Chronicling the catastrophic arc of the Trump administration is like live coverage of the sack of Rome, while Visigoths are still burning temples and raping vestal virgins just across the Via. It feels hazardous, it feels like the end of everything safe and familiar, and it’s happening way too fast to evaluate each atrocity as it occurs. Fresh news at noon is ancient history by midnight. Yet in the interest of perspective, as Washington rocks and rolls with speculation about Bob Woodward’s new book and the anonymous White House insider who ratted out Trump to the New York Times, I want to remind the panic-stricken that neither of these documents reveals anything about Donald Trump that I (and others) have not been telling you for years.
We’ve long since used up our most urgent warnings, our most bloodthirsty adjectives and cruelest nouns. Though I wish that I, and not Spike Lee, had been the one who dubbed this president “Agent Orange.” (And an appreciative nod to Reality Winner, sentenced to five years in prison for leaking state secrets, who referred to him in a Facebook post as a “soulless ginger orangutan.”) If you honestly believe, or ever believed, that Donald J. Trump is an appropriate person to serve as president of the United States, you are tragically misinformed and possibly in the grip of crippling delusions, or worse yet Fox News.
Trumphobia is really not about ideology or party politics, though it’s unfortunate that so many of the hungry parasites now fastened to Trump’s ample backside were spawned in the right-wing snake pits of the new all-white Republican Party. It’s nothing like the hatred leveled against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, phobias which may have had some connection to their policies, principles or personalities, but in most cases were simply that sick old boys’ distrust of politicians who aren’t white or male. Donald Trump? You wouldn’t shake hands with him or invest a dollar in him, you wouldn’t invite him into your home or leave him alone with your wife, your daughter or your mother. Or even your dachshund, if you care about your pets.
“Trump is unfit to be president” reads the headline on the editorial page of my local paper. What a revelation. Trump was, is, and always will be unfit to lead a pack of Cub Scouts on an overnight hike. If he’s qualified to choose a Supreme Court justice, I’m qualified to perform a heart transplant. The president is a complete idiot — I’m not sure what it takes for an idiot to achieve completion, but if anyone has put in the work that’s required, it’s Donald Trump. To call him a horse’s ass is a gratuitous insult to the equine community. How a dim and ridiculous laughingstock from the nether reaches of the mob-infused real estate and casino industries became the world’s most powerful elected official is something our historians will be chewing and re-chewing for the next half-century. If, of course, the science of history survives that official’s all-out war on facts.
Many facts are already fading toward opacity. Trump is anti-immigrant (though his wife and in-laws are immigrants) and a convert to the racist Birther sect that insists Obama was born in Kenya. We think we know that Trump was born and raised in Queens and lived most of his life in New York City. But his hatred of free speech and the free press, his demands for draconian new laws against libel and public protest, his criminalizing of refugees — these blind spots seem so flagrantly un-American that we wonder, however the Mueller investigation turns out, if this orange creature may be some changeling manufactured in Moscow and set among us, like those fake Facebook accounts, to sow discord and confusion. Unlike Columbus or Leif Erikson, this Trump we’re experiencing has never discovered America. Is he the same organism, the same desperately self-promoting Roy Cohn protege the New York disc jockeys used to mock on morning drive? Or was that Trump replaced somehow by a corpulent android from the Kremlin’s infernal laboratory? Someone pointed out that Agent Orange doesn’t know the words to “God Bless America.”
Have you also reached the point where you and your old friends spend a few minutes venting about the latest outrage and then, locking eyes, fall silent and share a moment of mournful communion? “Have we really lived so long, kept our hopes alive through so many disappointments, only to see it come to this?” The venerable Bob Woodward, who earned his reputation as the best-connected White House journalist of his generation, warns us that he has never seen a president “so detached from the reality of what’s going on.” The most plausible reality, reinforced by Woodward’s sources and the mole who squealed to the Times, is that USA 2018 is a runaway bus with no one in the driver’s seat. But in his recent speech in Illinois, ex-president Obama echoed something I asserted here a few weeks ago, though I’m not claiming he plagiarized me. “It did not start with Donald Trump,” Obama reminded his audience. “He is a symptom, not the cause.”
If the Trump-thing is like a poison arrow piercing the vital organs of constitutional democracy — and I’d readily go that far — somewhere there’s a hand that pulled the bowstring. Vladimir Putin? Puzzling and disturbing as the Trump-Putin relationship may seem, we shirk responsibility if we blame the little Russian macro-thug for all this sorrow. Obama points his finger at the “old playbook,” the demagogue’s game that rarely fails to fool a certain kind of American voter — “appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security would be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do.” He calls this familiar pitch “the politics of fear.”
Of course Obama’s diagnosis is correct, but in my opinion it’s far from comprehensive. Gullibility, prejudice and fear of the other are epidemic in America. But there’s a deeper infection, a pre-existing condition that makes it so much harder to cure these other diseases. The first essay in a book I’ve just published is a profile/eulogy celebrating the wisdom of Texas journalist Molly Ivins, who died in 2007. Molly’s last warning to her readers, which I recycle as often as I can, was “Either we figure out how to get corporate cash out of the political system or we lose the democracy.” And Molly died before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that opened the floodgates to corporate and plutocratic largesse in political campaigns. The oligarchy now in charge of the American government, the one responsible for Donald Trump, took its critical shot of adrenaline from Citizens United; in 2016 it crossed the finish line a length ahead of constitutional democracy.
“Oligarchy is eating our ass, our dreams, our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax code,” Molly Ivins wrote with her inimitable delicacy. But even 11 years ago, no one, not even Molly, could have imagined President Donald Trump and his cabinet of reactionary billionaires. I experience disgust every day when I open my email and find dozens of urgent messages begging for money — $1, $5, $10, Please! — from Democratic candidates all across the country, thousands of miles from where I live and vote. Each plea is couched in the most desperate language, as if my failure to contribute will sink civilization’s last hopes, and the messages include scolding and shaming for my previous inaction. I’m not exaggerating. And I’m targeted even though I’ve never been a registered Democrat and never, to the best of my memory, contributed a nickel to a Democratic candidate. (I served my newsroom apprenticeship back when any obvious party affiliation compromised a journalist’s credibility.)
In an election year in the age of oligarchs, money’s all that seems to matter. Political reporters routinely rank candidates’ chances according to the amount of money they’ve been able to raise, or all too often loan to their own campaigns — loans that usually exceed the net worth of the average voter. Candidates’ success in statewide races may depend on their ability to attract billionaire donors. “Will the Koch brothers fund Democrats?” asks a lead editorial in the Kansas City Star. A recent article in the Bangor Daily News celebrated the game-changing influence of a new liberal PAC, funded by billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and S. Donald Sussman, that has committed nearly $12 million to help elect Democrats in the state of Maine. Once that would have been questionable outside interference in Maine’s affairs; today it’s hailed as manna from heaven.
I don’t blame President Obama out on the fundraising circuit, or any of the mendicant Democratic politicians who pound on my cyber-door every morning. If you hope to win — and the stakes have never been higher — you’re obliged to play the game by the rules that currently apply. I’m glad that not all hedge-fund plutocrats lean to the right. But neither the Founders nor any of the idealists who helped to shape this country ever imagined that American politics would devolve into the battle of the billionaires, our fat cats against your fat cats, Soros and Steyer vs. the Mercers and Kochs and Sheldon Adelsons. The greatest scandal that currently embarrasses America, greater even than Donald Trump, racism resurgent or the government’s assault on the environment, is the most grotesque misdistribution of income and wealth any modern nation has achieved.
The richest 1% now controls nearly 40% (against 2.3% for the bottom 60%) of America’s wealth and collects 95% of all new wealth the economy creates. One family, the Waltons of Arkansas, is worth more than the bottom 40% of their fellow citizens, a bloc with an average net worth of $10,000. CEOs at the 350 biggest corporations earn an annual average of $19 million — 312 times as much as their average employee. In 1965 the ratio was 20-1. It’s bewildering and sickening, and cash-saturated politics are a major reason for the yawning, widening gap between rich and poor. Dollars do the voting now, and he who has the most of them reaps all the benefits our electoral system can bestow. Billionaires and conglomerates own so many legislators and congressmen they can override public opinion at will. A prime example is the gun lobby, a campaign-funding giant whose lunatic policies still prevail over common sense, even though polls show that a dominant majority of Americans, including many gun owners, would vote for stricter, saner regulation of firearms.
Republicans labor to disenfranchise minority voters and marginalize unions, and their pitch to the working underclass is always about creating “jobs,” which translates as any scrap the corporate oligarchy is kind enough to toss your way — “thank you, boss man, thank you” — rather than the leverage your labor should be worth or any fair share of the wealth of this affluent republic. What conservatives describe reverently as capitalism and free enterprise has morphed into the New Feudalism, with wealth and power distributed so unequally that Americans at the bottom of the economy are comparatively poorer, and certainly less secure, than indentured serfs of the Middle Ages.
Is it a great mystery, then, that so many of these 21st-century serfs, in most cases blue-collar white people, will still vote for a Republican Party with no serious agenda except to accelerate corporate profits, cut taxes for the undertaxed super-rich and generate more wealth for the wealthy? Not such a mystery. Seventy years ago, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), Hannah Arendt wrote that the secret to establishing a stable (fascist) oligarchy was to forge an alliance between “capital and mob,” between the ruling classes and the white working class industrial capitalism had emasculated. The key to the alliance, she explained, was always the oppression of minorities, whose degradation somehow restores the confidence of marginalized Caucasians. As Lyndon Johnson once said to Bill Moyers, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
The old wisdom expressed by Arendt and Johnson is the same bitter wisdom Barack Obama was referencing, the “old playbook,” the politics of fear. It’s that same old alliance between “capital and mob” that currently has the United States in a hammerlock. Donald Trump is indeed “a symptom, not the cause.” But he’s a very serious symptom, a side effect like going into atrial fibrillation because you just took the wrong medication.
Don’t just ignore him and expect him to go away.
Hal Crowther’s new essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair) will be in bookstores in October. He is the author of An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken and four previous collections of essays; the most recent, “Gather at the River,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize for Criticism.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018
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