I know it’s tragically uncool to compare the Keystone Kops plotting of the Trump campaign’s attempt to stage an election coup to the “you-know-whats” of Germany 1933. But it must be said that a whole lot of people thought the “you-know-whats” were pretty clownish too, although obviously they were more successful. The fact that Dear Leader Trump got 75 million votes should make everyone stop and take a moment to consider how dangerous he really is.
Masha Gessen in the New Yorker goes there. But in a really interesting way:
One of the best-remembered and most useful phrases from twentieth-century political theory is Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil,” born of her attempt to understand the motivations of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. The phrase has been interpreted to mean that Eichmann, despite his high position, was merely a cog in a wheel that would have churned with or without him—that he was normal for his time, a shapeless man who would have conformed to any era. All of this is accurate. But what perhaps struck Arendt most when she was reporting on the Eichmann trial, for The New Yorker, was Eichmann’s indifference. She notes that he didn’t seem to remember some of his most consequential, murderous actions, not because he had a poor memory—and not, she assumed, because he was dissembling—but because he didn’t care, and hadn’t cared at the time. Eichmann had an excellent recollection of two things: perceived injustices perpetrated against him—during his trial in Jerusalem he showed himself to be a first-class whiner—and events that advanced his own career, as when important people noticed him and, say, took him bowling.
The parallels offer themselves. From what we know about Donald Trump, he will remember 2020 as a year when he was unfairly treated by the voters, the courts, and the media, and also a year when he golfed. In this year of the coronavirus, Trump has oscillated between holding briefings and acting like the pandemic was over, while recommending bleach and bragging about his own tremendous recovery.
But what he has demonstrated consistently, while three hundred thousand people in this country have died and millions became sick, is that he couldn’t be bothered. Memorable news stories have focussed on the cruel and self-serving ways in which the Administration has addressed the pandemic, as when the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly found it to be politically advantageous that the virus was disproportionately affecting states with Democratic governments, or when Trump withheld resources from states whose governors had criticized him.
Trump apparently wanted to lift covid-19 restrictions because he wanted the short-term economic boost that might have helped his reëlection chances. But he also demonstrably, passionately, even desperately wanted a vaccine, and he wanted to take credit for it. His Administration poured money into Operation Warp Speed. And then they dropped the ball, for no reason that we can now see—likely because there is no real reason. Someone might have thought that it wasn’t his job. Someone might have wanted to spite Pfizer for refusing the money that Trump was so generously bestowing. Someone else might have assumed, overconfidently, that Pfizer could always be coerced later into producing the additional doses. Trump himself was most likely golfing.
I have written a lot of articles and several books about Russia’s transformation under Vladimir Putin, but the experience I’ve always found hardest to describe is one of feeling as if creativity and imagination were sucked out of society after he came to power.
The reason is not so much censorship or even intimidation as it is indifference. When the state took over television, for example, it wasn’t just that the news was censored: it was that the new bosses didn’t care about the quality of the visuals or the writing. The same thing happened in other media, in architecture, in filmmaking. Life in an autocracy is, among other things, dull.
Nothing has reminded me of Russia quite so much as the Trump Administration’s belated effort to encourage Americans to vaccinate. It will build on an earlier effort to “defeat despair” about the pandemic, which either wasted or simply failed to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars, because the officials involved tried to ideologically vet two hundred and seventy-four celebrities who may or may not have been asked to take part.
Many, according to documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, appeared to have been disqualified because they had been critical of Trump. Several said no, and only a handful, Dennis Quaid among them, accepted; Quaid then apparently backed out, and the campaign went dormant. Had it all been a scam? A particularly dumb version of a Hollywood witch-hunt? Probably not. It was probably another story about a President and an Administration that cares about slights but not about people.
I think that’s a very interesting observation. America used to be pretty good at doing things. But these past four years have shown us just how mediocre we are at getting even basic things right anymore. I doubt this is all attributable to Trump but he certainly escalated the phenomenon.
He’s turned America into the Trump Organization.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here: