Lots of Monday morning quarter-backing going on in that article.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2020 11:40 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: delores selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Legacy of President Donald Trump
On 12/23/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Legacy of President Donald TrumpWhy can't Op/Ed writers come up with these articles before the fact instead of
He was America's tour guide on its loudest, most exhausting, and
longest-ever journey in a circle.
Matt Taibbi
Dec 23
Reports say Donald Trump has lost it. Unable to face the reality that
he will no longer be president soon, stung by public repudiations from
the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Bill Barr, and
other erstwhile pals, he is said to be canceling appearances left and
right, retreating to a lonely schedule of golf and manic conspiracy
theorizing on Twitter. He posted 550 times in just a few weeks of
November, with three-fourths of that content, the New York Times for
some reason calculated, made up of rants about a stolen election.
Unlike past presidents, who with the exception of Dick Nixon were all
feted on the way out no matter what crooked or blood-soaked record
they left behind, Trump is being ridden out on a rail. He exits
politics as he entered it, as a human punchline, a ball of catnip to
the commentariat, which gets to snicker now about his thinning
schedule and "tiny desk" (the updated version of all those jokes about
short fingers that drove him so crazy once). There is delight as
"former close associates, longtime Trump observers, and mental health
experts" whisper into the op-ed pages the cold final judgment that, as
Politico put it, "Trump is a loser."
Which is fine - victori sunt spoila and all that - but it's already
safe to say the Trump years will be remembered as a brutal black
comedy that made winners and losers alike look very, very bad. It was
supposed to be a historic, norms-smashing catastrophe, but the reality
is that almost nothing actually happened during the Trump years,
except for a very long, exhausting story. The major in-between change
was a total loss of our collective grip on reality, beginning with the
fact that most of the country thinks we just went to hell and back a
thousand times, instead of making just one noisy trip in a circle,
arriving just where we might have four years ago, if Joe Biden had run
instead of Hillary Clinton. The tiniest conceivable step, but oh so
much grief and self-deception to get there!
They'll deny it, but huge portions of the snickering chatterati rooted
for Trump at first. When he jumped in the 2016 race, cultural icons
laughed, big-money Democrats cheered, and rubbernecking cosmopolitan
media audiences clicked and tuned in by the millions. Except for the
more favored Republican primary opponents who learned early on to look
on Trump with genuine alarm, like a social disease persisting beyond
the usual course of medication, most of upscale America thought the
Trump Show was a hoot.
It was a happy event when he called into Morning Joe, like the old
scripted radio bits where Rob Bartlett would call into Imus in the
Morning as Bill Clinton or Don Corleone or Manuel Noriega, except here
the voice pumping in one-liners over the phone to the guffawing
straight-man cast was the real Donald Trump. Mika, Joe, and Willie
yukked it up about Donald's Latino friend who'd sorta learned English
("I wouldn't say it's Ernest Hemingway we're dealing with," Trump
cracked) about the realness of Donald's hair ("I tugged it once,"
agreed Mika) and about how "it meant the world" to Lawrence O'Donnell
when Trump was one of the first to reach out to him after he got his
show back ("I like him," O'Donnell said).
The Hillary Clinton campaign was even more enthralled. Bill Clinton,
after all, had an encouraging chat with Trump just weeks before he
entered the
2016 race, telling Trump he "was striking a chord with frustrated
conservatives and was a rising force on the right," as the Washington
Post explained. The Clintons were preparing to run against Jeb Bush,
who scared them because he had cash and an economic message that
reportedly polled well with minority voters. The infamous
Wikileaks-leaked memo about pied piper candidates showed the Clinton
campaign was anxious to "elevate" Trump during the 2016 primary
season, feeling they could use his lunatic act to defame the GOP
against the inevitably more moderate "real" candidate down the line.
When it started to look like Trump had a shot at winning the
Republican nomination, the Clinton campaign was so tickled it kept its
mouth shut, so as not to jinx the situation. As Politico later reported:
Guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary and resist the
urge to distribute any of the opposition research the Democrats were
scrambling to amass against him. That hoarding plan remained in place
deep into 2016 as some senior aides stayed convinced that a race
against Trump would be a dream.
Democrats understood that Trump was an effective chaos agent, an
iconoclastic shit-hurler who could bust apart the candidacies of
people like Bush and Marco Rubio. They didn't realize Trump was only
just beginning an unprecedented assault on institutional America that
would sweep them up as well, and that his greatest asset would be the
consistent inability of upper-class America to take him seriously.
When Trump entered politics, his reputation in places where the most
influential people live - the Upper East Side, Georgetown and Northern
Virginia, in the wealthy tech-fattened cities of the West Coast - was
that of a class A buffoon and small-time huckster. He wasn't rich in
the same way as people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mike Bloomberg.
He was like one of those billionaires in the same way Madonna was
"like" a virgin.
Try to imagine Jeff Bezos juggling bridge loans while using his name
to hustle steaks or ties or Jacquard throw blankets, and you'll get an
idea of how desperate and gauche Trump seemed to people with real
money. He was the kind of character educated people found infinitely
mockable: an egotist and gluttonous devourer of inherited cash who
made it all the way through the grad programs of the country's finest
schools unblemished by insight, reflection, or idealism. Impressively,
he seemed even more immune to America's civilizing institutions than
George W. Bush. Trump was tacky, had absurd hair, and his interests
seemed limited to money and fake boobs. If wealthy America is a
family, Trump was its Fredo, an embarrassing loudmouth who in his
younger days reportedly couldn't focus on work because he was having sex with
"two and three women" at the same time.
Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter earned his post as the official
stenographer of the American upper classes on the strength of his work
at Spy lampooning twits like the "short-fingered vulgarian." Trump was
the ideal Spy target:
book-dumb, shallow, and thin-skinned. Picking on him was a way for the
smart set to congratulate itself on its superior refinement. In 2011,
when Barack Obama responded to Trump's preposterous birther campaign
by savaging him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, noting that
questions like whether to fire Meat Loaf or Gary Busey on Celebrity
Apprentice are "the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at
night," the crowd howled in delight.
Obama was a checklist of everything Trump wasn't: trim, handsome,
elegant, brilliant, a civil rights hero, a perfect exemplar of
upper-class attitudes and decorum, and incidentally, an actual sex
symbol whose (one) wife years later would still gush over his "swag."
(Testimonials from the women in Trump's life tend to run more along
the lines of Stormy Daniels blurting out, "I had sex with that.
Eech"). Obama won every conceivable plaudit from high society,
including a Grammy, Time's Person of the Year, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a
John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Trump meanwhile was a two-time nominee for a Reality Programming Emmy
who lost both times, and would at one point come close - the city
council vote was 3-2 - to having to return the key to the city of
Doral, Florida. The White House Correspondents' Dinner trailing only
the Oscars and maybe Davos as the ultimate gathering place for
America's beautiful people, Obama's brutal 2011 routine (delivered
with unsurprisingly perfect comic timing, as TV cameras cut back and
forth to shots of an unamused Trump in profile), was the tuxedo class
equivalent of a tarring and feathering.
When NBC finally ditched The Apprentice in 2015, it was the
culmination of decades of rejection of Trump by polite society (to be
fair, most of it probably deserved). This positioned him to commence
what would become one of America's all-time revenge tours.
The mockery Trump earned gave him something in common with huge
portions of the rest of America, which also felt it was being laughed
at by one-percenters. It took Trump a while to grasp this.
When he took his first halting steps toward the presidency in 1999,
flirting with the nomination of Ross Perot's Reform Party and touting
himself as a guy who was "pretty liberal on social issues," he was
clearly still trying to win the approval of members of his own social
class. He went to the left of Clinton in stumping for gay soldiers in
the military, said he wanted the "great lady" Oprah Winfrey as a
running mate, and ended up ditching the party when it included "a
Klansman, [David] Duke, a neo-Nazi, [Pat] Buchanan. not company I wish
to keep." The 1999 Trump tried to sound statesmanlike, but it got him
nowhere with the society crowd whose acceptance he craved. Jesse
Ventura was taken more seriously.
By 2016 he realized all the mockery he'd absorbed worked in his favor.
Trump
is no intellectual, but he does have a knack for sniffing out the real
bottom lines of business deals, and his campaign started picking up
steam once he started to talk about how American politics for most
people was basically a defective/fraudulent product, sold by the same
people who'd laughed at him at the Correspondents' Ball. He knew
something about selling crappy products to mass audiences and began
spilling the political trade secrets of the monied class in his
speeches. His emergence as a populist hero nonetheless delighted his
old society enemies, who were unconcerned enough to egg him on out of
sheer bemusement. Even Carter reiterated in
2016
that Trump's fingers still looked "abnormally stubby."
Trump began his vengeance campaign with the easiest targets, Republicans.
He
asked a simple question during the 2016 primary: why was one of the
two most powerful political parties in the country content to put its
fate in the hands of a clear sub-mediocrity like Jeb Bush?
Trump pantsed Jeb and the rest as phony "leaders" who had no will of
their own and whose real job was to be puppets of other interests who
didn't have to guts to show themselves. He then deployed the same
strategy against Hillary Clinton, who walked into his trap by openly
courting Bush's donors and refusing to repudiate the Wall Street titans
backing her.
Trump at best was a deeply flawed human being, and maybe a level or
two down from that - I think particularly of the story from Ivana
Trump about Trump ripping out a clump of her hair and allegedly
forcing himself on her as punishment for recommending the wrong scalp
reduction surgeon - but he was the only politician who bothered to
prioritize talking directly to voters.
Democrats like Clinton were obsessed with the transactional model of
politics, which dictated that winning was mainly a matter of securing
the right backers, the right endorsements, and the right message,
written by the right consultants.
The way they did politics scarcely involved input from people outside
K Street. They were the political version of movie producers more
interested in Oscars and invitations to Cannes than box office, in
competition with someone in touch enough with America's lowest common
denominator to create The Apprentice. It shone through that Trump
actually liked interacting with his voters ("I love the poorly
educated!") in ways no Democrat since Bill Clinton had thought necessary or
desirable.
Trump did campaign on a platform designed to play to xenophobia and
racism, and the motivation for his run, the part that wasn't a craven
PR stunt designed to revive his flagging entertainment career, came
from the same general place that inspires people to leave pipe bombs
and set forest
fires:
he felt personally slighted and wanted to spread the hurt. He more or
less completely destroyed the old Republican Party in 2016, while the
damage he did to Democrats was lasting in a different way. He forced
them to abandon their pretensions to kumbaya liberalism and announce
themselves as the elitist authoritarians they'd always been.
Trump deserved the fragging he got from Obama in 2011. The birther
campaign that inspired it was one of the lower stunts he ever pulled,
though one could argue inducing people to take out loans to buy ripoff
diplomas or welching on bills to workers is worse than anything you
can do to a sitting president.
Still, even the sainted Obama had weaknesses. Who could argue it
wasn't ridiculous to give the Nobel Peace Prize to a guy who held
weekly "Terror Tuesday" meetings to decide whom to assassinate,
bragged to aides he was "really good at killing people," and was
creepily believable when he threatened to wipe out the Jonas Brothers with
Predator Drones?
It was no less ridiculous when President Trump years later began
insisting that he should get a Nobel Prize, too, "if they give it out
fairly, which they don't." But he was probably right when he said he
deserved the award at least as much as Obama, who was conducting
bombings in seven different countries by 2016 and, as Trump correctly
noted, "had no idea why he got it"
when he won.
While he isn't really rich, Trump had enough money to significantly
finance his first run for president, which underscored the ugly truth
that politicians running against him were technically even
smaller-time swindlers than he was, and therefore also more pathetic.
After all, Clintons and Bushes (and Obamas, and Bidens) had to whore
themselves for donor checks to run, and pay for political ads, while
he, Trump, got the press to spread his message for free. Trump
described the presidency as a door prize passed back and forth between
competing clans of wealthy interests, who in turn delegated it to a
jumped-up servant class of political prostitutes, the sort of people
whose attendance at a wedding anyone, Trump included, could buy for a
few thousand bucks. Most of these front men and women - Clintons,
Bushes, whatever - were hustlers just like Trump, people who'd suck
the paint off a doorknob for a dollar, or pass NAFTA for two. Trump's
pitch was, would you rather vote for an unrepentant pig like me, or
someone who goes to Oxford to learn how to make selling you out to
Johnson & Johnson or Lloyd Blankfein sound like it's your idea? If you
thought in these terms, the vulgarity gap suddenly didn't look so pronounced.
Once Trump was elected, competing narratives developed. One involved
the real President Trump, a dedicated incompetent whose skill at
accomplishing almost nothing of substance across four years ought
rightly to earn him a place alongside great presidential non-doers
like Gerald Ford, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. The other
narrative described a figure of surpassing importance and unique
historical evil, an American Hitler. Trump can't have been both, but somehow
is, supposedly. What gives?
Go through any media list of Trump's worst in-office offenses, and
most of the stuff you'll find is head-scratchingly small-time - for
Hitler. Hatch Act violations? Kellyanne Conway using her social media
account to hype "Make America Great Again"? Leaving 10 IG offices
vacant and firing two others who were investigating his staffers?
Violations of the emoluments clause?
That last one always cracks me up. Yes, Trump and his spawn seem to
have worked tirelessly to pad the bottom lines of Trump businesses,
including the use of the Trump Tower as a headquarters for the RNC,
the hosting of a G-7 Summit at a Trump Doral Miami golf resort, having
lobbyists from companies like T-Mobile stay at his hotels, etc., etc.
This was the one use of White House authority the Trump administration
seems to have entered into with real gusto, as there were reportedly
more than two thousand visits by government officials to Trump
properties. This was predictable given the vast record of sleazy
profiteering in his litigation history, but also should have been as
much a relief as an outrage to Trump critics. If Trump couldn't figure
out a better way to monetize the presidency than shuttling
G-7 leaders to eat $17 shrimp salads at his shitty golf courses, it
probably meant he didn't grasp the more terrifying conceptual
possibilities for corruption in the presidential machinery.
Behaviorally, Trump was an embarrassment, talking about "shithole
countries," suggesting minority congresswomen "go back" to the "most
corrupt and inept" countries from whence they came (three of the four
were American-born), and saying things like "Why do we need more
Haitians?" As an example-setter and inciter of bad behavior, Trump
probably has no presidential equal, but this is America and we grade
on a pretty serious scale, when it comes to Executive Branch iniquity.
Where's his secret bombing of Cambodia? Which country did he drench in
disfiguring Agent Orange? How many wars did he start under false
pretenses? Where's his Teapot Dome, his Palmer Raids, or, for that
matter, his $39 billion war support contract for KBR/Halliburton?
Imagine if George W. Bush the Simple had actually run his White House,
instead of a more organized psychopath like Dick Cheney, and you get a
decent picture of Trump's real legacy. On every level, Bush's
presidency - which launched two bloody wars and built vast programs of
secret surveillance and extralegal detention that will outlive all of
Trump's fiercest critics - was more destructive than that of Trump.
Yet, Bush hangs with Ellen DeGeneres and is celebrated for receiving a
"moving" embrace from Michelle Obama, while Trump is uniformly shunned
as an irredeemable monster.
This is because the Trump legend constructed by antagonists, which was
as much about culture as it was about politics, was always destined to
have more historical import than the Trump reality. The paradox of
this period is that the legend was often more ridiculously false than
Trump's own lies.
Trump arrived just as his old boss at NBC, Jeff Zucker, came to CNN.
Zucker wanted to "broaden the definition of news" and right away began
pushing the network to reality-style coverage blowouts of things like
drifting cruise ships and the disappearing Malaysian airliner. Don
Lemon even sank to interviewing a "celebrity llama" in the months before
Trump announced.
Zucker immediately understood that Trump could be a permanent solution
to programming problems. "I've always been interested in the news, but
I've always been interested in what's popular," Zucker told the Times.
"I've always had a little bit of a populist take. Which I know is
interesting when you talk about Donald Trump."
Just as Trump learned the value in being attacked by the kind of snobs
who attend the Correspondents' Ball, CNN learned there was huge value
in being attacked by Trump, whose constant complaints and tweets gave
the network plenty of its own "earned media." This led CNN to ditch
what Zucker described as the "utility" profile the network enjoyed
prior to his arrival, and embrace being "characters in a drama."
This decision, mimicked in one form or another by nearly every
mainstream news organization in the Trump years (usually citing
motivations less honestly expressed than those of openly
ratings-obsessed Zucker), produced the first important part of Trump's
legacy, the permanent alteration of the news landscape. News changed
from something often dull and neutral in tone to a charged narrative
show, in which the drama of each day's events built toward the next,
in the manner of episodic TV. This format depended upon static sets of
villains and heroes, whose virtues and vices had to be operatic in scope to
justify the daily coverage barrage.
The truest things about Trump were his smallness of character and the
accidental nature of his success, but the instant he was elected he
was sold to us as the grandest of villains: leader of a coming fascist
revolution, a super-spy for the Russians, the head of a white
supremacist conspiracy. For four years, Trump was ludicrously
portrayed as not merely a diabolical traitor, but a revolutionary
planning the imminent overthrow of democracy.
Trump-Putin-Boris Johnson was the new Axis of Evil, and Trump's every
move was imbued with significance far beyond grubby reality, to the
point where educated people in 2018 marched to protect the job of Jeff
Sessions, in the belief that his firing was the first lit match in the
American Reichstag.
"We aren't alarmed enough about Jeff Sessions's Firing," is how Vox
put it (we actually didn't really need to be alarmed at all, about
this or a hundred other things).
Every other week, some poor Atlas propping up the weight of
civilization had to be physically protected from Trump's imminent
assault: Christopher Steele, Jim Comey, the Ukraine whistleblower, the
anonymous #Resistance author bravely penning a New York Times
editorial, Stephan Halper, Marie Yovanovich, the "exfiltrated spy,"
and countless other facers-of-danger, a suspiciously high number of
whom ended up scoring sweet book deals.
"Democracy itself" was reported to be hanging by a thread so many
times in the last four years that it would take a massive effort to
count the instances (I should know, I've been working on the list for
months), and while the Trump administration did many questionable
things, Trump himself somehow never followed through on rumored plans
to upend the Mueller probe or cancel elections or start nuclear war, or any
of a thousand other Dr.
No-style schemes to destroy the world.
Trump's best defense to the most serious accusations was that he was
just a shnook developer who was overmatched in Washington and wouldn't
have known how to commit half the crimes attributed to him. But his
delusions of being a political superhero, a cross of Lincoln,
Churchill, and Reagan (he gracefully conceded Jesus was a little more
famous), led him to subconsciously endorse the false legend of
colossal importance. On some level, he preferred being Hitler to
conceding the old insult of a "short-fingered" nobody, helping power the
symbiotic news mania.
He played up his reputation as a threat to the established order, when
he demonstrated repeatedly that he didn't really know how to be that.
He flirted with moves that would have left a mark, like pulling out of
Afghanistan or pardoning Ed Snowden, but his most significant acts
were nearly all designed to curry favor with the political class whose
approval he still craved, like his massive 2017 tax cut, his record
military spending hike, and especially his epic commitment of
government support for the financial markets at the start of the
pandemic, whose clear policy ancestor was the Bush/Obama bailout of
2008-2009.
Democrats should not only give eternal thanks for Trump's ignorance
(in the form of quotes like the one about combatting Covid using
disinfectant "by injection or almost a cleaning") his uncouth manner
(his "I hope you can let this go" aside to James Comey about Michael
Flynn is probably how he dealt with a hundred gaming and workplace
inspectors in places like Atlantic City), and his almost total lack of
traditional political savvy. Down the stretch in 2020 he often
insulted huge potential support blocs, from the elderly to the
supporters of "Crazy Bernie." This year, he abandoned his own
successful 2016 outsider strategy, cloaking himself in the garb of a
traditional Republican by painting Biden and Harris as radical
leftists, instead of proxies for Wall Street. This was done seemingly
in service of a delusion that he, Trump, was now the defender of the
establishment. Of course, the actual establishment rewarded him by
massively shifting its third-quarter donations to Biden and Harris.
Down to the bitter end, Trump was crippled by his desire to be taken
seriously by the representatives of the political "swamp" he'd
denounced, the John Boltons and Gary Cohns and H.R. McMasters, who all
predictably stabbed him in the face at the first opportunity. This was
another reason Revolutionary Trump was always absurd. Not only does he
not have enough friends to pull it off - he'd have trouble enlisting
enough conspirators to hold down the White House State Dining Room,
let alone the Pentagon or the Capitol Police - but the legend
conflicts too strongly with his proven desire for acceptance. He may
like visiting the poorly educated, but he doesn't want to be banished to go
live with them.
As for his current "coup," as it is being called by nearly everyone in
media:
It's an odd sort of coup when the chief plotter has already agreed to
surrender power on schedule. "Certainly I will, and you know that,"
Trump said, when asked if he would leave the White House on January
20th. My faith in Trump's sanity is not so absolute that I can't see
him forcing the Secret Service to drag him out by his underpants on
that day, but there's a difference between throwing a media tantrum
(Trump is adept at this) and successfully overthrowing the government.
The Trump presidency will be over soon, and though there will
doubtless be drama in between, his leaving with a whimper will mark
the last in a staggering list of Trump-related false alarms.
There was always so much less than met the eye with this story, a
simple tale of an arrogant ruling class that first got a deserved
comeuppance in the form of maybe the least deserving challenger
imaginable. It then spent four years pretending it was beaten by a
demonic supervillain instead of an ad-libbing, flatulent salesman with
a fourth-grade reading level. The propaganda we had to endure to cover
up the embarrassing real story had the unfortunate effect of
furthering distrust in both media and government, and therefore (of
course) swelling Trump's numbers. This was yet another of the
symbiotic idiocy cycles that have come to so characterize American politics
in the Trump age.
No one will admit it, but Trump was and is a quintessentially American
type, and his rise to the presidency, one of the all-time American
stories. It was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County meets
Duck Soup meets Scarface, a tall tale saga of how anyone determined
enough, and full enough of resentment, greed, and unearned confidence,
can make it all the way to the top in this country, armed with nothing
but the pure power of bullshit.
Would we really want things any other way? All of this may have been a
miserable confluence of events, but the core truth of the Trump story
is that in democracy, we have to accept that anything can happen, even this.
It's part of the deal. More than that, it's over. Let's hope we never
have to find out that the only thing worse than the circus we just
went through is an alternative, where it's impossible.
