Among the damages the outgoing president has wrought is the infantilization of the Republican Party. Donald Trump never led by accepting the responsibilities that come with the job of president but, petulant man-child that he is, he set an example that much of his party and his most fervent followers were eager to emulate.
Trump modeled name-calling and schoolyard bullying and taunts on Twitter, in his public statements, and at his rallies. And tantrums. (I almost forgot the tantrums.) He made adult adolescent behavior as socially acceptable for his followers as open racism. Cultist see; cultist do. The country is worse off for Trump’s tenure both domestically and internationally. The man who for decades complained the world was laughing at us (him) made it his mission to prove it by giving the world a president to laugh at.
The families of 300,000 Americans dead under his mismanagement of the CPOVD-19 crisis are not laughing.
Paul Krugman suspects that Republicans do not actually “believe” what they claim to, but that “what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do.” That is, “the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.”
But there is belief and there is behavior.
Under Trump’s tenure, adolescent acting out and threats of violence have become behavior his party not only finds acceptable in its base, but in its leadership. If political stunts were policy, they would count as Republican accomplishments in the Trump era.
Trump electors on Monday demanded they be allowed into the Michigan State Capitol building to cast votes for Trump despite Trump having lost the state. Republican state legislator, Gary Eisen, suggested on the radio that violence could erupt during the Lansing protest he had agreed to assist. The party subsequently stripped Eisen of his committee assignments.
A single protester Tuesday afternoon clarified just how juvenile Trumpism is at its core. During a stand-up report outside Michigan’s State Capitol, a man wearing a Three Percenter sweatshirt and carrying an American flag stood behind MSNBC’s Vaughn Hilliard for minutes chanting, “NBC sucks!” Just to change it up now and again, he switched to chanting, “Liar! Liar!” in a sing-song tone usually heard only on a grade school playground.
What are you, 12? Developmentally, that would be older than the outgoing president he considers a leader.
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