Well, we made it.
For all the folks who knew exactly who (and what) Donald Trump was before he threw his MAGA cap in the ring, this was an especially painful stretch of incompetence and mendacity. After five years, it’s hard for me to improve upon my dear friend Sean Beaudoin’s masterful take-down from 2015, here. But I will give myself props for referring to Trump as a KFC Double Down sandwich in human form long before he officially become our national embarrassment.
Like everyone else, I had thoughts before, during, and especially after the 2016 debacle, and for a trip down memory lane, you can see a lot of them here. Some lowlights, below:
My biggest beef with Obama’s tenure (one that we’ll miss and appreciate with greater urgency in a couple of months) is, aside from his not being a more vocal and triumphant advocate about providing health care for millions of Americans, the once-in-a-generation opportunity he wasted in 2009. Obama was either too credulous or (worse) haughty to believe he actually needed to make a case, and be prepared for the full-scale war the GOP declared on him the second he was elected. (His refusal to bother himself getting involved in the health care brawls all summer of 2009 is the second largest blunder of his presidency: he not only allowed the malevolent Republicans to define the narrative (wrongly), he let the Tea Party lunatics get a foothold and, with the absence of any consistent, intelligible message, determine that opposing government—instead of the Masters of the Universe, and the Republicans who serve them—was the correct, patriotic thing to do. By the time he saw the grammatically-challenged writing on the signs, it was arguably too late. Meanwhile, against all probability, the masses with their pitchforks and flames, had—for lack of a tangible target for the ire—latched on to the Fox-spewed propaganda filling the inexplicable vacuum of what passes, these days, for political discourse. Put simply, the health insurance industry and the pols they have in their pockets are cartoon villains and the Democrats still were unable to game out an effective strategy to expose them as such.
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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.
(Editor’s note: this one, thankfully, has aged quite nicely.) Finally, we should desist from drawing any comparisons to Hitler (aside from the fact that it’s lazy and, at this juncture, historically inaccurate; Trump’s more your average tin-pot dictator wannabe): that cretin was able to convince (or intimidate) enough people to commit the atrocities he oversaw; yesterday proves, undeniably, that Trump will never have anything close to a mandate. Going forward, every subsequent utterance or scripted scene will alienate more folks…and that’s before his (that is, the GOP’s) policies begin actively harming and disenfranchising people who voted for him. We’re seeing how unpopular (and unqualified) he is today, and he’ll never be this popular, again. It’s a slow (or maybe not-so-slow) burn, effective immediately.
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As we enter a steadily surreal landscape of alternate facts, braindead braggadocio masquerading as foreign policy and daily dumpster fires that titillate social media but also provide cover for the shady shit going on behind the scenes, it’s painful to conclude that idiocy has found an unprecedented symbiosis: only the most eager to dissemble can consistently reach those most in need of being deceived. Donald Trump is not the president most of his voters actually need, but he’s the one a distressing number of them want.
The hollowness of the Christian right is now irrevocably laid bare, as they don their MAGA hats in support of a man representing practically everything Jesus denounced. Still, it’s a combination of resentment, rage and denial that make anyone, whoever they are and wherever they live, able to suspend disbelief to the extent that they still, after eight months, support President* Trump.
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And so on.
Short and not-so-sweet: here’s my final assessment; an epitaph for America’s supreme con artist:
As it relates to He-Who-Shall-Hopefully-Recede-Into-Immediate-And-Ceaseless-Ignominy, among the many thoughts I’ve had during the last 4-5 years, two have recurred most consistently:
One, that despite everything we’ve seen and imagined, there never was a bottom—the capacity to go deeper and be increasingly depraved became more than performance art and almost an existential state—possessing no shame, with cruelty the point of each perverse act, to be incapable of hitting rock bottom seems to me the essence of the man himself.
But the other thing, more simple and profoundly sad: I’ve never detected in him anything approximating joy; not in his role, in his family, in anything. Here we had the pitiful desolation of the most powerful man in the world hating every second of his tenure. T.S. Eliot presciently described “the hollow men” as an epitaph-in-advance for those (invariably males) who would make the 20th C in their empty images, but Trump—all politics, prejudice, and spectacle aside—is without doubt the most barren husk of a human being I’ve ever witnessed, demonstrably devoid of insight, humor, empathy, curiosity, lacking the foundational ability to feel anything other than a lizard-like rage—to survive by consuming and devouring. And while, as a septuagenarian, he is entirely accountable for his myriad foibles and flaws, it has long since occurred to me that he was very obviously broken at a young age. This does not remotely excuse (or adequately explain) all the mendacity, his almost sui generis hollowness, but his every public act illustrates the tragedy of a damaged man who has never known love.
Trump’s genius turned out to be the very imbecility that enabled him to connect with so many addicted to misinformation, talk-show carnival barkers, reality TV, and self-absorption as religion. His proficiency for embodying every vice defied literature, became biblical. But in order to become destroyed one had to have first been whole; as such, I think about his father, as well as the toxic culture that has bred generations of misguided men, their belligerence a mask for the frightened, unloved boys they’ve always been.
