By David K. Shipler
As
President Trump’s poll numbers slip four months before the election, he and his
frenzied staff have launched an end game of wild thrashing that could bring
further damage to a country they pretend to love.
The closer defeat looms, the more
desperate the death throes of a deranged administration. It lunges for levers
of power and propaganda. It undermines institutions that stand above politics.
It smears physicians who work for the public’s health. It attempts to conceal
pandemic data, Soviet-style. It issues absurd decrees to local school boards to
open in the fall or else. It dispatches unidentified federal forces to kidnap
peaceful protesters. It flails out against measures to ease voting. And these are
only the omens. A final spasm—if it is final—seems likely.
Insurgencies,
dictatorships, and the like often tend toward untamed outrages as they are
backed into a corner and face annihilation. Similar impulses appear ascendant
in Trump’s criminal government, where the rule of law is a minor irritation and
self-enrichment at taxpayers’ expense is routine. He has shed his White House of
responsible advisers, replacing them with cruel dogmatists whose ideology of
ignorance is a plague on the nation. It’s hard to see impediments to the
abuses. Trump has no moral brakes. His values are those of a mafia boss who rewards
and punishes those who protect or oppose him. Never in U.S. history has a
president commuted the prison sentence of the chief witness against him, as
Trump did for Roger Stone, who defied every legal requirement to testify on
Russia’s alleged collaboration with the Trump 2016 election campaign. No “snitch”
was Stone. His silence stymied Robert Mueller’s investigation and enabled Trump
to crow, “Hoax!” The full truth may never be known.
Where are the Republicans who chant
“law and order” when their party leader ignores the law and sows disorder?
Where are the conservatives who don’t fight to conserve the American
constitutional system that Trump and his accomplices try to shred? If there is
a glaring lesson from the Trump era, it is how easily compromised are the
nation’s founding principles, how deferent to autocratic aims are those who
wear the camouflage of liberty: Congressional Republicans, right-wing broadcast
personalities, self-righteous evangelicals, flinty citizens who make a show of
individualism and resistance.
In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a state militia
loyal to the eventual fascist president, Buzz Windrip, “considered him their
general and their god.” The militia was a precursor to the Minute Men, his
private troops in black capes or white or khaki shirts, who beat, arrested, and
confined—and thereby purged books, manuscripts, and thinkers from the political
landscape. In 2020 America, armed right-wing vigilantes have already attacked
Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and have been encouraged by the Trump
campaign to “monitor” polling places in November. The smell of political
violence is in the air.
This fear could be overdrawn—let’s
hope so. Trump’s incompetence as a manager might save us. But he has a zealous
base and a compliant coterie of collaborators. Consider this passage from Lewis
and its familiar ring, describing the fictional Windrip’s supporters before a
rally in Madison Square Garden: “Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was
packed with drab, discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the
hashish of hope. . . . they were people concerned with the tailor’s goose, the
tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on
the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby’s diapers, the dull safety-razor
blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. . . . Kind
people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate
cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for
any rabble-rouser.”
Trump’s mental and emotional
disabilities have infected many under him, and they in turn create a loop of
reinforcement for his most destructive impulses. Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos parrots his dangerous insistence that schools reopen entirely in the fall
or risk losing federal funds. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf adopts
a callous plan to deport international college students whose classes proceed
online (before uproars and lawsuits force a reversal). He and Attorney General
Bill Barr begin to mobilize elements of law enforcement for political ends,
specifically to tout “law and order” in Portland, Oregon, where the U.S.
Marshal’s Service has been deployed in violation of local officials’ demands to
depart and halt their violent harassment and false arrests of demonstrators. It
would be wise to see Portland as only the first stepping stone toward as much
repression as this administration can muster in the coming months.
Pity Trump and the country he leads. Raised in
a family rife with emotional abuse, as his niece Mary Trump has documented, he
suffers from narcissism and a fragile ego that deliver him to an unending
reliance on lies, conflict, and bullying. His obvious brain dysfunctions
prevent him from processing information, reasoning logically, remembering what
he said a minute earlier, and governing effectively. He cannot stand anyone
smarter or more popular than him, so his economic adviser, Peter Navarro, and
anonymous acolytes try to take down Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose credibility in
polls far exceeds Trump’s.
The president of what is supposed
to be the greatest country in all of human history cannot tell the difference
between image and reality, or cares more about image than reality, as he orders
a halt in reporting Covid hospitalizations to the CDC and laments the increase in
Covid testing because it makes the case numbers go higher. Is it possible that his
mental defect means that he doesn’t realize that the actual incidence of
infection is a fact independent of how many are detected by tests? Or is he
just trying to fool his fellow Americans? And how many will be fooled? Or
frightened?
We’ll find out in November.
