Trump’s insulting the troops is just the latest
episode of the ‘nothing matters’ presidency
Opinion by
Columnist
September 5, 2020 at 5:22 p.m. CDT
At the
end of James Michener’s Korean War novel, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” an admiral
notes the bravery of aviators who are flying perilous missions against the
enemy. “Where do we get such men?” he asks.
Apparently
President Trump wonders the same thing — but not in a complimentary way. The
Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quotes Trump
telling aides that the men and women who have given their lives for their
country were “suckers” and “losers.” “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
he reportedly asked his then-homeland security secretary, retired Marine Gen.
John F. Kelly, as the two men stood by the grave of Kelly’s son, who was killed
in Afghanistan. Trump’s own view of the military seems to echo Sonny Corleone’s. In “The Godfather, Part II,”
the mafia scion says of the men enlisting after Pearl Harbor: “They’re saps,
because they risk their lives for strangers.”
The
Atlantic report clearly stung. Witness Trump’s frenzied denials; he
even called in the first lady to
defend him. But a president who has lied or deceived more than 20,000 times has no
credibility — and his defense quickly fell apart. Trump denied having called
the late Sen. John McCain a “loser,” yet he did so in 2015. The
Atlantic report was confirmed in short order by the Associated Press, The Post and — the
cruelest blow — even by Fox News.
Confirmation
from a Fox reporter did not, of course, prevent Fox hosts from calling the
report a “hoax,” but if history is
any indication, it won’t be long before they pivot from “he didn’t do it” to
“yeah, he did it, so what?” Indeed, a “senior administration official” already
tried out that defense with the Daily Beast: “The
president means no disrespect to our troops; it’s just that the way he speaks,
he can sound like an a------ sometimes.”
Why do
Trump supporters even go through the motions of trying to discredit the latest
allegations? Their support hasn’t been shaken by all of the other things the
president has done. He has welcomed Russian election help; called white
supremacists “very fine people”;
put children in
cages; gotten impeached for trying to
blackmail an ally into helping him politically; kowtowed to
Vladimir Putin and avowed his love for Kim Jong Un; unleashed security forces on
peaceful protesters; fomented violence; espoused insane conspiracy
theories; refused to say that he would accept the election results; and, most
recently, urged his fans to vote twice in
violation of the law.
He has
erased every red line, and none of it seems to matter to his base. He entered
office with 45.5 percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight poll
of polls. Today he stands at 43.5 percent. Nearly four years of craziness — and
his numbers have barely budged.
Most
remarkably of all, even Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the covid-19
pandemic and of the economy haven’t dented his popularity. If you had asked me
at the beginning of the year what one thing could cause Trump’s support to
crater, I would have said a recession. Well, we’ve had the worst recession
since the 1930s, combined with the worst pandemic since 1918. Nearly 200,000 Americans have already died — and a widely respected polling
model predicts 400,000 deaths by
January.
Trump’s
response has been a combination of inertia, denial and fantasy. He said, “I don’t take responsibility at all,”
and he mused about injecting bleach. One
study found that at least 70 percent of the
U.S. deaths could have been averted if our response had been comparable to that
of other wealthy countries. In other words, some 134,000 Americans might still
be alive today if Trump were a competent president.
And yet
his poll numbers remain remarkably steady. His malign incompetence has
certainly cost him some support: He is the one president in the history of
polling to never crack 50 percent approval,
and he has not gotten the kind of polling bump that
other leaders have seen during the pandemic. But neither has his support
cratered as, by rights, it should have. Richard M. Nixon, who was far more
competent and ethical than Trump, saw his approval fall to 24 percent. Trump
remains within striking distance of reelection.
How can
this be? The only explanation I can see is that his supporters place party
loyalty above all else. Trump is the leader of red America, and red America
will stick with him no matter what, because, despite all evidence to the
contrary, it is convinced that Joe Biden will somehow be worse. There is
nothing, literally nothing, that Trump could do to shake the support of
the Fifth Avenue Republicans.
This is
the Founding Fathers’ nightmare. Alexander Hamilton called “Party-Spirit” the “most fatal disease” in
“governments of the popular kind.” That disease is ravaging America: Were it
not for Party-Spirit, Trump could have been impeached and removed before he had
a chance to mismanage the coronavirus. And now
Party-Spirit is likely to inoculate Trump from the political fallout of his
insults to our military. Truly this is, as the kids would say, the “LOL nothing
matters” presidency.