Trumpism

 

Trumpism                             Gerry OShea

Aesop is the first Greek storyteller on record. He was an illiterate slave who lived in the 5^th century BC and is renowned for his fables, fictional stories pointing to some moral insight about the ups and downs of life, what Shakespeare 2000 years later would memorably call “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

One of the famous stories attributed to Aesop is entitled Belling the Cat. This tells of a group of mice that were terrorized by a marauding cat who regularly visited their domain while they slept, grabbing a few of their members before they could scamper to safety. They met in council to consider how to deal with their predicament. One proposal which was widely applauded involved placing a bell around the cat’s neck thus ensuring that the noise from the pendant would alert the mice and allow them to escape before the cat could pounce.

A motion to adopt this proposal was carried unanimously and there were celebrations in “mouseland” that they had developed a credible plan to overcome their hostile intruder. Then the question was asked: who will place the bell on the cat’s neck. Not even one mouse volunteered to take on that challenge.

The clear message of this fable points to the fact that plans for great undertakings have no value unless they are implemented.

The story catches the essence of Trumpism. When running for office in 2016 he talked about leading a new and glorious era in American history, but he had no strategy to implement this dream of progress and prosperity and so his high expectations have remained fallow.

For instance, candidate Trump promised that he would be more demanding on Kim Jong Un than his predecessor, President Obama, and he did talk tough about the need for the denuclearization of the peninsula in the first year of his presidency. However, his words had no  impact on stymieing the aggressive military planning in North Korea. He then tried a placatory approach, visiting the DMZ between North and South and even naming a bewildered Kim as a loving friend. However, after all the antics of alternating between tough threats and making nice, North Korea increased its nuclear capacity during his tenure.

Again, he said that he had a replacement plan for Obamacare only to cross the t’s and dot the I’s. Four years later, still no healthcare plan – no bell on the cat!

A hallmark of the culture of the last president was his distaste for all international agreements. Make America Great Again (MAGA) wasn’t just a campaign slogan; it conveyed a sense of active hostility towards most other countries and their leaders. He withdrew the United States from 13 international commitments, including the Paris Accord on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal.

 NATO’S raison d’etre, preventing Russia from expanding westward, was weakened by Mr. Trump’s refusal to question President Putin’s policies or motives. Their Helsinki meeting where the American president said that he rejected the conclusions of all his own intelligence agencies in favor of believing the corrupt and scheming Russian leader remains a disturbing part of his legacy.

Trumpism was particularly hostile to environmental regulations. He abrogated over 80 rules that protected the country’s air and water, and he sidelined serious leaders working in the Environmental Protection Agency.

At the heart of Trump’s philosophy was a disrespect for science. This was evident in all areas of government but especially in how he dealt with the Covid crisis. Initially, he said that it was a passing problem that would end when the weather changed. He recommended hydroxychloroquine to people who got the virus despite the public disapproval of his own scientists in the Food and Drug Administration.

His stupidest blunder came when he opined that injecting a disinfectant might have the same positive impact on a person’s innards as it has when used to cleanse external body parts. When this drew guffaws from all sides, he claimed that he was only joking, an assertion that didn’t stand up to videotape reviews.

The Center for Disease Control strongly recommended mask wearing to limit the spread of the virus. Then-president Trump never agreed, seeing it as an imposition on his freedom. Millions of his supporters fell in line with this thinking, and as the election got closer, only a small minority of his followers had their faces covered at Trump rallies, and he himself was rarely seen with a face cover.

A similar problem arose recently when every past-president, except Mr. Trump, recommended publicly that all Americans should present themselves for vaccination. Opposition to inoculation is particularly prevalent among Republicans who look to the former president for leadership. It transpires that Mr. Trump was secretly vaccinated in December when he was still president, but instead of publicizing this, which would have been really influential with his supporters, he kept silent about it.

The deaths of more than 500,000 Americans remain a devastating reflection on President Trump’s refusal to follow scientific advice and his clear incompetence in dealing with a national crisis - and it cost him the election.

This hostility to scientific facts extended to minimizing knowledge derived from research. Every president gets a morning briefing document to update him on all aspects of policy, including new information on various issues. Mr. Trump devalued this work and, at best, merely glimpsed at the material. He preferred to provide a gut reaction, delivered by tweet, about whatever issue was on the front burner at any time.

The criterion for appointment to the Trump cabinet was not what expertise a person brought to the table but the depth of the person’s loyalty to him. William Barr, the attorney general, was a great favorite because he acted as the president’s personal lawyer rather than fulfilling his obligation as the people’s top legal representative. As president, he appointed over 220 judges to the federal bench with a record number of these marked as unqualified by the American Bar Association.

Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis and John Kelly, his ablest appointees, all left because they refused to become apparatchiks for the White House.

Trumpism is closely associated with lies – over 25,000 during his four years in the White House. No previous president came close to this level of mendacity. From his blatantly untrue claims that more people attended his inauguration than his predecessor’s, to his repeated, unfounded assertion that the official results of the 2020 election were fraudulent, his presidency showed a consistent inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

Yet he has a substantial following who has bought into the big lie that powerful liberal elites controlling the media brought him down. In one astonishing poll, 70% of Republicans stated that they believe that he won the presidential election.

Some commentators predicted that conservatives would abandon him after the riotous insurrection in the Capitol on January 6^th. Some have done so but a solid 30% of Americans continue to have his back. These are core Republican voters, so most of the party leaders in Washington do not dispute that he is still the top man and they dare not cross him. It is a Faustian deal where they abandon their principles to kowtow to an incompetent populist leader with strong grassroots support.

Trumpism is facing days of reckoning in the courts. There are thirty-nine cases lodged against him in various courthouses. Many of the charges are serious and have grave consequences for the former president. For instance, he is accused of serious tax fraud over many years, of blatantly interfering with election laws in Georgia and raping two women who are now suing him for defaming them by besmirching their characters in his denial of the charges.

It would be highly ironic if the man who introduced the harsh “lock her up” epithet into the electioneering lexicon in America will himself feel the cold hand of the justice system. Hilary Clinton has never faced a judge for the malfeasance she was accused of; will the man who repeatedly called for her jailing be similarly exonerated in the thirty-nine court cases he faces?

 

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com