There are no more words to mince. And the fact that the author of this warning is married to and cohabits amiably with KellyAnne Conway, whose loathsome job is to defend and interpret the nut job in question, makes you wonder whether George himself can be in full command of his faculties. Or, frankly, whether any of us Americans can still claim to be functioning as rational adults. Where’s a well-lighted path out of this? The political labyrinth in which we seem lost is like nothing this country has ever seen before—-certainly like nothing I’ve seen before, and I’ve been a working journalist since 1967.
“Politics, as we see at the moment, are grubby, dishonest and chaotic,” said the English writer Penny Junor, lamenting the state of things in Brexit-torn Britain. If only those adjectives were the worst ones we could apply to the circus now playing in Washington, D.C. The impeachment of Donald Trump by the House of Representatives has been a litmus test for political animals, revealing depths of depravity and dishonesty the most cynical observer would have hesitated to credit, a few short years ago. A parade of eminently credible, sometimes eloquent witnesses has indicted the president beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt. There’s no question in any sane person’s mind that he did exactly what he stands accused of, that he tried to bribe Ukrainian officials (with our tax money) to find information damaging to Joe Biden, a political rival. If this is an impeachable crime, as most constitutional scholars believe, Donald Trump should soon be nothing but an ugly memory, a few long strands of nasty, lacquered orange hair on the furniture in the Oval Office. Any sane president, hearing this testimony against him, would already have resigned. But no sane president would have stepped into such a slimy business to begin with.
George Conway is not a psychiatrist, but many professionals in that field have already weighed in on the president’s cognitive decline, and the consensus is alarming. If he were a more appealing, amiable individual, like Ronald Reagan long after his cerebral warranty had expired, I might feel sympathy for Donald Trump. He’s almost my age, an age at which the specter of senility is no joking matter. But Trump is and has always been such a vain, cruel, mean-spirited featherweight of a man that the eclipse of what we call his mind is tragic only in its possible consequences, for Americans and for a world community that stares astonished at what our foundering political system has produced. A party that long since sacrificed principle to power and profits has made a president out of one of the most corrupt, ridiculous and ultimately disgusting individuals in my entire generation, and senile dementia or some more urgent form of mental illness has consumed his meager resources right in front of our eyes.
It’s a pitiful spectacle, played out hour by hour, absurdity upon absurdity, on this perversion of a medium they call Twitter. But Donald Trump, nearly three years into the farce of his presidency, is an established, predictable disaster. Or obscenity, if you will. He has taken “The Swamp” he promised to drain and turned it into an open sewer with a transatlantic stench that reaches far beyond the Ukrainian steppes. What the impeachment process has revealed anew is the colossal cynicism and dishonesty of the president’s supporters. Certain Texas legislators, according to the late Molly Ivins, were the intellectual equals of house plants and root vegetables, and I understand that many congressional Republicans were spawned in that same gene pool. Still, I refuse to believe that anyone now in Congress is so dim and befuddled that he honestly believes the president is innocent, or mentally intact either. These people all know he’s nuts, that he’s a delusional thug whose fantasy avatars range from Mussolini to Tony Soprano. Yet they fight for him fiercely on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the Republican party has just committed another $7 million to defend him from the Ukrainian impeachment.
They’re all in for a presidency where the lights are all out, morally and functionally, where the kind of megalomania common to back wards and padded cells has become the bewildering norm. It should have been all over but the sniggering when Trump declared himself “a stable genius.” There should have been a kind, but firm way to escort him from the White House to a place where he could get the care and medication that might stabilize his condition. Yet through it all — the Mueller report, the preposterous turnover among his staff and appointees, the 70,000 refugee children he incarcerated, the rumors of sexual assaults, the aides and associates imprisoned, the weird racist outbursts and now the Ukrainian fiasco — his support in Congress and among voters of the proverbial Republican “base” remains steady.
What do these loyalists tell themselves, that a rational person could understand? There are the personally compromised, of course, an expanding roster of amoral lackeys that now appears to include the vice president and the secretary of state. There are the congenitally cynical and greedy, who always vote their wallets and know that any Republican plutocrat, no matter how vile, will help them to maximize their fortunes. These reliable allies add up to a relatively small minority. It’s the rest of Trump’s steady 40%, the majority that isn’t wealthy and is nowhere close to the sources of power, that keeps us scratching our heads. What holds this “base” in place? Is it possible for a reasonably informed citizen to dismiss the entire impeachment cycle as a predictable partisan squabble, just another sore-loser attempt to dislodge the brash New Yorker who shot down Hillary Clinton?
The key phrase, I’m afraid, is “reasonably informed.” Polls show that loyalists get nearly all their news of the world and the nation from this thing on TV called Fox News, which at its best is a Republican propaganda machine, at its worst an exercise in police-state mind control that Josef Goebbels would have envied. The president’s incestuous relationship with Fox is an unprecedented scandal — he recruits staff from its ideologues and turns to them for advice and solace — and some of the praise its “journalists” heap upon our imaginary dictator would mortify Kim Jong-un. Trump recently boasted that Lou Dobbs of Fox Business had anointed him “the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”
Surely not, Lou? Did Trump make this up? But Dobbs is our age—-mine and the president’s — and if this is his take on American history, I’m afraid that his own senile dementia is well advanced. With the invaluable help of Fox extremists like Dobbs, Sean Hannity (who to his credit has never claimed to be a journalist), Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, the Far Right feeds truckloads of such banana-republic nonsense to the helplessly gullible. Trump’s approval ratings indicate that it’s highly effective. With Fox, right-wing radio, and a wild array of reactionary websites and social media cliques mobilized to misinform him, it’s now possible for an American voter to bypass reality altogether. He can fantasize a world that conforms perfectly to his prejudices and see it reflected in a hundred mirrors. When the history of the 21st century is written, this flight from facts and a president’s attacks on “fake news” —-anything printed or broadcast that didn’t flatter him—-may be the historians’ dominant theme.
Fox and its friends have succeeded in changing the meaning of the word “conservative,” as it applies to politics. As a rural, hard-core Luddite with Republican roots, a not-so-closeted libertarian and a pragmatist with no great faith in the socialist dream, I used to think I qualified as conservative. In 2020 I pass for a superannuated Bolshevik; “conservative” is a word reserved for malignant Neanderthal conspiracy-peddlers like Alex Jones, or presidential advisors in the lineage of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, dark figures who consort with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers. Don’t write to tell me that Miller is Jewish. His own uncle has denounced him for anti-immigrant hypocrisy and pandering to anti-Semites of the alt-right. In Trumpworld, this scent of madness, of contradictory outer-fringe eccentricity, is always near at hand. The president’s personal attorney for impeachment strategy, Jay Sekulow, is the former general counsel for Jews for Jesus. He’s a protégé of the “prosperity gospel” evangelists Paul and Janice Crouch, who introduced him on their TV show as “our little Jew.”
You couldn’t make this stuff up. (“Good grief,” as Charlie Brown used to say.) Another apostle of the prosperity gospel, Paula White, is Trump’s newly appointed religious guru and liaison to the evangelical community. The unholy alliance between the vulgar, profane, almost certainly criminal president and the most sanctimonious fundamentalists must be one of the weirdest in political history. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, another sad stooge who sold his soul to Trump, has actually referred to the Great Orange Sinner as “the chosen one.”
Which is the point where your head begins to spin, your mouth goes dry and your teeth begin to grind involuntarily. Trump was too crazy for those multi-starred generals whose medals and machismo he worshipped like a little boy; he was too crazy for Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil whose appointment as secretary of state signaled this administration’s abject submission to the fossil fuel industry and climate-change denial.
He was too crazy even for John Bolton, the most bloodthirsty, warmongering anti-diplomat in the Republican arsenal. But he’s not too crazy, polls continually remind us, for the poor double-mortgaged, credit-maxed schmuck in one of the “flyover” states like my own, who absorbs and consecrates the ugly xenophobic drivel with which the Hannitys and Limbaughs pollute the airwaves. There are tens of millions of these red-state underdogs, the same polls remind us, who never seem to grasp that there’s nothing for them in the Republican cupboard, no substance in the promises of a fat racist liar in a 40-inch necktie.
Donald Trump’s imminent impeachment will not result in his removal from office. He will not be remanded to an appropriate nursing home or asylum. He’ll be rebuked and humiliated, in our terms, but humiliation is a meaningless concept to a demented hustler with no more shame than the hungry fox who breaks into your henhouse. He’ll retain the support of nearly all the senators and congressmen in the Republican Party, within memory (mine) a diverse and flexible coalition, now little more than a white nationalist cabal. He’ll be nominated to run for a second term, with an enormous treasure chest, and there are reputable insiders who think he may win again. With his 14,000 fact-checked lies in 1,000 days and his revolving-door Dream Team of felons, fanatics, lobbyists, predatory billionaires and doddering free-lance incompetents like Rudy Giuliani, he’ll continue to make a sorry mockery of representative democracy. Columnist Leonard Pitts reminded us that John Dean told Richard Nixon, during the Watergate scandal, that there was “a cancer on the presidency.” “But in 2019,” Pitts added, “the cancer is the presidency.”
What is a sane patriot supposed to do — tear up his passport, join a survivalist militia, research real estate in Saskatchewan? America’s suicide rate has gone up 30% in the 21st-century; last month in Maine, a wealthy couple my age, in fair health but deeply discouraged by the state of things, left explanatory messages for their friends and family and took a lot of sleeping pills together, dying hand in hand.
Don’t pursue this option, please. Or if you must, please wait until after you’ve voted in the presidential election. The dead don’t vote—-at least in most precincts—and the Democrats who hope to dislodge Donald Trump need every sane voter who can breathe. It doesn’t really matter which Democrat is chosen from this multi-faced, multi-flawed lineup of candidates. This is not the time for the Democratic Party to indulge in its traditional cannibalism; I can’t even bear to watch them attack each other. The only thing that matters in 2020 is evicting this sick, this awful, this destructively evil man from the White House. On every truly urgent issue, every question of survival America faces——climate change, gun control, environmental degradation, income inequality, poverty—-his lunatic administration is either doing nothing or working hard to make things worse. Review those issues and consider that these people are quite literally killing us—-you and me, our children and grandchildren. Defeating Trump is not a goal that hinges on our political philosophies. It’s literally a matter of life and death.
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 books include “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners,” published in October 2018 from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2020
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