Remembering the Presidency of Donald Trump
I wish
it were a fever dream in my Covid-clouded mind. But, no, our president believes
empathy, like patriotic sacrifice, is for suckers.
By Roger Cohen
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 11, 2020
After two weeks of
battling Covid-19 — thank you, dear readers, for all the good wishes — I can
report that the droning discomfort has passed, some energy has returned, I can
taste again, and, for better or worse, I am recovering my personality from
whoever hijacked it. I can also certify that the virus is a devilish addition
to life on earth. Do not mess with it.
My memory is also
returning, a mixed blessing as it turns to familiar obsessions, like Trump’s
ego.
You know that ego
could not resist 18 interviews with Bob Woodward, just as you know that he
spent some of those interviews detailing his lies to the American people about
the virus (he preferred “to always play it down”),
just as you know that he said in 2018 that the Aisne-Marne American cemetery in
France he declined to visit was “filled with losers,”
just as you know that in 2017 he said Haitians “all have AIDS” and
Nigerian immigrants wouldn’t ever “go back to their huts.”
You know because the
president’s personality is consistent: a mix of coward, racist, liar, con
artist, narcissist, grifter, and blowhard, with uncanny antennae for the worst
instincts of humanity, and for how to use the media to channel insecurity and
hatred into a mass political movement galvanized by his fiendish energy.
Yes,
you just know with Trump. You know he insisted that Sean Spicer say his
inauguration was “the largest audience to ever
witness” the ceremony, and that the former senior White House
counselor Kellyanne Conway used the Trump playbook when she said the statement
was not false but “just alternative facts,”
and that when Trump started insisting (falsely) that there had been voter fraud in the election he had won, he was laying the
groundwork for real voter suppression in November 2020, and that downplaying
the virus was about getting the Dow to 30,000 so he would not suffer an impossible defeat in the coming
election.
Alternative facts
have been the diet of Americans for 44 months now. No democracy, built on
accountability and law, can survive such an onslaught indefinitely. That is why
Joe Biden’s most effective slogan is a simple one: “You deserve a president who
tells you the truth.”
Biden has a fight on
his hands. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Militarized police
confront angry mobs. Insecurity is rampant, as is racial tension. A plague
stalks the land. These are near perfect conditions for a proto-fascist like
Trump who seeks a disoriented populace.
You just know, and
the knowledge is that cloying glob of sludge that can never quite be washed off
in the Trump era, however hard you scrub. It permeates existence.
You know he doesn’t
believe climate change is a threat, that he has done his best to eviscerate the
Environmental Protection Agency, that he does not believe in science, that he
thought “disinfectant” might knock out the virus “in a minute,” that he has
hobbled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that he couldn’t care less about
transgender people, that he loathes immigrants he has described as “animals,”
and that he authorized the separation of thousands of immigrant children
from their parents at the border. You know that in textbook totalitarian
fashion, he calls a free press “the enemy of the American people.”
Yes,
you know, and you also know that Trump wants you to know all this so well, and
so relentlessly, that you don’t care.
He has always gotten away with it. He has no reason to believe he will not
continue to bat 1.000.
“The fact is, we’re
here, and they’re not,” he taunted his
opponents at the White House last month. It is a fact, alterable only through
an immense summoning of American character and will.
You know Trump
thought there were “very fine people on both sides”
at the 2017 neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally, and that he thinks any Jew who
votes for a Democrat shows “great disloyalty,” and that he winks daily at millions
of Americans who believe he is their savior from a takeover by Black and brown
people, Jewish finance, cosmopolitans, and leftist radicals. You know Trump is
“very much behind” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of
Egypt because he has yet to meet a dictator he does not dream of emulating. You
know Trump must be compromised with President Vladimir Putin to the point
of ignoring Russian
bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.
American deaths, as
this year’s virus death toll has shown, are a matter of indifference to a
president who believes empathy, like patriotic sacrifice, is for suckers.
It’s important not
just to know, to be aware, but to remember. It’s hard to remember. It’s like
looking for the way out of a labyrinth in the mist.
It’s important to
remember that Trump believes he has
done more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln and
that he claims he
will preserve coverage for pre-existing conditions even as he is asking the
Supreme Court to destroy Obamacare. Because Trump is
delusional and a world already on the brink of an armed Chinese-American
confrontation may not survive a second Trump term without disaster. Nor will
the oldest democracy on earth.