Bill Moyers. (photo: PBS)
Ask Yourself: Will Donald Trump EVER Become President?
By Bill Moyers, Billmoyers.com
15 April 17
As our institutions bend and buckle and approach the breaking point, the
president bombs Syria and is hailed by an obeisant media.
It's been a week now since Donald Trump once again became our president.
Here's how it happened.
After he unleashed missiles on a Syrian airfield, members of Washington's
national security establishment and elite pundits swooned. Top Democrats and
Republicans led the way. Good soldiers all in the
military-industrial-political complex, they stood smartly at attention and
saluted the commander-in-chief for sending a message to the world, although
exactly what the message meant remains far from clear.
The headline above Glenn Greenwald's story at The Intercept summed up the
response: "The Spoils of War - Trump Lavished with Media and Bipartisan
Praise for Bombing Syria." The hawkish Hillary Clinton, who long had been
critical of Barack Obama for not bringing Bashar Assad to heel, "appeared at
an event" - and this was before the bombing even happened! - "and offered
her categorical support for what Trump was planning."
Up in the choir loft, the media and pundits sang as one from the official
hymnal, praising Trump's "presidential moment" and transforming him from a
pathetic dunderhead suffering from narcissistic personality disorder into
the Lord of Hosts. It was CNN's Fareed Zakaria who pronounced the decision
to fire away as the "big moment" when "Donald Trump became president of the
United States."
The theatrics were perfect. The Pentagon shopped to the media a video of the
missiles as they were lofted up and away. MSNBC's Brian Williams was among
those moved by the aesthetics of violence: "We see these beautiful pictures
at night from the decks of these two Navy vessels in the Eastern
Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: 'I'm guided by
the beauty of our weapons.'"
When I heard those words, I thought back to that night in 2003 when another
president lit up the skies over Baghdad with the "shock and awe" of his air
attack on Iraq. Suddenly the press was talking about George W. Bush as if he
were George Washington, George Marshall and George Patton rolled into one. A
touch of George III came later, as our newly refurbished president donned a
flight suit and strutted aboard the aircraft carrier with the banner behind
him that read: "Mission Accomplished." Not quite.
Then a more recent scene and another miraculous moment came to mind, from
six weeks ago - Feb. 28, to be exact. Donald Trump spoke to a joint session
of Congress. He paused, pointed to the balcony and recognized the widow of
the Navy SEAL who was killed during a raid on an alleged terrorist compound
in Yemen, the very first military mission dispatched into harm's way by the
brand-new commander-in-chief himself.
That mission went badly, so much so that at least two dozen local civilians,
including women and children, were killed. Trump did not mention them. He
focused on honoring the grieving widow in the balcony who was trying,
unsuccessfully, to hold back her tears as wave after wave of applause rolled
across the House chamber and ricocheted from wall to wall.
Time magazine's White House correspondent tweeted that the speech was the
"clearest example Trump is beginning to own and understand the powers of the
office." The next day, The Washington Post's White House bureau chief
tweeted, "This is the best morning of Donald Trump's presidency. He is
basking in positive pundit reviews. All that tumult [of the previous month]
feels like yesteryear." Politico's man on the scene admiringly described it
in a tweet as Trump's "Reaganesque moment."
And over at CNN, liberal commentator Van Jones called it
"one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American
politics, period. And for people who have been hoping that he [Trump] would
become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential,
they should be happy with that moment. He did something tonight that you
cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States."
[italics mine]
I understand what these people were saying - that although constitutionally
Trump had become president when he was inaugurated four weeks earlier, he
had not metaphorically made the leap into the persona expected of him. He
did not fit the mythical image of a president we prefer over the real thing.
Above all, he had yet to put on a sufficiently good show (the crowd at the
inauguration was not much larger than his two undersized hands clasped
together). Nor had the establishment pundits fully weighed in with any
semblance of support, and without their blessing, Trump was obviously just a
usurper who could barely read a speech, even with a teleprompter.
But after the dramatic spectacle of that Feb. 28 speech, the white smoke
rose from the chimney: America at last had a president who could act the
part even if his cronies were ripping out the plumbing, stripping the wiring
and carting it all off in Uber cars.
Alas, the euphoria of that night was not to last. Once again it evaporated
as fast as the truth on Kellyanne Conway's lips. Trump quickly returned to
governing by anarchy. Chaos again ruled the White House. Wrecking crews
installed by Bannon and Priebus at federal agencies continued their
bloodbaths. Trump's state of mind once again became the subject of much
speculation. Trump's health care "reform" went down in flames. His proposed
budget exploded on contact with reality. Conflicts of interest littered the
city like cow patties in a pasture. The atmosphere stank like a fetid swamp,
the one Trump has made no attempt to drain. And his popularity dropped lower
than any president so early in the game.
Yet after the bombing a week ago, Trump towers again. Fifty-nine cruise
missiles - tomahawks - were all it took.
Mind you, there is little to show for the attack. The airbase was open the
very next day. Russia's Putin and Syria's Assad may be forced into a tighter
embrace as Donald chills on Vladimir - and vice versa.
And really, what was the big deal, anyway? As Glenn Greenwald wrote,
"The CIA has spent more than a billion dollars a year to arm anti-Assad
rebels for years, and the US began bombing Syria in 2014 - the seventh
predominantly Muslim country bombed by Obama - and never stopped. Trump had
already escalated that bombing campaign, culminating in a strike last month
that Syrians say destroyed a mosque and killed dozens. What makes this
latest attack new is that rather than allegedly targeting terrorist's sites
of ISIS and al-Qaida, it targets the Syrian government - something Obama
threatened to do in 2013 but never did."
Trump will be tempted to do it again, because he likes big booms and
especially if such thunderbolts gain him adulation from hard-liners in the
national security complex and the press.
There will be opportunities because even if Assad stops using chemical
weapons, he will no doubt continue to pummel what remains of Syria's
civilian population. As Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department official,
told The Huffington Post: "You'll see many more pictures of beautiful
[Syrian] babies [dying] on TV - specifically to humiliate the United States
and show the fecklessness of military action." In other words, Trump is
about to find out why Obama avoided military intervention in Syria.
Meanwhile, here at home, our institutions bend and buckle and approach the
breaking point from benign, blind or willful neglect - and above all, from a
leadership vacuum.
One example: our transportation infrastructure. A week ago, as Trump &
Company plotted the attack on the Syrian airfield, here in the Northeast
corridor of America's vast transportation system a second train derailment
in two weeks again plunged hundreds of thousands of commuters into
nail-biting, life-upending chaos.
It began as a minor derailment at Penn Station, the hub of our transit
network, but like a spider web, everything transit-related is so connected
in these parts that the upheaval quickly spread to Long Island and New
Jersey and then to the corridor between Boston and Washington, DC. The New
York Times called the calamity "another reminder of the decrepit, tenuous
state of much of the region's infrastructure and transit systems."
You would think this would be a priority of Donald Trump. He grew up in New
York. He knows the crucial role of mass transit. He spins a good spiel on
infrastructure. Yet for all this, he has rejected an Obama-era program that
would have funded long-range improvements to our regional infrastructure,
even as he proposes huge tax breaks for builders and real estate developers
like himself.
He also wants to increase defense spending by $54 billion and proposes to
slash non-military spending by a corresponding amount. This includes slicing
funds for Amtrak and transit and commuter rail programs across the country.
The National Association of Rail Passengers estimates the cuts of federal
funding for Amtrak's national network of trains would drastically affect
service to 23 states and 144 million Americans, many of them in rural towns
in the Midwest and the South, including my home town in East Texas which
went for Trump by an overwhelming majority - and I mean overwhelming.
How is it Trump seems to care the least for the very folks who voted for
him? Not a day passes that he doesn't betray some of them.
And instead of bombing another country, how about building our own with
better bridges, railroads, highways and airports, how about tending to those
who need jobs and homes, how about health care that really gets the job
done?
Then we might finally achieve the transformative moment when even Donald
Trump at last becomes president for real. But don't hold your breath. It is
foolish to expect anything like this from a man-child who plays with
America's destiny as if it were a rag doll in his gilded crib.
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