The real Donald Trump, if we care to see
As a rule, I don't write about Donald Trump. But seeing what's in front of our nose is more important than ever.
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I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with a sense that more of us need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue. At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our political moment and leads to more meaningful progress. This is hard work, and it will be a process.
As a general rule, I don’t write about Donald Trump. Others do it far more ably than I can and, either way, he has become an unhealthy media obsession that has warped our national political conversation beyond recognition. Trump is right about one thing — whenever he leaves office, the mainstream media will absolutely miss him (and, if we’re honest, probably some executives at MSNBC, too). But that doesn’t mean that all of the controversy has been inflated, and it doesn’t mean that this election isn’t every bit as consequential as it’s been made out to be.
If you support the guy, send me your replies. If it’s some variation of “but the libs,” you’re not paying attention — but I promise to read it anyway.
Go vote on Tuesday or before, if you can. They don’t want you to, which is how you know how much is on the line.
The emperor has no clothes
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash.
Donald Trump sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and reads stiffly from a teleprompter. He says he understands the pain he is seeing in the streets. He cribs from Bill Clinton, saying, “I feel your pain.” He pledges to study policing and instructs William Barr to look into how and why the police officer who murdered George Floyd grinned meekly while kneeing the breath out of him in broad daylight. He promises a thorough civil rights review in the case of Breonna Taylor and others.
He doesn't pledge to do, really, much of anything — but he says to widespread and mainstream relief and praise: “We are stronger as a united America, and we must confront our history of racism. I support law enforcement 100 percent. But these cases show a system that needs greater accountability when things go wrong."
Trump ends with a note of solidarity about our shared values as Americans. “May God bless the United States of America,” he says sternly.
A small part of me expected that speech to come, and I expected to be exasperated as the center-left and center-right would have saturated our airwaves intoning that we all would have to agree on how powerful it was, how the president had helped chart a course toward true healing and had finally understood the gravity of his position and his office. The New York Times editorial board and Meet the Press would have had to gush that the administration had met the moment, lest they be seen as liberal, an attack waged like a cudgel by the right that ensures media overemphasize every instance of perceived GOP morality.
Such a speech would have been quickly debunked by the left but the so called center, the right and the media would have praised him. Just as Jim Acosta of CNN once did a momentary about-face after a brief Trump mood swing — saying that he believed that the president “gets it” in reference to the coronavirus, a comment that didn’t stand for very long — our obsession with believing the good in “both sides” would have taken over. Pod Save America might have wrung their hands and spit venom at a president who hadn't matched his words with his actions, while noting that this was a serious problem for the general, pleading with Democrats to install their partisan cronies because they’re obviously better than Trump’s cronies. Mitch McConnell and other old white Republicans in the Senate would have a new bounce in their step.
Of course, Trump never made such a speech. If he had kept a measured tone regardless of what he did when the cameras were off, I suspect he’d be cruising toward re-election.
Quite the opposite, our president has spent the weeks and months since George Floyd’s brazen on-camera murder at the hands of a police officer fanning the flames of white supremacy. All of this intersected with the advent of COVID-19, which Trump has spent not in sober-minded press conferences talking about how to conquer this new challenge but — even when he contracted the virus — spending his time debunking science and feigning support for fringe conspiracy theories, unproven medications and occasionally planting the thought that maybe this all was a political “hoax,” not a health crisis. He didn’t care enough about himself or his family to insist on the basic safeguards. Seemingly inevitably, he and his wife got the virus. That gave him an opportunity to film a Mussolini-like moment where he emerges as the star of his own propaganda film to declare that he’s a man’s man as we’re all supposed to cheer off camera.
He has rarely mentioned the more than 200,000 dead, and when he does he says it was supposed to be 2 million and, besides, mostly blue state deaths, right? How’s that for accountability and empathy.
“One thing that’s for certain: don’t let it dominate you; don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it,” he said after receiving immediate care at a world-class military hospital.
Why shut things down or wear a mask when the strongest will survive? If this were the view of a toddler, it would be more understandable.
I don’t care that much about the personal shortfalls of our leaders — except when those shortfalls are illegal, corrupt or affect public policy that hurts the rest of us. In this case, all of those things are true. How Trump personally dealt with the virus is how the rest of us are forced to deal with it. A person who has no regard for data, science or scientists when facts get in the way of an agenda will have drastic affects on our society for years to come. With another four years of Trump, much of what the federal government does that is in everyone’s interest (and they don’t always know it) will be gone. And just as Trump raised taxes for high-income individuals in blue states, pardoned and condoned the criminality of those who ran his campaign, a second Trump term will mean the further punishment of blue states and a federal government that exists merely to aid and abet Trump’s emerging kleptocracy.
The bullshit that is often impossible to dissect even to those of us who follow politics closely has been there for everyone to see, in full view. The emperor has had no clothes for some time and, yet, somewhere around 40 percent of the country spend their time admiring his gorgeous mushroom-shaped suit.
I don’t blame everyone. For anyone who has spent time in Ohio or former factory towns in North Carolina, this isn’t a place that was screwed over yesterday — this is a 50-year erosion of the middle and working classes as both parties, especially Democrats, were happy to have those former workers pose with American flags on barns while shipping jobs overseas and failing to implement a plan stateside to re-train them for a 21st Century economy. The language of the neoliberal left and the right came to a consensus as we extolled the virtues of the “market” and “individual freedom” while giving tax breaks and advantageous policy toward the biggest corporations to speed the process of pushing jobs overseas and padding the pockets of the already wealthy. At home, Republicans preyed on America’s long history of racial strife, while Democrats offered rhetorical solace to equally ignored communities of color with too little action.
The two parties have made a grand bargain at our expense, trading power every two, four and eight years while keeping things on an even keel by using the power of government to prop up business interests, corporations, themselves and their donors. These have real world consequences that we are paying for, especially for communities of color and the poor, who are being actively punished for the sin of their lack of birthright — given poisonous soil to live and water to drink, targeted for over-policing, offered poor education and work opportunities and diminishing healthcare and social net benefits. The government offers them the American Dream of bootstraps without, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., providing the boots or the straps. The sinister dynamic is always at play, as the wealthy use government to ensure some people never get much of a chance while cutting regulations, their own taxes (but, proportionally not ours) and financial rules to ensure that we don’t have the same access to the wealth created by the stock market as they do.
As David Sirota put it after the first debate, our public politics is merely a puppet show of infotainment:
They got off scot free after the financial crisis, they got off scot free as they’ve pandemic profiteered, they got off scot free last night in a debate that mostly refused to focus on the material well being of millions of people, and they are getting off scot free this morning as the debate analysis revolves around decorum.
This isn’t some accident. The hollowing out of our politics is the outcome of a system designed to produce a particular result. Corporate-bankrolled politicians and millionaires paid by billionaires that you watch on your cable TV roundtables have no interest in scrutinizing, challenging or focusing the political conversation on the power of billionaires and corporations — even though that plutocratic power is the central problem destroying the country and the world.
But make no mistake, these are hardly equivalent evils between the two parties, and to pretend that they are is eschewing our duty as Americans to call out fascism, racism and a would-be dictator while we still can.
There is only one person and one party running against the idea of democracy itself. Donald Trump has promised to take any election that doesn’t name him the winner to court under the false guise of voter fraud, like the dictators he openly says he so admires. Some mainstream Republicans even openly admit they don’t believe in democracy. The rich white men who founded this country built in protections for the minority class, slaveholders, and scream Republic! whenever they get the chance, willfully ignoring the democratic part. And that’s why Texas and other states are making it as hard to vote as possible. As one comedian put it, the way you know they don’t want you to vote is to hold pivotal elections on a Tuesday in November.
We are now governed by a two party system that represents the smallest slice of the electorate there is — the big donors and corporations. The hard right that currently runs thing is not merely a minority — its programs are anathema to a wide majority of the American public, including many in the GOP before Donald Trump. In her book, “Democracy in Chains,” historian Nancy MacLean painstakingly charts the course of how a fringe of the hard right — starting with former slaveholders through the writings and work of John C. Calhoun — began to seed how even with the abolishment of slavery a political agenda could ensure that white people’s power and wealth was preserved. This, dressed up in the banal language of economics, came to be the modern libertarianism and eventually, with the help of billions from the Koch Brothers, took over the Republican Party. “Liberty” has been perverted to mean anything that the government might do without all individuals’ agreement — which is how you get a country that doesn’t believe in masks during a pandemic. The abolition of government and the basic societal contract it helps us uphold is anathema to all but the tiny fraction who can afford to have their own schools, roads and police. Fuck the rest of ‘em, right?
And, yet, Trump voters have convinced themselves that they hate the left so much that this guy — a huckster whose vaunted business acumen has squandered some unknown massive amount of the fortune his daddy gave to him — represents their interests. He and his family are taking their support straight to the bank by bringing the family’s money laundering practices to the White House.
The good news: this is all plain to see for anyone who cares to look into these issues. Many of them are a Google search away. Despite all these challenges, the U.S.’s system is equipped to overcome them, and is still a beacon of light and hope worldwide.
I don’t believe that the election of Joe Biden can restore the soul of America, as he tells us, or that it will put a stop to fascism in the U.S. But his election can and would prevent further decline and — frankly top of mind for me and everyone else — restore some semblance of order to a federal government working against itself and its own scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic. The restoration part is up to the rest of us, and the work will be as hard as anything this country has ever encountered.
I don’t know whether we can meet the challenge. I’ve always wondered what we would what this country would do if faced with true fascism — would we do better than the Germans did in the 1930s, with a president who finds good on both sides when white supremacists faced down protesters? Would we do better than allowing the FBI to murder those who dare exercise their constitutional right to challenge their government? Would we do better than an FBI that sent letters to Martin Luther King Jr. pushing him to commit suicide?
If Trump had given the speech that some thought he might, that, no doubt, the spinsters urged, I would be frustrated at what lay just below the surface. I would want people to see the lies for what they were.
In that way, we’re lucky. Donald Trump has, in theory, made it easy for us as it all lies in plain site, if not in our particularly social media sphere. I wasn’t around to see how we handled these issues in the ‘60s or the ‘30s, but we do have a chance to find out what we would do today.