Trump’s Corona Coronation
“There
won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.” How could the
president makes his intentions any clearer?
By Roger Cohen
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 25, 2020, 4:22 p.m. ET
“There won’t be a transfer, frankly.
There will be a continuation.” That’s President Putin — I’m sorry, I mean
President Trump — declining to assure Americans of a peaceful
transfer of power after the November election. Does it get any clearer than
that?
Trump, in the fog of a pandemic, has
opted for chaos. If he can generate enough, he figures, the election results
can be disputed, and a post-Ginsburg Supreme Court will hand him victory. “The
only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” he says.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a
duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. The duck is called a
Trump power grab.
Oh, we’ve heard it
all these past 44 months, Trump is a harmless buffoon, he is inconsequential,
the adults in the room have him by the cojones. Yes, and we know from
20th-century history that raving loudmouths, lunatic clowns and cunning actors
never do real
damage,
right? Wake up!
It’s not easy. My city, New York, feels
semi-anaesthetized. Madison Avenue, midmorning on a Monday, is ghostly. People
are dazed. They’re so done with the virus. What they would most like to know is
what they can’t know, which is how far through this nightmare are we. Halfway?
More? Or, God help us, less?
And what exactly is the nightmare?
Trump tramples on science, turns it into a political tool, and so the plague
becomes a double one in which the death of more than 200,000 Americans and the
death of reason fuse. A terrible foreboding takes hold. Meaning has succumbed
to fever. We are trapped in a Zoom box inside four walls in cities with moats
around them and the drawbridges pulled up. The Great Calamity is upon us.
The calamity has many elements. Trump
makes repeated and baseless claims that mail-in balloting will result in
rampant voter fraud and an election stolen by the Democrats. He offers hymns to
violence. Predicts “citizen militias,” calls an assault on a journalist “a beautiful sight,”
condemns protesters as “domestic terrorists.”
He explores using the Insurrection Act and the
military to suppress disorder. To an impossible defeat, the Great Leader
intimates, the only response is violent resistance in the name of his continuation.
Trump’s Republican Party is servile. It
is conspiratorial. Senator Mitch McConnell, his zealous functionary of indecent
hypocrisy, reacts to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by racing to
install a conservative replacement. “O most wicked speed,” as Hamlet put it. No
need even to attempt to disguise the purpose. Vice President Mike Pence
suggests a new justice must be seated to decide “election issues” that may
arise “in the days following the election.”
Hamlet again: “The
time is out of joint.” What is the scream gathering in tightened lungs? It is
the death of language. Trump’s incessant lies do that, strip words of sense.
The virus does that, too, creating hideous neologisms. To see someone is now to
have an “in-person” or “live” meeting. This has become a privilege. Think about
it.
Look at children, now in “pods” or
“cohorts,” subject to “synchronous” classes that involve a teacher being there
in real time (either in person or on video), and the less desirable
“asynchronous” classes, meaning a prerecorded video or some posted assignment.
This is Orwell territory. “Coronavirus,” all 11 letters of it, rolls off any
child’s tongue.
Or look at the Skid Rows forming as
businesses close and tourism dies, and try to consider a terrible thought —
that a tribal America is so incapable of constructive debate that even a
coherent response to a pandemic became impossible and masks are turned into a
political statement.
And still the scream will not be
released from lungs under constant scrutiny because it is all too much to bear.
The pathogen hyper-inflates anxiety, 1930s style.
A friend, a naturalized American like
me, writes from Austria: “I am baffled. I am shattered. I question my entire
belief system, my trust in America, my darling adoptive country: Was I too naïve?
Too idealistic? Too young? Too stupid? The hardest part for me to understand is
not the one lunatic, not the one certifiably, wickedly twisted mind, but all of
his enablers, all of his supporters. Who are they? How are so many of them even
possible?”
They are possible because America-First
nationalism is a heady drug for a nation past the zenith of its power, battered
by forever wars and economic precariousness. They are possible because the
Great Leader says your ugliest demons are in fact your greatest assets. Just
look at me!
“It’s a rigged election. It’s the only
way we’re going to lose,” Trump says. A pliant judiciary, a press he calls the
“enemy of the people” tamed, a personal militia, a miraculous vaccine by
November: He wants it all for his continuation. He’s got his son
Donald Trump Jr. claiming Democrats
“will add millions of fraudulent votes that can cancel your vote and overturn
the election.” The disease runs in the family, you see. They want a
corona coronation.
The time is out of joint. Wake up! See
the duck for what it is. Vote. Register and vote. The Great Calamity is upon
us.