“Stay calm,” the late Harry Reasoner used to counsel younger colleagues, anger artists like me who found things in the news that made us want to set fires and pound our foreheads against walls of unforgiving brick. “Never type your copy with trembling fingers.” Sound advice that will not see me, aged and seasoned as I am, through the bewildering Age of Trump. When is enough truly and finally enough? Will there, could there be a moment when someone steps forward to call out the mad bull in our China shop, as Joseph Welch famously called out Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954, in such a way that nearly everyone in a troubled, divided country will realize that the raging monster has to go, and go now?
We don’t need an election in 2020, we need a medical intervention. But who has the stature, the credibility to make this critical call, to say “Enough, sir, it’s time to step down and get the care you need,” and make it stick? No Democrat, obviously, in this most cynical age of partisan politics. Chief Justice Roberts might make a credible intervention, but if he hasn’t had enough of Trump already, forget him. Dr. Fauci? There is no religious leader, no elder statesman, no upright beribboned general, no revered national hero with enough prestige to depose a clueless, shameless president.
By any previous standards, Donald Trump reached “Enough” years ago. But my fingers are newly atremble over his response to the news that Sen. Kamala Harris will be the Democratic candidate for vice president. He immediately called attention to the baseless right-wing claim that she’s ineligible for higher office because her parents weren’t American citizens when she was born. For Trump, who embraced the racist “Birther” cult that claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya, this line of attack against another non-white Democrat goes miles beyond the “dog whistle” tradition of sending racist signals in coded language. It’s more like a cross-burning on the National Mall. In a summer of sorrow with racial prejudice back at the center of the national conversation, and most politicians paying lip service, at least, to Black Lives Matter, our president makes a point of whistling love songs to the diehard racists who make up such a substantial percentage of his repulsive “base.” We might as well have elected David Duke to sit in the Oval Office, hood and robe and all.
This is creepy, vile, frightening. But it’s only mildly deranged compared with the emergence of QAnon, the Trump-loving conspiracy cult that has crept from the haunted fringes of the Internet to the front page of the New York Times. QAnon believes that Donald Trump was sent from heaven to rid the world of a powerful secret society of Satan-worshiping pedophiles — not surprisingly including prominent Jews and Democratic politicians like the Clintons — who traffic in under-age flesh, eat children and drink their blood. These things that bubble up from social media cesspools are so ridiculous and disgusting that it’s embarrassing to have to describe them. But, according to the Times, this one now has several million adherents. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has just won a Republican primary in Georgia that will almost certainly make her a member of the next House of Representatives.
You and I might just let our jaws drop open and suggest that Nancy Pelosi could move Ms. Greene’s office to the reptile wing of the National Zoo. President Trump congratulated this strange woman and called her “a future Republican star.”
When is enough enough? QAnon, the lurid fantasy of anti-Semites who call George Soros a pedophile and a pedophagic, is so crazy that it’s hard to believe it could find even one true believer, far less three million. Donald Trump, the weird orange psychopath it professes to worship, is so crazy that it’s hard to believe he could attract a dozen voters, far less 50 million. This is a man whose every utterance and very existence are cardinal sins against the intelligent, the competent and the pure of heart.
What does it take to bring down the curtain on a lethal burlesque that will keep historians puzzling for a hundred years? If we listen only to Trump’s closest associates and officials he personally appointed, the verdict on the man and his presidency is cruel enough. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “He’s a f***ing moron.” Chief of Staff John Kelly: “He’s an idiot.” Campaign manager Steve Bannon: “He’s an 11-year-old child.”
National security advisor John Bolton: “I don’t think he’s fit for office.” Economic advisor Barry Cohn: “He’s a professional liar.” White House press aide (and former reality TV associate) Omarosa Manigault Newman: “He’s unhinged.” His own niece, Mary Trump: “He’s the world’s most dangerous man.”
And finally: “I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” Who knows Trump that well and despises him to that extent? That would be his personal lawyer and loyal henchman, Michael Cohen, who, after more than a decade of executing Trump’s dirtiest dirty work, was thrown under the bus and ended up in a New York prison, where he wrote a tell-all book to get even with his master. Of course Cohen is hardly the most credible witness — where would you ever find one, in Trump’s inner circle? — but he can prove that he was, as he writes, “Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night.” He claims he was in and out of Trump’s New York office “as many as 50 times a day.”
We won’t ever hear a witness with more to tell than Michael Cohen — unless the next White House defector is Melania Trump, but she won’t be able to get a book published before the election. Cohen’s book is expected “soon,” and the foreword he posted on his website also promises inside proof that Trump conspired with the Russians in 2016.
Combine all this testimony with the coronavirus disaster, with the denial and incompetence that resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the worst pandemic response in the civilized world, and you would not expect more than a handful of American voters ready to give Trump another four years in office.
You would, of course, be wrong. In spite of the polls that show him trailing Joe Biden, sometimes by a double-digit gap, there has always been an irreducible minority — 40% of most samples — who would vote for Trump if he was photographed eating one of those children in the QAnon fantasies. They are the mystery we struggle to solve. For years I’ve been advised to listen to voices “outside my bubble,” and I’ve tried. All I’ve been able to detect is a mile-wide stubborn streak, the MAGA tribe’s refusal to admit that they were wrong in 2016, and their belligerent rejection of anything the “elites” consider logical. Along with ample evidence, of course, that assaults on “Fake News” have been effective. Discrediting news media that try to tell the truth is a trick the Trump administration has in common with Nazi Germany and with anti-democratic autocrats everywhere. It may prove to be Trump’s most lethal legacy.
Those voices from outside my bubble were rarely informed voices, or even coherent. Lately, I’ve been considering a different demographic. In response to the pandemic of 2020, a couple of members of my college graduating class initiated an online plague dialogue that our classmates embraced enthusiastically. Every day at least half a dozen old men, some clearly showing psychological wear and tear, post opinion and autobiography that ranges from tepid self-promotion to dark sexual secrets. The level of candor is surprising, and it’s natural that political bias has emerged, including some scarcely-veiled contempt for the president. But the class participants are currently agonizing about making political statements taboo, for fear of destroying collegiality and nostalgic fraternity. What they’re clearly pussyfooting around is the possibility that there are rabid Trumpists among these kindly old men we knew when they were boys.
Using the decrepit Class of ’66 as a sample narrows down the search for Donald Trump’s mysterious, virtually inconceivable appeal. As I see it, there are only three reasons why one of my classmates would support a demented racist clown. One would be senility, which doesn’t need to explain itself. A second would be almost total ignorance, the sole reliance on Fox News and similarly tainted sources of Republican propaganda that has rendered a large section of Trump’s base impossible to reach or teach. This one we can eliminate, in the case of my classmates. Most of them are or were doctors, lawyers, professors, corporate executives, investment bankers and the like, and it would be grossly insulting to imply that any of them rely on Tucker Carlson for ideology. The third possibility is selfishness and cynicism — an affluent classmate might be among the viciously greedy Americans who know that Trump is mad and destructive but always vote for the candidate who promises to protect and enhance their fortunes.
I hope that none of my old fraternity brothers have aged into that kind of grasping cynicism. I know for a fact that some of the wealthiest men I knew in school are adamantly anti-Trump and spending generously to stop him. But there’s no point in pretending that all Trump voters are illiterates and morons, or even single-issue fanatics who love assault rifles or hate homosexuals. Plenty of them are calculating, miserly old bastards, and nearly all of these bastards are white. They pretend that the Republican Party is still the bastion of tight-money, small-government conservatism, when they know very well that it’s been hijacked by white nationalists and even wilder rightwing creatures like the hate-encrusted, quasi-religious subhumans who subscribe to QAnon. Once again in this strange election year of 2020, it’s the racists, the Scrooges and the snarling yahoos with their cartridge belts — the brainless and the heartless, someone wrote — against all the rest of us.
And there has never been less common ground, less neutral territory. What can we possibly say to someone who doesn’t think Donald Trump is a tragic embarrassment? We can cry “enough,” we can wail until our tears are dry, but no Joseph Welch or reborn Chief Justice is going to rescue us, no men in white coats are going to march into the White House to carry a straitjacketed president off to the asylum where he belongs. No furious throngs of protesters, numbered in the tens of thousands like the successful ones in Lebanon (and Belarus?) are going to force this failed government to resign. Like their president, Americans use up their rage on Twitter.
Are we helpless, then, to stop the arterial bleeding, to keep a wounded democracy from fainting dead away? We have a national election in two months, but its legitimacy has already been challenged from both sides. In the midst of the pandemic, no one wants to catch his death of COVID-19 standing in a long line of voters, and the White House is already trying to stifle absentee voting by hamstringing the Postal Service. It seems certain that Trump will dispute the result if he loses, and no one is sure he’ll leave voluntarily when his loss is obvious. Even if the election goes well and proves there are more of us than there are of “them”— the brainless and heartless —the outrageous anachronism called the Electoral College can still crush our hopes, as it did in 2016.
Many fine words of idealism and patriotism were spoken at the Democrats’ virtual convention. I hope they energized enough decent people to fight back, to defeat both the coronavirus and the equally poisonous political virus that Donald Trump and things like QAnon represent. Will 2020 end on a high note, with all our graveyard talk of Pearl Harbor and Fort Sumter forgotten? I hope so. But there were never many devout optimists in my profession, and I was never one of them. See you in November.
Hal Crowther is 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, September 15, 2020
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