire in a president, or in any person worthy of our respect. In alphabetical order: compassion, courtesy, curiosity, dignity, empathy, generosity, humility, humor, intellect, insight, integrity, irony, learning, loyalty, restraint, tact, taste, tolerance. If you would like to argue that Trump possesses even one, any one, of these virtues, I’m ready and well-prepared to take you on. This is not only the most dismally underqualified and inappropriate individual ever elected to the presidency, or any high office — this is one of the worst American men of my generation, a repulsive shyster so morally and intellectually unfit for public service that we can only keep shaking our heads in wonder at our predicament.

If you won’t take my word for it, sample the words of a master, the great American novelist Philip Roth, who recently granted an interview as he approached his 85th birthday. Roth, whose novel, The Plot Against America, imagines a pro-Hitler USA after Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 election, was asked to compare the racist and anti-Semitic Lindbergh to Donald Trump. No contest, replied Roth, describing the aviator Lindbergh as “an authentic American hero,” and “a kind of 20th-century Leif Ericson, an aeronautical Magellan.” “By comparison” he told interviewer Charles McGrath, “Trump is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

What can we say about this man that isn’t common knowledge, what contempt can we express that isn’t shared by nearly everyone who’s ever known him or dealt with him? He’s lived his whole life, most deliberately, in the public eye. So perhaps the most bewildering, most ominous thing about the reign of Trump is the abiding admiration he enjoys among those people who voted for him and would do so again, as if the grim spectacle of Year One had never occurred. The Times recently devoted its editorial page, the same page where its 42 indictments of Trump were posted, to 16 satisfied Trump voters who were invited to defend and explain themselves. Not one expressed disappointment or remorse, and some responses were frankly incomprehensible.

“By any measure, President Trump’s first year has shown prodigious progress,” wrote Dan from Cincinnati. “I think Mr. Trump is doing a terrific job against all odds, and is getting better. I am proud when I see the First Couple representing us on the world stage.”

It’s as if these people have just landed in a spaceship from another galaxy. Did they somehow miss everything that has the rest of us groaning and pulling out our hair? Or do they simply dismiss it all as lies, “fake news” circulated by the president’s political enemies? Most of these loyalists, I suppose, are part of the so-called Republican “base,” white voters who fall below the national averages in income and education. No doubt most of them consider themselves Christians. And yet they offer no objection to a president whose adult life might be characterized as a relentless assault on the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus Christ. To hear the mega-hypocrite evangelist Franklin Graham defend Trump and say “God put him there” is to suffer one of the most intense spasms of homicidal indignation the American experience can provide.

The possibility that these people dismiss the whole catalog of Trump’s lies, sins and blunders as political slander isn’t as frightening as the possibility that they were never exposed to the news, the actual news, at all. That would be Fox News’ stunning contribution to the destruction of democracy — 21st-century Americans have the option of consuming only the news and opinion that conforms to their prejudice. If that prejudice matches the rhetoric of one political party, especially if it’s the party in power, those citizens are part of a captive, spoon-fed audience no different from the ones dictators control with state-supported media. Maybe they don’t dismiss the fact that virtually no one (barely 10% in some boroughs) in New York City, where Trump was born and raised and worked all his life, would vote for him in 2016. Maybe this is a fact they’ve never encountered. They certainly didn’t hear it from Sean Hannity.

As for Cincinnati Dan and his pride when he sees the “First Couple” on the world stage, it’s possible that he’s never seen that photo of the First Lady naked in a bathtub full of golf balls, which bounces freely around the Internet. I’ve felt great sympathy for that poor mercenary woman, even before the porn star bulletins, but let’s not talk about pride, or dignity, or class. They all left town with the Obamas. Another commercial photograph of Melania shows her in profile wearing nothing but a thong, and brandishing a pistol. Who could make this up? I grew up on Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower.

Trump coverage produces vertigo with its fast shuffle between horror and hilarity. But the sheer volume of the news, the bad news, distracts us from stories that will still signify when all the gossip and cheesy bickering is long forgotten. I turn to the obituary page, a quiet, Trump-free place in my newspaper. Some of the last survivors of the death camps in Germany have been dying this winter, most of them Jews who were imprisoned there as children. The Allies liberated those camps the year I was born. It’s a hardy optimism about the human experiment that will survive the details of these Holocaust obituaries. But two other post-holiday obituaries should be required reading for American voters. One was the death at 97 of Recy Taylor, a young wife and mother in 1944 when six men abducted and gang-raped her on her way home from church. They were white, she was black. Of course no Alabama jury would even indict the rapists, in spite of ample evidence.

The other obituary was for Edgar Ray Killen, 92, the Klansman (and Christian preacher) who organized the notorious murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. Killen was actually tried for the killings, and of course acquitted by a white jury, but he was convicted in a retrial 41 years later and spent the rest of his life in prison. The details of these crimes bring an Auschwitz chill to the blood, but these are American stories. A few of the American monsters who played a part in them are still breathing. If you’re sure the Deep South, or the human race, has made tremendous strides in the meantime, you may have missed the saga of Roy Moore, who would now sit in the US Senate if Alabama hadn’t discovered that he used to chase teenage girls around the mall. Even with that baggage, Moore, he of the tiny gun, huge hat and constant appeals to Jesus, won more than 48% of the vote. A leader of the racist Birther movement that insisted Barack Obama was born in Kenya, Moore was endorsed by the alt-white forces of Steve Bannon, and by his fellow Birther in the White House.

Racial progress in Alabama and Mississippi, which has come at a glacial pace, now seems to be reversing. In 1965, a year after the murders in Philadelphia, the black playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun) agonized over criticism of African-American militancy: “Since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation, from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted.”

A half-century later, a loud “Amen.” Of all the steps backward that Donald Trump represents—-environmental, educational, diplomatic — the racial steps backward are the fatal ones we must not take. Entirely aside from his gross outburst about “shithole” countries that are coincidentally black, Trump’s policies would set immigration and open-arms Americanism back 100 years. He may be the first president since Andrew Johnson to flash a green light to white supremacists, or to whistle Dixie seductively to the diehard segregationists of the Old Confederacy. In New York, reporters have counted 1,021 official complaints of racial discrimination against Trump-owned real estate operations. For Trump to deny that he’s a racist is as ridiculous and delusional as denying that he’s fat. I might not stoop to mention it, if he hadn’t been so vicious about other people’s bodies and physical appearance. But there’s another photograph online, a close-up of Trump running in tight tennis shorts, that reveals a butt the width of Lake Michigan. A butt nearly as big as his ego.

The next time you hear, “Whatever happened to Chris Christie?” you have the answer: Trump swallowed him whole.

We live in a racist country with a racist history, and now our government has fallen into the hands of another racist demagogue. African-Americans are right to express their exhaustion, exasperation — -rage. Martin Luther King’s nonviolence always seemed impossibly saintly, to me. It was much easier to empathize with the furious black men like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver or Rap Brown. But I don’t think the prospect in 2018 is hopeless, and we can’t just wait passively for the special counsel with his Russian probe, like the national janitor, to mop up this filthy mess that has flooded the marble halls of the Republic.

Black Lives Matter is an important, well-focused movement, and I’m 100% behind Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling giants of the NFL. But some of the rhetoric coming from the intellectual Left gives me pause. After an excess of tortured semantic hair-splitting over the meaning of racism, a black academic on the Times op-ed page seems to say that anyone born white in a racist country is a racist, and only proves it when he tries to deny it. But like so many merchants of micro-identity, this writer seems to forget that race in America is an artificial, anti-scientific construct — “white” and “black” are only racists’ words intended to create barriers, and hierarchy. Most African-Americans today carry European blood, and many “white” Americans could claim Africans on their family trees.

Why not try “all hands on deck” for the terrible struggle ahead? Beige and color-blind, which may not suit the identity cliques of the Left, are really the only roads that lead forward. Writing off all white people as racists may feel empowering and righteous to exasperated African-Americans, but it isn’t a promising strategy. Perhaps we are all racists — some of us without even knowing it? But 43% of us voted for Obama in 2008, and for the most part most of us are glad we did. If we’re ever going to take this country back from the Trumps and Moores and Bannons, maybe black America should grant us the benefit of the doubt.

Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essays have been awarded the H.L. Mencken, Lillian Smith and American Association of Newsweeklies prizes for commentary and the 2014 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. His latest book is An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L.Mencken (University of Iowa Press, 2014). Email delennis1@gmail.com

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2018

Populist.com