Trump Leads America Through the Looking Glass

 

By David K. Shipler 

     Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “One can’t believe impossible things.”

 “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

                The United States is capitulating to one-man rule so rapidly that only Lewis Carroll could describe the absurd fantasies that Americans have accepted.

                Consider this: The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, flatterer and purchaser of President Donald Trump, gives two straight-arm, Nazi-type salutes at a Trump Inauguration Day rally, and the Anti-Defamation League, which touts itself as “the leading anti-hate organization in the world,” dismisses it as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Judge for yourself. Watch these two videos, one of Musk, one of Hitler: Compare.

And consider this: The number of illegal entries from Mexico drops to a four-year low, and Trump declares a state of emergency at the southern border. The country’s oil and gas production reaches an all-time high, and Trump declares an energy emergency. The violent crime rate drops steeply, lowest among non-citizens, and Trump pictures a crime wave driven by immigrants. The society spends decades combating discrimination against minorities and women of merit, and Trump calls for a meritocracy by demolishing the programs that are achieving it. What’s more, big companies rush to follow his lead back into bigotry.

To appear to be a solver, Trump needs problems to tackle. And since his remade Republican Party is still averse to attacking the real problems of its own working-class supporters, who have financial trouble in everyday life, Trump needs fake problems. Then he can conjure up fake solutions to the fake problems, crow about his progress, and—evidently—fool most of the people most of the time. And that’s a most distressing feature of this new American era, which might be called Make America Gullible Again.

It is not remarkable that a charlatan could come along in American politics. The world is full of con artists. They once traveled from town to town selling magical potions to make your hair grow or infuse perpetual youth. Now they’re online weaseling millions of dollars from lonely people lured into the mirages of love affairs and financial windfalls. And also online, Trump will benefit from his billionaire friends who run social media companies. In trepidation or collaboration, they have abandoned fact-checking and opened their platforms to Trumpist alternative realities.

Defending Minorities Against the Defense Secretary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The one true thing that Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary this week was that the military is a better place for minorities than perhaps any other American institution. What he fails to recognize is how much work it has taken to get there, and how much it will take to stay there. That point was not even made by Democratic senators as they berated him about his history of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and lack of management experience. It was a missed opportunity for serious discussion.

Hegseth railed, mostly unchallenged, against programs promoting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and pictured “wokeness” as antithetical to the lethality essential in a fighting force. Yet actual experience shows the opposite: racial, religious, and gender tolerance has to be taught, sadly, and if it isn’t, fissures can open to the military’s detriment.

In 1971, after the decay of military cohesion as racial tensions and violence spiked among troops during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon established the Defense Race Relations Institute, now named the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). There, military trainers operate on a pragmatic philosophy about the interaction between bias and readiness. They summed it up for me years ago, when I visited DEOMI several times while researching A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: You can think anything you want; that’s your business. But what you do becomes our business if you undermine your unit’s cohesion and fighting effectiveness.    

Like most conservatives, Hegseth apparently believes that the natural landscape is a level playing field, and that doing nothing will guarantee a meritocracy devoid of privilege for one group or another. (Or, perhaps more likely, he and other conservatives make this self-serving argument to preserve white males’ longstanding advantages.)

Not only is Hegseth’s position oblivious to the nation’s history, it’s also blind to the future. Halting diversity efforts allows institutions to snap back into old patterns of bias and discrimination. The military “does not do the equal opportunity and fair treatment business because it’s the nice thing to do,” I was told back then by DEOMI’s director of training, army Colonel Eli A. Homza Jr., who was white. “We do it because we have learned that if we don’t do it, we will not have cohesive and battle-ready units.”

The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.