Send Off the Clown?

Donald Trump, Defendant; Case Closed

By HAL CROWTHER

“Now is the season
Of bitter unreason
The rose at the window
And death at the door.”
— from “Lullaby,” Robert Beverly Hale

I found the timely lines above in the program for a memorial service, a tribute to the New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell, who died in July in his 102nd year. They sound like an epitaph for the troubled summer of 2022, as the United States of America faces a crisis unlike any in its history. The House Select Committee investigating the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 has established beyond any reasonable or even conceivable doubt that Donald Trump is guilty of more criminal intent and responsibility than his worst enemies had dared to imagine. There’s no legitimate debate about it, as loyal Republicans with eyewitness access testify that he was at the center of an elaborate illegal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And even took satisfaction in the bloody riots that violated the Capitol building and threatened the lives of senators and congressmen.

In short—motivated by nothing but his own diseased vanity—he planned a coup, and was bitterly disappointed when it fell short. It’s not excessive to charge him with an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of his country by force. That’s treason, and in another century patriots might have hanged this ex-president, or shot him. Even as he planned another campaign for the White House, it was clear that the house where Donald Trump belongs is known as “the big house” to criminals who serve time there. Or the madhouse. In a properly functioning judicial system the only way he could escape prison would be to plead insanity. It’s a plea no one could easily dismiss.

(The worst kind of crazy people, whose brain stems have been gnawed through by narcissism, observe other people so inadequately that they only accuse their rivals of sins they themselves are committing, usually at that very moment. Think of The Big Steal, voter fraud, lie, fake, cheat, libel, etc. But Mr. Trump is also a classic locked-ward head case who once tweeted that Israelis view him as “the second coming of God.” He has said “I am the chosen one” in public, and recently admitted that he schemed to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to himself.)

He has utterly exhausted our patience, and my vocabulary of pejoratives. This is a crook, a racist, a pathological liar, an apparent psychopath, an accused rapist and an admitted sexual predator—-and all that was clear even before the rapid cognitive decline that has rendered his outbursts incomprehensible. This is a 76-year-old, 300-pound grandfather with the intellectual depth and emotional maturity of a badly spoiled and distinctly unpromising eight-year-old, the kind of boy despairing parents ship off to military school long before puberty. He’s in a class by himself—a strong contender, if not the frontrunner, for the title “Worst Man in the World.” (His only close competitors are the autocrats he admires in Moscow and Riyadh.) And even when the prerogatives of power turned him into a towering menace, an active threat to everything decent and aboveboard, he managed to remain ridiculous throughout his public career. He’s the devil clown, a step ahead of villagers with pitchforks, who was left behind when the circus moved on.

But the worst of the crisis America faces in the summer of 2022 is not Trump’s outrageous, delusional persistence, nor even the damage his Jan. 6 plot inflicted on constitutional democracy. If you take the facts above—shaped only slightly by my opinion—and discount them by 50%, it’s still seems clear that no sober, accurately informed voter would consider this individual for any public office, far less our highest one. Not one voter, not ever. His long rambling speeches are verbal dumpsters packed with empty bluster, flat-out lies, incoherent digressions and right-wing boilerplate some slightly less illiterate flunky has written for him. Nonsense, unrelieved by wit, sincerity or charm. And yet most polls show that between 25 and 30 percent of likely voters, and half or more of Republicans, are still devoted to this awful clown and eager to see him run for president again. The one true thing Trump ever said, it seems, is that his supporters would stick with him even if he murdered someone on Fifth Avenue at noon.

Why? It isn’t quite as mysterious as it seems. The key, above, is “accurately informed voter.” For the first time, in the age of the internet and social media, of proliferating voices and cataracts of deliberate disinformation, it’s possible for a voter to live sealed in an impermeable bubble of untruth and denial, avoiding all media and nearly all information that could be described as “accurate” or “reliable.” Never in our history have so many sinister players tried so hard, and so successfully, to isolate, deceive and manipulate the most gullible segment of the electorate. The Trump they sell to a captive audience is not the same Trump the rest of us see clearly. Deborah Eisenberg, in the New York Review of Books, strikes the proper notes of alarm and despair when she laments “our helplessness in the face of the current assault on sources of reliable information.”

Twenty-first-century America is a landscape of failing local newspapers and “news deserts” where the loudest media voices, sometimes the only sources for national politics, are radio’s regional “shock jocks” selling every rightwing fantasy from QAnon to Holocaust denial. In this country today you can build a winning coalition, as Trump did, with voters who—at least from any journalist’s point of view—know nothing at all. As a flock of prosecutors circle like road-kill buzzards over Trump and all his convicted, indicted, pardoned and currently investigated associates, we have to assume that tens of millions of Americans have no idea that this is happening. And that many millions more will ignore this news or dismiss it as a partisan assault by “fake” media. “Fake media,” a coinage of the 45th president, included every news source that tried to tell the truth about Donald Trump.

Are we helpless, as Eisenberg asserts, with no real hope of reaching or liberating these prisoners of the bubble, Reality’s resisters and dropouts? It’s possible that we are, at least up to a point. This is a grave educational and cultural crisis that will long outlast Donald Trump. And there’s no gain in deploring the undereducated for what often appears to be stubborn inborn stupidity. We all saw what happened to Hillary Clinton when she rationally applied the word “deplorable” to the shaggiest elements of Trump’s Republican base, the wild ones he embraced as “very fine people” and “my people” when they rallied in Charlottesville and on Jan. 6. Politicians are obliged to remember that racists, neo-fascists and anti-Semites have feelings, too.

We need to remind ourselves that these news-vacuum dwellers, even the ugliest ones, are relative innocents compared to the inner circle of sophisticated Republican enablers who’ve always known perfectly well that Trump is nuts and nasty, but will never say so because they still believe he can make or break them. It takes subpoenas to smoke them out, and I hope the Select Committee has coerced them into enough honesty to put Trump behind bars. The strength of the devil clown’s grip on the Republican Party will remain a mystery. But I confess that I’m bored and frustrated with journalists who persist in psychoanalyzing the diehard Trump voter and trying to extend empathy for his point of view.

Bret Stephens, one of the New York Times’ “rationally conservative” columnists who reject Trump, recently wrote a rather abject apology for his condescension to Trump’s supporters and his failure to appreciate the resentments that drove them to embrace such a fool. First of all, none of them will ever read Stephens’ mea culpa in the Times, which is part of the problem. But as much as I applaud humility, I was disappointed to see Stephens recycle rightwing rhetoric about “coastal elites” who have betrayed and neglected less privileged Americans. No doubt there are such “self-satisfied elites,” as he calls them, but who could be stupid enough to imagine Donald Trump, or any current Republican, as the knight-errant opposing them?

At some point in America’s long anti-intellectual culture slide, they managed to flip the definition of “elite.” Wait—Donald Trump with his gold plumbing and monarchic grandiosity, the billionaire Kochs and Thiels and Wall Street tycoons who fund the Republican party, they’re now champions of the little man? And my family and friends are the little guy’s enemies because we went to college? Stephens should be ashamed, not of his condescension but of his gullibility. Trump never “had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties,” as Stephens wrote. He was simply a lout, a dull-witted boor who defied all civilized expectations.

This popular myth of the new “elite”—not the people who own too much, but the people who know too much—epitomizes disinformation and insidious propaganda at their most effective. Information failure is a curse we can’t wish or legislate away. It has been no summer for optimists. War, pestilence, fires, floods, famine, drought, infernal heat and massacred schoolchildren make even our grotesquely polarized and gridlocked politics seem irrelevant. The long arm of the law reaching out for Donald Trump provides a single ray of hope. The Select Committee has lined up a battery of smoking guns, and even the hyper-cautious Attorney General Merrick Garland will be compelled to move soon.

The jig is up, Don. How will the bubble tribes respond if they see pictures of their leader in striped pajamas or a straitjacket instead of that huge blue suit? What strange tales will they be told to explain it, and which minorities will be blamed? Violence is possible, even likely. “Truth is for children,” a credo attributed to the Nazi executioner Reinhard Heydrich, has become the password and working principle of the Republican Party. But allow me to dream of Donald Trump scrawling those words on the wall of his barred and padded cell.

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, September 1, 2022

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