Anyone who claims he’s not petrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a shameless fraud, or a lump of inanimate matter. This is the most earth-shaking military action by a major power in my lifetime, and I’m creeping toward the upper end of the actuarial tables. Among the grim possibilities are the collapse of the world economy, a cataclysmic world war and a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet uninhabitable for human beings and most other forms of life. That such a crisis could evolve from the resentments and delusions of a single man, one icy, homicidal little dictator who earned his spurs with the secret police, this is a bitter fact we have no choice but to swallow.
Whether Vladimir Putin is insane, by most clinical standards, no longer matters, any more than sanity mattered when Hitler embraced genocide. The dead remain dead, and the sanest survivors struggle to restore some kind of order that we can live with.
A genuine world crisis, one that can affect each of our lives profoundly, temporarily renders our other concerns peripheral. As long as those bombs are falling on Kyiv and those hearses and ambulances are racing through the rubble, no one is going to pay much heed to stories of racial injustice or environmental collapse. Among those most frozen by a major crisis are people who peddle their opinions, which can become obsolete overnight. The moment that Putin declares war on France, or God forbid that a nuclear warhead hits Paris, everything we thought or wrote yesterday is medieval history. Nevertheless, I had been thinking — I confess with a groan — of Donald Trump. I found something in my files, a clipping from December 2016 when Trump was president-elect. It seemed so astonishing, in the light of subsequent events, that I couldn’t keep it to myself.
Then the war began. Revelations about an ex-president, even one as ominous and outrageous as Trump, seemed spurious as photos of Ukraine’s maimed children began to circulate. But Trump predictably failed to keep his mouth shut, and inserted himself into the war coverage that had overshadowed the Jan. 6 investigation and the steady stream of embarrassing memoirs by Republicans who worked for him. While the sane world gasped in horror at Putin’s invasion, Trump issued a bewildering statement praising his favorite Russian for his “genius” and “savvy.” He even appeared to express delight at the way Putin had “handled” Joe Biden, an American president suddenly burdened with trying to save the world. What ought to have shocked us most, even coming from Trump, was that he clearly regarded Biden as his enemy and Putin as a role model. To make matters worse, in the midst of the Ukrainians’ agony, this bizarre Donald Trump directed his contempt at a key American ally, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, for his COVID mandates.
Alarmed advisors may have intervened — I imagine his weeping daughter begging him to shut up — and implored him to walk back some of this wild stuff before Congress voted to deport him to Moscow. Follow-up statements allowed, grudgingly, that the invasion “truly is a crime against humanity” that “has to end soon.” But not even Sean Hannity, Trump’s media stooge-in-chief, could get him to admit that Putin was “evil.” Clearly a line had been crossed; the fantasy that Trump is merely a cranky, profane and belligerent fool was no longer a place where Republicans can hide. Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t hesitate to employ the “T” word on television. Trump’s praise of Putin is “almost treasonous,” said Romney, on CNN. Rebel Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney expressed grave concern that Trump’s outbursts “aid our enemies. Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States.”
Look up the word “treason.” The former president’s “bromance” with the Russian tough guy has been a joke for years. I even own a refrigerator magnet someone gave me, a photo-shopped image of the two of them bare-chested and arm-locked, with the words “Donny Loves Vladdy.” But tasteless gay jokes turn very lame when cities are burning and Russian bombs are falling on maternity wards. In the same news cycle, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham promoted her memoir, recalling how Trump had feared Putin and “admired him greatly.” TV hosts on “The View” took a deep breath when Grisham asserted that Trump “wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. He loved the dictators, the people who could kill anyone, including the press.”
Here we sink into deep pathology, and deeper mystery. This is a witness from inside the Trump White House. Is anyone listening? The unshakable loyalty of Trump’s true believers — we saw who they were on Jan. 6, 2021 — remains a huge factor in American politics. But don’t they claim patriotism as the bedrock of their ideology? One deadly irony, considering the lunatic conspiracy theories the Far Right embraces, is that no paranoid theory comes with one-tenth as much circumstantial evidence as the Left’s favorite rumor that Donald Trump was a Russian agent all along. Apart from his passion for Putin, the Russian connections of his various indicted, convicted and pardoned associates must have placed him under CIA surveillance years ago.
No, I don’t believe that Moscow owns him outright — he’s very useful to them, but he was always too dumb and erratic to be Putin’s chosen agent. And I don’t recommend that we take him out and shoot him, if that’s what federal law mandates for proven traitors. Though I seriously doubt, if I take Stephanie Grisham seriously, that Trump would extend this compassion to me or any of my kind. All we can hope for, as small compensation for the Russian terror now destroying Ukraine and shaking the world, is that some decisive percentage of those “patriots” in their MAGA hats will finally see Donald Trump for what he is, and help to put him behind us for good.
So what is he, exactly? Patriot? Besides offering praise and comfort to America’s most vocal and belligerent enemy, Trump has never tried to conceal an authoritarian vision in direct conflict with the Constitution of the United States. The whole point of Article II (concerning the presidency), in the eyes of Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, was to guarantee that there would be no American kings or dictators. In his memoir, “The Congressional Experience,” my friend and congressman David Price, the 17-term Representative from North Carolina, takes special note of Donald Trump’s radical dissent. “I have an Article II,” Price quotes Trump telling a student audience, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At a press briefing, Price recalls, Trump went even further: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total. That’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”
So much for the balance of powers. We can imagine Vladimir Putin nodding his approval. In the light of current revelations about Trump’s plot to reverse the 2020 election, congressman Jamie Raskin expressed amazement: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.” Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, one of the Republicans Trump is trying to destroy for voting to impeach him, is now describing him as “a would-be tyrant.” Congressman Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts summed it up: “Donald Trump is a constitutional wrecking ball.”
Yet, neither his flirtation with treason nor his sick hunger for absolute power seals the case against the clown who would be king. There is no doubt that electing him president in 2016 was the single greatest embarrassment American citizens have ever inflicted on themselves. This hollow, stupid, amoral hustler with a terminal case of narcissism is arguably the most repulsive public figure of my entire generation. Never in human history has so much self-love been expended on a self that deserved so little. “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” of which MAGA loyalists accused me and others who might have written the previous sentence, was no more than an honest attempt to express our astonishment that such a creature could exist, and thrive.
I still marvel, daily. But I know they’ll be physicians, not politicians, who lower the final curtain on the remarkable career of America’s 45th president. If you’re part of the hard core that doesn’t care whether your candidate is a crook, a traitor and a pathological liar, wouldn’t you still hesitate to vote for an elderly charlatan in the late middle stages of irreversible mental illness? There’s still debate about whether Putin is insane — our CIA director claims he’s not — but the verdict on Trump came in long before the 2020 elections. In 2017 I quoted several prominent psychiatrists, including academic authorities from Harvard and Yale. Their diagnoses of Donald Trump were uniformly despairing, including “mentally ill, cognitively compromised, brain impaired” and “inability to process critical information or to consider consequences before making impulsive, irrational decisions that are not based in reality but in fight reality.”
And that was years ago, pre-pandemic, preceding many cycles of incomprehensible outbursts and — according to the Washington Post — more than 30,000 certified lies. His post-presidency has been marked by an even more rapid decline. Last week a friendly right-wing interviewer asked him about the future of Ukraine, and he answered with a madhouse tirade about how he hates windmills. Look it up. The next day he told an audience of supporters that the solution to the Ukrainian crisis is “to bomb the sh*t out of Russia” using planes painted with the Chinese flag. It’s safe to say that no other politician, no public individual with any marginal grip on reality or consequences would have said that. Anywhere, ever. He thought it was a joke.
Even in his prime the man was a joke. Alair Townsend, a deputy mayor of New York, where everyone knows Trump and no one votes for him, once said “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” But I’m way too old to joke about dementia. Here was an intellect that never expanded much beyond middle school, a dim bully eroded by dementia until his vocal cords disconnected from his brain. And the second most frightening thing about Trump is that he’s running for president again and 40% of sampled voters claim to support him. Since most Republicans have abandoned facts-accountable media, how do we convince enough of them that voting for Trump again is the least patriotic act an American could commit, short of taking up arms for Russia or ISIS? Ideology be damned. If you love your country and take a modest view of your own importance to its history, if you think America’s laws, traditions and basic principles are worthy of respect — if you have never been threatened with involuntary commitment — you have nothing in common with Donald Trump.
Oh, and the news item from 2016 that brought our “would-be tyrant” to mind? As president-elect, he had just received a congratulatory message from — you guessed it — Vladimir Putin. “So true,” Trump tweeted. “Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary and the Dems: ‘In my opinion it is humiliating. One must be able to lose with dignity.’ “So true.”
You could never make this stuff up, not with the worst case of Trump Derangement Syndrome on record. Let your mind boggle, if it’s still able. On the foggy far side of an illness like this one, hypocrisy is an inconceivable concept.
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. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2022
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