Tag / trump

by Edward Champion

A Dark Day for America

Some thoughts on the recent act of domestic terrorism.

The siege on the Capitol didn’t just represent Trump pushing his already dangerous envelope further into the realm of lunacy. It further exposed America as a nation that is hell-bent on abandoning facts, democracy, science, and basic decency. We have two weeks left with the Madman-in-Chief and there can be little doubt now that anyone who continues to support this monster is malleable clay for his cheap authoritarian tyranny. This would include the 11 Senators who opposed the Electoral College as well as the mindless sycophants who bend to his every word.

“We love you,” said Trump. “You’re very special.”

He knows exactly what he’s doing. When sedition becomes aligned with Leo Buscalgia, you know you’re dealing with a particularly sinister strain of outreach.

But let’s not just pin this on the pinhead. Jack Dorsey, who is now inexplicably being heralded as a saint for suspending Trump’s Twitter account for twelve hours, is also responsible for what happening. As is Dean Baquet of The New York Times for legitimizing right-wing extremism under the false “all the news that’s fit to print” covenant. It was Baquet who allowed a Tom Cotton op-ed arguing for brutality against peaceful protesters. Yet the brutality ultimately emerged from Cotton’s own political party and has been increasingly normalized. It was Dorsey who issued an apology to alt-right provocateur Candace Owens — getting on his profiteering hands and knees to apologize for calling her “far right.”

Dorsey and Baquet — in making right-wing extremism and white supremacy as commonplace as a leisurely walk in the park — used their power and media influence to hone the cornerstones of “both-siderism,” where we are now supposed to entertain the alarming notion that Nazis and antidemocratic terrorism should be afforded the same intellectual weight as any sane political position.

If we don’t remove Trump and his enablers soon — and there has been talk of a second impeachment — then the next two weeks could very well be the end of America. If we don’t immediately arrest and try every single thug who stormed the Capitol, then this will send a message that domestic terrorism is as casual as asking a hot dog vendor for extra mustard and sauerkraut. The question of how many Republicans will continue to align themselves with treason and treachery remains an open and likely preordained one. They’ve marched this far in the swamp without a whit of self-reflection and they know very well what butters their bread. But the additional enemies of America are those who continue to pretend that the daily dose of fascism and violent spectacle is something that should be as normal as thousands of Americans dropping dead every day from COVID. The people in power want us to be conditioned to accept all of this as business-as-usual, to capitulate our shock and outrage and to be divested of what remains of our virtues.

If you have rats in your home, you call an exterminator. But Dorsey and Baquet are more interested in growing their fortunes than standing for decency. They have cynically opted for the bottom line of profitability and dishonesty. And if we hope to heal America and secure a peaceful presidential transition, then we need to be very vocal and condemn every known influence that has allowed this repugnant state of affairs. The pestilence that is eating away at the American promise needs to twitch in glue traps.

by Edward Champion

“I Have Friends” — The Trump Must Leave Remix

A remix for our dark political year.

I’m a huge fan of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Rachel Bloom. I’m also a huge fan of anything that will get the now gray-haired monster from 1600 Pennyslvania Avenue.

So with apologies to Ms. Bloom, here is a remix/parody of “I Have Friends” — a song that seems peculiarly applicable in this epoch of contending with a raging narcissist who can’t leave the White House gracefully.

by Edward Champion

The National Epidemic of Selective Empathy

Our nerve-wracking presidential election isn’t just about uniting with the points we conveniently agree with. It’s about stepping way from our ego and seeing people as people.

When CNN anchor Don Lemon pointed out to Chris Cuomo on Thursday night that he had to cut off some of his friends because they were “too far gone,” I knew exactly what he meant. The problem is that the disgraceful act of punching down at anybody who is struggling isn’t confined to the right anymore — even though all the calls for basic human decency have emerged from Democratic leaders. Back in August, Biden gave an acceptance speech at the DNC that was surprisingly eloquent. He demanded an America that was “selfless and humble” and hoped to redefine the nation as one of possibilities rather than division. The Left’s talking points have seemed — on the surface, at least — to prize decency and humility as the honorable traits that distinguish them from Trump’s minions.

Earlier in the week, Wallace Shawn wrote a thoughtful essay for the New York Review of Books that featured some surprisingly trenchant truths (for Shawn, at any rate) about the way in which America has shifted away from being kind:

Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind.

Shawn is absolutely correct. But a certain type of professional pundit who professes to speak on behalf of regular Joes and Janes, usually epitomized by Dirtbag Left types sitting on Patreon-fueled piles of money — the kind of brunch-entitled elitist or “sensible” middle-of-the-road type who not so secretly despises the vast promise of humanity — would seem to suggest that some people who claim to lean left are just as guilty in cleaving to false pretense. To even point these obvious blind spots out is to be falsely branded as a Quillette fan. (When I called out the aforementioned elitist on his insensitivity to the brave food service workers he poked fun at, even citing articles pointing to how they were underpaid and risking their health during the pandemic, he decided to personally attack me, much in the deranged manner that he once demanded that a Nigerian prove his country of origin within ten seconds.) It’s clear that many of these self-appointed experts, driven by hubris and the Need to Matter, are unwilling to practice the very empathy that they profess to stand for. You won’t find them at Black Lives Matter protests. You won’t see them committed to tangible action that can get us closer to the goal of an America that considers everyone. Above all, you’ll never see them listening. And this does a disservice to the heartfelt DSA types committed to indefatigable organization or the Democrats rolling up their sleeves for a long and hard fight that considers the bigger picture.

I’ve had to end two friendships since the pandemic began. These two people weren’t Trump-voting Republicans, but rather strident neoliberals who felt as if their right to enjoy the good life was not something to be shared by those who fall into a lower income bracket and who seem incapable of perceiving life outside their hermetically sealed bubbles. I’m a far left progressive who was in the tank for Bernie and Liz, but who swallowed his pride for the greater good and who extended numerous hours phone banking for Biden out of a need to preserve democracy by any means necessary. The strategy here, one shared by other progressives who see stability as a long game for radical change, is to revive an American framework in which we can theoretically listen to each other again and make true change happen that is good for everyone.

But my perspective is a bit different from that of my moneyed middle-class peers. I grew up white trash. I have been homeless. I have lived in environments in which physical and emotional abuse was the daily norm. I have a toxic family who relished in hurting me and who left me to die repeatedly. I’ve had to do considerable rewiring of my attitude in the last six years so that I don’t feel resentment, but wonder and gratitude for all that I have and that I can pass on to those who are hurting. I have tried to pay it forward by taking care of other people in my life even as I often stay silent about my own needs and my own difficult struggles. I have known what it is like to have only thirty cents in my pocket and to have no pecuniary hope for the future. I have known what it’s like to have people in positions of power go well out of their way to smear me and distort the truth of my life. I have lived entire months in which I have eaten nothing but Top Ramen. And I am deeply aware, given the present unemployment crisis and the failed economic relief for Americans, that I could very well find myself in that place again, along with many other people who are dear to me. I believe that everyone deserves basic welfare and a second chance — even if it comes at the risk of repeat offenses, as we saw over the weekend with Ruth Shalit Barrett. To not extend such clemency is to align yourself with the Dirty Harry acolytes who believe that all people are hopelessly corrupt and incapable of change.

To believe in such liberalism right now can, in some circles, be an act of apostasy.

I decided to end these two friendships — one of which had endured for more than fifteen years — because these two neoliberals refused to consider the homeless and the working class even as they insisted that they “knew best” for America. Because I was such a loud advocate for the working class and the marginalized, these two former friends proceeded to disrespect me, somehow sensing that I was lesser by way of not adhering to the uninventively vanilla and somewhat sociopathic idea that the middle-class was the common origin point. These two “friends” vitiated me when I had given so much of my time and my energy to them. Something about our austere political atmosphere had made this kind of “What’s in it for me?” style of friendship a political issue, much as empathy, which must remain inclusive to anyone irrespective of political affiliation, has become a partisan issue.

In short, what united my neoliberal ex-friends with the hideous Trump cult was the selfish idea that there was only one narcissistic narrative that mattered: theirs and only theirs. Let’s not forget that the self-absorbed and the selfish can be found at any point on the political spectrum. You can suss them out fairly quickly by their need to announce their good deeds rather than simply performing their benevolent acts. There isn’t a concern for posterity or for extending a hand to the underprivileged. There isn’t a sense of historical continuity.

What I hope that everyone voting on Tuesday can come to understand is that we have two completely different paths for the future of our nation. One of them is a terrifying road to authoritarianism. The other is a path to greater promise. But let’s not be selective about our empathy. It’s a mistake to assume that all Republicans are Nazis, even though there are plenty of strong reasons to condemn the Republican Party’s repugnant actions over the last four years. When contending with fascist policies, your job is to fight hard, at any cost, for a greater tomorrow. When fighting systemic racism, your job is to be indefatigable.

Even so, the only reason I reached Republicans and Independents and converted them into Biden voters while phone banking was because I took the time to listen to their grievances and I paid close attention to their life stories. I took the time to find common points. We must remember that the people who are uncertain about Biden are driven by the same qualities that we ultimately are: empathy and decency and the sense that they are being heard rather than getting left in the dust. Flexing your ego on social media or within the framework of an article that only your peers will read may make you feel better. But are you actually doing the work? Are you trying to get people to listen? Do you have more than a superficial understanding of the clusters of people you are speculating about and for whom you falsely profess to be an expert? Because as far as I’m concerned, that tactic is just as inconsiderate as Trump leaving millions of Americans in the cold and refusing to offer a healthcare plan or a strategy for national recovery. As we look forward to a prospect in which we can hopefully move to a governmental system that takes care of everyone, we must not fall into the same trap as Trump. We are the United States of America. And that means finding new ways of reaching total strangers who we swiftly condemn as our enemies.

by Edward Champion

Why Donald Trump Deserves No Sympathy: The Case for Popping Open the Champagne If He Drops Dead

There is nothing wrong in hoping that great misfortune falls upon a mass murderer.

Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID.

I wouldn’t mind if he dropped dead.

Let be more specific in case the Secret Service has flagged this article and some dutiful bean counter is now adding my name to a list. I do not possess a homicidal bone in my body. I have no interest in hurting or assassinating anyone. I am not threatening the President’s life. I am merely stating my opinion that, should the President expire of the very virus he stubbornly failed to control and that killed so many people, I’d probably sleep much better at night and chuckle over the poetic justice.

To further clarify the nature of my opinion: If I learn that the corpulent moronic mass of Donald Trump drops dead in the next month from COVID, I will take the chilled champagne out of the fridge without hesitation and pop it open, watching the cool parabola of bubbly goodness explode from the bottle just after the cork shoots into the air like a wild projectile that has been waiting four years to demonstrate its resistance to gravity. I will probably grab my guitar and sing “Born free, as free as the wind blows” very loudly out my window. I may even bust out the confetti and some party blowers. I will then probably dance naked in my living room, blasting Rage Against the Machine at top volume, and paint my body all sorts of exciting colors. Based on some informal text canvassing of some sleepless friends, I am far from alone in my methods.

Why would I do this? Because this is how I celebrate liberation. This is how I celebrate being released from grief. Let us not forget that all of America has been held captive by this brutish bully for almost four years. He’s had so many opportunities to be presidential, to be an eloquent leader who the people can look up to, even if they disagree with him. He has botched them all and he has demonstrated that he will never change or apologize. I’m sick of the stupid neoliberal belief that we can’t play dirty. With Trump, it’s self-evident that the normal rules of schadenfreude do not apply. There is nothing shameful in denouncing this monster. If anything, it’s an act of patriotism.

Why is it so bad to express this? Why should the measure of goodness involve believing that all people are worthy of commiseration? Sure, most people are. But Trump is not most people. As the writer Zito Madu declared on Twitter, “It’s always insufferable when people see the true test of their kindness as extending public sympathy for the worst people who have spent their time on earth being cruel to others.” Don’t give me the Christian malarkey that you’ve never once wished for bad things to happen to bad people. I mean, I’d probably give you the sideeye if you spent most of your time doing this rather than doing good work and being good to other people. But if you’re a normal person, I guarantee that you’ve probably stewed over some son of a bitch who burned you earlier in the week, an ogre who made your life a little more hellish during a time in which patience is increasingly a hard-won virtue. Perhaps you chose — wisely, I might add — to hold your tongue and not react to the transgressor and focus on the positive. Life is all about how we choose to react. Even so, it is a perfectly justifiable reaction to rejoice if Trump dies. Remember: We’ve had nearly four years of this.

Some may argue that this makes me a bad person. But it doesn’t.

The number of people who I want to die can literally be counted on one hand. Believe it or not, I tend to be kind and respectful towards other people. But Trump falls into a category of animalistic slime that defies all known human classifications and thus excludes him from the virtually universal privilege of being given clemency or the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the day, you can still have a conversation with a cop or a gun nut or someone who leans to the right. But with Trump, you clearly cannot. This man is a boor and a bully and it’s this very personality quality, this incurable narcissism that a troubling cluster of Americans believe to be a virtue, that has inspired dangerous public health policy decisions that have contributed to the deaths of 209,000 people.

Trump effectively sentenced these people to death. He was more efficient than the NKVD during its notorious Polish Operation of 1937-1938. More people dead than the East Timor genocide. More casualties than the Greek Civil War of the 1940s. It’s a staggering number that will likely spill over the casualty count in Darfur. And it only took six months for Trump to do this.

If that doesn’t fill you with red hot rage, I don’t know what to tell you. What people often forget about angry people is that they are often angry because they believe in a corresponding set of positive virtues. In my case, my unshakeable anger towards Trump is driven by my unwavering faith in democracy, of returning to a nation in which we can actually have conversations with each other again.

My great desire to see the most dangerous fascist in America disappear permanently from public life is predicated upon all the goodness that I see from everyday people. In short, I want the American experiment to continue. It won’t under Donald Trump. His removal from office or this earth, whatever fate decides first, will surely be one of the 21st century’s most awe-inspiring achievements.

by Edward Champion

Bob Woodward’s Rage: Not a Barnbuster, But Still Vital

Bob Woodward’s latest volume on Trump isn’t quite the Trump TKO we were all hoping for. But it is a thoughtful and vital volume that nimbly exposes the baleful Trump strain that has altered American politics — perhaps permanently.

RAGE
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 480 pages

It goes without saying that, contrary to Trump’s maddeningly megalomaniacal claim that his signature is now worth $10,000 on eBay, most of the universe would sleep easier if this walking disaster would swiftly disappear. And because this state of affairs is the norm, backed up by polls showing that the current President can barely squeak past 40% in the polls against Biden, it does make reading the latest Trump tell-all an act of masochism.

Most of us know that Trump has mangled the pandemic and permanently uprooted millions of Americans now facing grief, eviction, and unemployment. Most of us intuitively understand that nearly 200,000 Americans are dead because of Trump’s arrogance, cruelty, and ineptitude. Why then would one want to read another book exposing this pernicious sociopath?

Well, when it’s Bob Woodward, you do. Rage, Woodward’s followup to Fury, is different from his previous Trump volume because, this time around, he actually talked with Agent Orange, landing eighteen interviews with the monster between December 2019 and July 21, 2020 — the last on the very day his manuscript was due. It is different because we’ve been in the prepublication position of listening to the tapes. Trump clearly knew how deadly the virus was and he lied to the American public about it. Just as he lied about calling McCain and military veterans “losers” and “suckers” — as recently as last night in a town hall appearance on ABC. This disparity between the private and the public represents the very reason why we need journalists to dig up the details.

The book arrived last night. I stayed up until 5 AM reading it. The volume is by no means a barnbuster and will probably not change too many minds, but it does offer an even-handed narrative that serves as a necessary reminder of just what we’ve come to accept from the executive branch and why this simply cannot be the norm of American politics.

The book’s first half is largely a summary of the political hellscape that we’ve come to accept, with some new context. We see former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former secretary of defense Jim Mattis enter into a Faustaian bargain with Trump under what now seems to be a dowdy ideal of patriotism and loyalty, no matter how bungling and dangerous the Commander-in-Chief may be. “How can you work for that man?” asks Mattis’s mother. “Ma, last time I checked, I work for the Constitution,” replied Mattis. Tillerson asks for numerous reassurances (being able to pick his own staff, asking Trump to refrain from a public dispute) before uneasily accepting the job. Tillerson, like many former Trump staffers, would be swiftly betrayed and have his conditions vitiated.

Mattis would find himself in a madhouse, contending with an easily distracted maniac who refused to countenance the facts. Here’s a stunning Mattis quote from the Woodward book:

It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it would go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him. So you had to deal with it. He’d been voted in. And our job was not to take a political or partisan position. It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?

We see Senator Lindsey Graham — a man who, only five years ago, denounced Trump as “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” on CNN — cozy up to Trump on the golf course, even willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when evidence of Russian collusion was stacked against him. “Listen,” said Graham to Trump, “if you actually did this, even though it was before you were president, you cannot serve.” Trump responded, “I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t do this.”

In other words, the new loyalty among those who worked with Trump meant accepting blanket statements at face value, never corroborating these against the facts and, above all, never fighting a pernicious leader who was committed to magical thinking when he wasn’t abdicating his duties altogether. This is one of the key takeaways from Woodward’s book, one that eluded Alexander Nazaryan at the Los Angeles Times.[footnote]I’m very fond of Nazaryan and have had the man over for dinner a number of times. He’s done some great reporting over the years, particularly his reporting on Chernobyl. At his best, he’s a playfully pugnacious type. But here his energies are sadly misdirected. His review for the Los Angeles Times, undoubtedly stirred on by an editor who is more committed to rumors and sleazy gossip rather than tangible facts, is deeply embarrassing. Nazaryan wallows in a cheap resentment for Woodward’s success that is very much beneath him.[/footnote]

What Trump has effectively accomplished over the last four years is to create a political environment in which believing in tangible and objective facts is now partisan. Much as empathy and taking care of a suffering population has become partisan. For there is no other way to explain why so many of the people who endured Trump over the long haul altered their command of the facts.

One of the book’s more shocking revelations involves Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the CDC. Here is the man who ostensibly exists to protect the national health. When he first learned of the virus, Redfield nimbly cracked the whip and gathered his team — on New Year’s Eve, no less — and produced a three-page memo, the first of many detailed daily reports. But as we see in the book, even Redfield could be corrupted.

In late February, Redfield had information that there was “a big problem in New York.” There were cases of people from Italy who had been infected with the virus. At this point, Redfield was well aware just how fast the virus could spread. But he fell in with the Trump line, telling the commonweal, “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives. Okay?”

If Woodward doesn’t quite answer the question of how ostensible scientists like Redfield could abdicate the very scientific method in favor of Trump loyalty and propaganda, Woodward’s conversations with Trump, which constitute the book’s second half, are of considerable importance in understanding how we have permitted such a beast to get away with anything. The episodes involving Kim Jung-un reveal not only how Trump could be easily manipulated with targeted flattery (Kim always referred to Trump as “Your Excellency” in “love letters” obtained by Woodward), but of how flexible Trump could be in humanizing clear human rights abusers. When Woodward asks how he could have cozy relationships with monstrous men, Trump replies, “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

Moreover, there is a creepy womanizing approach that Trump applies to diplomacy, one that makes the victims of Trump’s abuse and harassment even more necessary to not brush under the carpet. Here is Trump describing meeting Kim:

“You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s all going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes, and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second.

Woodward also offers definitive evidence of just what a blundering credit taker Trump has been, particularly in relation to the virus. Five people – Dr. Anthony Fauci, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the aforementioned Redfield, and security advisers Robert C. O’Brien and Matthew Pottinger — urged Trump to initiate travel restrictions on China. On deep background, Woodward paints a picture of a man merely telling the room, “Are you guys okay with this?” rather than, contrary to his own myth-making, being the sole voice to demand a flight ban. (Moreover, it is Fauci himself who suggests that stranded Americans be given the opportunity to return home.)

Jared Kushner tells Woodward that one of Trump’s great skills is “figuring out how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.” This quality may also explain why guys like Redfield and Mattis eventually gave up the ghost and allowed Trump to beat them down into tacit acceptance of the counterfactual.

And maybe that’s the rage of the title that we’re meant to feel here. Righteous indignation that was once so easily summoned and used to take out the politically corrupt, but that has been deadened over the last four years — save perhaps for the valiant efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement, which may very well be our only remaining hope. Because Trump is the new normal. And we’re all so busy trying to survive a pandemic, climate change on the West Coast, and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.