Donald J. Trump has ended the United States as a world leader. He has in three-plus years reduced the U.S. to a monster truck bristling with guns and Trump flags. Impressive maybe. Intimidating to some. But not what the world views as leadership. Unless your name is Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
A decade ago, I reviewed U.S. history post-September 11, 2001:
A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?
We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.
Would America keep its head? No.
Damon Linker covers some of the same ground this morning for The Week. Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House did not reverse the trends set by George W. Bush, nor did the Obama administration display the fortitude to repudiate Bush’s crimes. But Obama’s attempts over eight years to reestablish international norms made the Bush years look like “a momentary lapse in America’s responsible global leadership.”
Running in parallel were the T-partiers, the birthers, the death-panelers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, Sarah Palin, and right-wingers parading with guns. And finally Donald Trump.
In addition to insulting allies across the globe and courting autocrats and dictators, Trump has undone every international initiative put in place by his predecessor, Linker writes:
All of that is bad. Very bad. But too often our discussions of Trump administration malfeasance take insufficient account of the broader context of recent alarming events. Trump is not merely an agent of international disorder. He’s the second agent of international disorder to be elected president of the United States in the past two decades. Even worse than handing the White House to someone as unfit as Trump is to have done so immediately after his predecessor spent two terms in office attempting to demonstrate to the world that the mistakes of his predecessor were a temporary hiccup.
By now our allies and adversaries alike have learned the lesson that the United States is thoroughly unreliable. We will work for years to accomplish a series of goals in multiple regions of the world and then in an instant turn 180 degrees in the opposition direction, blowing up all of those efforts without the least hesitation or forethought. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, many will be relieved that Trump is gone, but no one will be fooled into believing for a second time that America has righted itself. Everyone will know that 2024 and yet another potential reversal is just four short years away.
In other words, the Trump presidency was not the product of immaculate conception. His promise to make America great again appealed to a large minority whose sense of itself and its place in the world was shaken to its core. First, by the September 11 attacks. Second, by the majority electing the first black president.
The first demonstrated to generations born since Vietnam that their country is not untouchable. The second forced a white population previously able to ignore shifting demographics to reckon with the fact that it would eventually have to share power with people it considers inferiors. Too many Americans need people to look down on to feel better about themselves. They’re terrified of losing that. #BLM means “black lives matter too. They hear “… more than mine.” Nonwhite demands for equality feel like oppression. They are having none of it. They want their Great White Hope.
Dahlia Lithwick reflects on what Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” says, not about her irreparably damaged uncle, but about a country that would elect him president. Mary Trump’s book is an indictment of the “institutions” and persons who “all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.”
Even the family patriarch, Fred Trump, found there was no escape from Donald’s myth-making:
But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”
Trump’s political enablers find themselves trapped as well. Whatever transactional advantage they might have hoped to win, “the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave,” Lithwick writes. “It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable.” They will simply double down.
“Donald isn’t really the problem at all,” Mary Trump concludes. Or as a more storied author before her wrote, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars …”
Once the George W. Bush administration went to “the dark side,” the Bushies and their enablers were all in. Today, so are John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Melania Trump, and the Trump administration’s Republican allies. As are the #MAGA faithful. Admitting their “spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment” and facing the light of truth is unendurable.
In 2008, Blue Century (my 527 committee) ran a series of regional 30-second radio ads aimed at getting out the vote. Not all of the scripts were right for the air. “Compulsion” never ran. It spoke to Bush’s inability to stop throwing good lives after bad decisions. It is ironic now that the setting was a casino:
SFX: Casino ambience, slot machines, coins dropping
AIDE: Sir. Sir, I think it’s time to leave.
GEORGE: Can’t leave. Making progress. Gonna win any time now.
SFX: Casino ambience, coins inserted, slot machine handle cycles
AIDE: But, sir. You’ve already lost a fortu- … um … sir, are those … dog tags?
GEORGE: Running low here. Here’s a billion for more. [to himself] If you don’t quit, you don’t lose.
SFX: Slot machine handle cycles, casino ambience, more “coins” inserted
VO: You can tell a calculated risk from a bad bet. Call your leaders in Congress. Ask if they can.
The Trump administration and its enablers are exhibiting the same all-in behavior in 2020, not as much with the lives of troops overseas as with citizens at home, including school children. Yours.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.