WELL, THAT PRESS CONFERENCE was…something, huh? Predictably shambolic to the point of parody. Only more so. Satire and ridicule no longer register; we’re down the faux-golden rabbit hole, and it smells a lot like…urine. The unprecedented combination of incompetence and unscrupulousness on display makes George W. Bush look like Thomas Jefferson. What a national embarrassment. And if we’re counting on the media (many of whom laughed dutifully like dead-eyed show dogs at the appropriate moments, proving the only thing more astonishing than Trump’s truthless mendacity is the imperturbable fashion with which these bootlickers lap it up — for access, for ratings) to hold this buffoon in any way accountable, it’s going to be a long, brutal slog.
Special kudos to Jake Tapper, sitting afterward beside the emptiest suit in modern journalism, Wolf Blitzer, and making a play for his colleague’s crown: that immediate capitulation, equal parts petulant but unctuous, marks a new low in what may become a bottomless pit in the years (months? weeks? days? minutes?) ahead. Like a pathetic nerd willing to endure endless wedgies from the jocks for the pleasure of being in their company, these cowards are pleading with Trump to understand they aren’t the ones pushing “fake news” about a man who started the Obama “birther” conspiracy. For anyone struggling to understand why what Buzzfeed did is not only defensible, but imperative, it’s useful, as ever, to turn to our man George Orwell, who wrote: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” That precept, already in grave peril pre-Trump, is going to be tested to previously unimaginable limits in the years (months? weeks? days? minutes?) ahead.
Yet, in a surreal best case scenario for the GOP, even the most plugged-in fanatic can’t keep pace with the outrages and things-that-would-normally-qualify-as-headline-dominating-scandals (Exhibit A: that stunt, during the press conference—with the lawyer spewing falsehood after ruse after gambit to explain why, in fact, there are no conflicts of interest—normally would require, by the laws of irony, a lightning bolt to crash into the room, incinerating everyone present. Exhibit B: the mere fact that a wretched poltroon like Jeff Sessions is being mentioned, in 2017–outside a Top Ten list of most despicable public servants in American history–would usually oblige weeks of discussion and deliberation). We can’t even wrap our minds around the depravity of Trump’s alleged Russian adventures (when The Donald denied being down with water sports because he’s a germaphobe, and some of the press tittered, it was a particularly low point in yesterday’s spectacle), so these types of distractions will likely enable a host of unsavory cretins to coast through their confirmations unscathed, assuming their roles in Trump’s administration.
I’ll confess that after yesterday’s infomercial, I mean press conference, I had a fleeting (however naive) revelation: despite his bluster, once the polling became clear, Trump would not willingly take away health care from so many of the red state suckers. As more folks figured out what’s really going on, and we saw more stories like this, we could count on Trump, quite paradoxically and only because of his colossal ego, to be the unforeseen monkey wrench in Ryan & McConnell’s vision of undoing everything positive, post-FDR.
And yet, we wake up today to discover (once again), by having no shame whatsoever, the GOP is figuring out that in a nation increasingly populated by children, obfuscation without apology (or explanation) is the best way to advance an agenda and suffer minimal, if any blowback. In today’s America, our reality is that a black man giving millions of people health care is many times more politically damaging than a rich white man taking it away from them. Until, that is, they figure out exactly what they had, what’s gone, and the person they voted for did what they thought they wanted…
And then, some accountability, at long last? Not necessarily.
Guess what? It can get even worse.
Just after the election results came in, I realized most of what passes for Republican intelligentsia were so many dogs that inexplicably caught the car. Demonizing Obamacare by any means necessary was easy as it was effective, because it didn’t require any action, aside from reciting boilerplate propaganda and whipping useful idiots into the type of frenzy that could make a President Donald Trump possible. But, even the most cynical of these charlatans had to know, once it got down to the nuts and bolts of fucking over tens of millions of citizens, it might prove…complicated. My prediction, cynical in its own right, turns out to have been optimistic (!): I proposed that, if they were smart, Trump & Co. would immediately “repeal” Obamacare, replace it with the exact same thing (never forget, the ACA is a compromise crafted in conservative think tanks), call it Trumpcare, and convert the most spectacular sleight of hand in political history.
But I overlooked one important thing: the current crop of Republicans don’t give the slightest shit about people, or their health care, and we now have the votes to prove it.
It occurs to me that doing this maneuver (in the dead of night, natch), effectively forcing repeal (damn the torpedoes, declare victory, mission accomplished, etc.) without a net — or the pesky collective conscience to fret about how it will play in the media, much less actual peoples’ lives — proves that luck, combined with a brazen will to power for power’s sake, provides (another) miraculous opportunity. If, in fact, today signals the beginning of the end of Obamacare, effective immediately, people will steadily figure out what’s going on (way too late, as always) and they will, of course, be apoplectic. Someone will have to answer for that rage, and it won’t be Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell. In a perfect storm so repellent it causes one to ponder the actuality of the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, they’ll use Trump as ballast, impeach him, and tie the repeal of Obamacare to…Trump. And it will work, because enough Republicans (and all Democrats) will relish the idea of jettisoning Mr. Make America Great Again from the Oval Office. A win/win for all involved, right?
Wrong. The unfathomable good fortune bestowed on Pence (and Ryan and Big Mac) will reach wet dream proportions: with Trump gone (and presumably having the stench of failure providing cover) a unified GOP will finally have unfettered access to dismantling anything and everything these sadists deem “progressive”. Worse, they’ll likely have years of accountability-free momentum, because between blaming Obama (duh) and Trump (who, of course, they all hate anyway), they’ll somehow position themselves as the ones who got rid of Obama and saved us all from Trump.
Trump is sufficiently unconscionable he tends to camouflage the horrifying prospect of Pence as the ultimate GOP fantasy: a perfect amalgamation of Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Jerry Falwell, where mendacity meets opportunism, all gussied up in an aw shucks, superficial piety. He will, without the least reservation, blank-check the most ruthless Ayn Rand fetishists in history, making the Bush/Cheney years seem like a utopia of regulation and civil rights and market stability.
The typically gullible and feckless Democrats will think—abetted of course by an ever-pliant media—that since Pence is calm, soft-spoken and smiles a lot, they can reason with him. And with a shit-eating smirk, he’ll shut them down on every single issue, including ones (privatizing Social Security) that Trump, possibly, would have blanched at. And for every policy that undoes equality or the hope of middle-class advancement (The working poor? Face, meet Boot), credulous sycophants like Chuck Todd will allow weasels like Paul Ryan to frown meaningfully and talk about how none of this is easy, but governing requires difficult decisions and God Bless America.
And best case scenario, in four-to-eight years there’ll be a Bud Lite type of reckoning (the Democrats emboldened enough to campaign on positions that were middle of the road a decade ago), and the GOP (and their enablers in the business community and media—assuming the two entities are distinguishable by this point) will start whining, again, about the debt being amassed to pull us out of the mess, the one no one could have seen coming. That is, unless the hole is not finally too deep, a fantasy that causes so many of our right-leaning members of Congress to arise with Sildenafil-assisted morning wood every day.
Cheer up, things can get worse. Much worse. Impeaching Trump, that big, bloated white whale, may not be the prize we’re after. Indeed, there’s a possibility that keeping him in office may be the only thing preventing the half-ass Ahabs behind him from partying like it’s 1929.
This piece originally appeared in The Weeklings on 1/12/17.
