Donald Trump and the Damage Done
A
little part of it in everyone.
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 14, 2020
A few days before Barack Obama left office,
he invited a small group of conservative writers, all Never Trumpers, for a
conversation in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. The mood was dark.
The president was worried about the
future of the Republican Party. We worried about the future itself. Someone
mentioned the possibility of global thermonuclear war as a plausible outcome of
a Trump presidency.
Nearly four years on, it’s worth
comparing what was predicted about the Trump administration versus what
actually happened.
Among the
predictions: The stock market would never recover. We’d stumble into war with
North Korea or Iran. The free press would be muzzled. Vladimir Putin would rule
Donald Trump through blackmail. Trump-appointed judges would dismantle the rule
of law and overturn the verdict of elections. Trump would never leave office.
None of this came to pass. Bad things
happened under Trump. But nothing so bad that it couldn’t be stopped by courts
(such as his attempt to end the DACA program), prevented by Congress (his
desire to ease sanctions on Russia), undermined by underlings (his effort to
withdraw U.S. forces from Syria), exposed by the press (the child-separation
policy), corrected by civil servants (his coronavirus misinformation), rejected
by voters (his presidency) or dismissed by the very judges he appointed (his
election challenges).
Yes, there were serious missteps in the
handling of the Covid crisis. But those who would blame Trump for tens or
hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ought at least to acknowledge that a
pandemic of this magnitude would have gravely challenged any president. Deaths in the United States from Covid-19 (91 per
100,000 people) are slightly worse than in France (87) but better than in
Britain (97), Spain (102) and Italy (107), all of which imposed harsher
lockdowns and had more engaged leaders.
All of this has convinced many of my
fellow conservatives, including those who were initially hostile to Trump, that
there’s more than a touch of derangement to those of us who oppose him — a
mixture of justified distaste for the man and his manners and unjustified fears
about the consequences of his governance.
Trump, as they see him, wasn’t
Mussolini II. He was mostly just Archie Bunker II — a blowhard easily kept
within the four corners of our constitutional system.
But the catastrophe
of Trump’s presidency doesn’t mainly lie in the visible damage it has caused.
It’s in the invisible damage. Trump was a corrosive. What he mainly corroded
was social trust — the most important element in any successful society.
I was reminded of this again reading
an extraordinary essay in
The Washington Post by former Secretary of State George Shultz, who turned 100
on Sunday. His central lesson after a life that spanned combat service in World
War II, labor disputes in steel plants, the dismantling of segregation and
making peace with the Soviets: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”
“When trust was in the room, whatever
room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office
room, the government room or the military room — good things happened,” Shultz
wrote. “When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything
else is details.”
What Shultz attests from personal
experience is extensively documented in scholarly literature, too. In high-trust societies —
think of Canada or Sweden — people tend to flourish. In low-trust societies —
Lebanon or Brazil — they generally don’t.
Trump’s presidency is hardly the sole
cause of America’s declining trust in our institutions, which has been going on for a long time.
In some ways, his was the culmination of that decline.
But it’s hard to think of any person in
my lifetime who so perfectly epitomizes the politics of distrust, or one who so
aggressively promotes it. Trump has taught his opponents not to believe a word
he says, his followers not to believe a word anyone else says, and much of the
rest of the country to believe nobody and nothing at all.
He has detonated a bomb under the epistemological foundations of a civilization that
is increasingly unable to distinguish between facts and falsehoods, evidence
and fantasy. He has instructed tens of millions of people to accept the
commandment, That
which you can get away with, is true.
Apologists for this president might
rejoin that there are also examples of this form of politics on the other side
of the aisle, notably in the person of Bill Clinton. That’s
true. But it only causes one to wonder why so many of the same conservatives
who vehemently objected to Clinton on moral grounds vehemently support Trump on
the absence of moral grounds.
It may take Americans decades to figure
out just what kind of damage Trump did in these last four years, and how to go
about repairing it. The good news: no global thermonuclear war. The bad: a
different kind of radioactivity that first destroys our trust in institutions,
then in others, and finally in ourselves. What the half-life is for that kind
of isotope remains unmeasured..
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist
with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The
Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem
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