The
Trümperdämmerung Is a Fitting End to 2020
December 29, 2020
As the awful year of
2020 and the awful tenure of Donald Trump both come to an end, the President has
partied with the unmasked in Palm Beach and taken credit for a vaccine against
a virus that he once counselled could be beaten with bleach. He has pardoned
mercenary child-killers and Paul Manafort. He has golfed. He has raged. He has
vetoed the annual defense bill and threatened to shut down the government over
the holidays. He has turned against even some of his most loyal henchmen, and
some, in turn, have finally flipped on him. “Mr. President . . .
STOP THE INSANITY,” the New York Post blared on Monday, after
four years of relentless cheerleading.
But,
of course, the President did not, and he will not. He continues to refuse to
accept his defeat in the election, and just the other day he retweeted a claim
that “treason” kept him from winning. Injecting still more political drama into
the most ministerial of constitutional processes, Trump and his most fanatical
supporters now want Congress to refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6th—which is both pointless,
in that it will not happen, and incredibly destructive. Meanwhile, more than a
hundred thousand Americans have died of the coronavirus just since the
election, and only two million Americans—not the hundred million he once
promised—have so far received the vaccine.
The Trümperdämmerung is
finally here, and it is every bit the raging dumpster fire that we, the unlucky
audience for this drama, have come to expect. Is there anyone left who is
surprised that the President is careening through the last days of his
Administration with a reckless disdain that simply has no precedent in American
public life? Still, the hardest thing to accept is that 2020 is not merely the
year that Donald Trump’s luck ran out but that with it the country’s did, too.
Sadly and yet inevitably, this terrible, wretchedly toxic year of pandemic death and economic distress, of partisan hatred and national
protest, is the culmination of all that Trump has wrought and all that he is.
Now
that 2020 is finally almost over, I find that I don’t want to remember it at
all. (Though you should read Lawrence Wright’s definitive account of this Plague Year in this week’s New
Yorker.) Perhaps this is simply because Trump has remained so defiantly and
obnoxiously unrepentant, continuing his antics all the way to the end. He does
not want to let go, to cede the spotlight, to renounce his outsized claim on
our collective consciousness. It is my protest, our protest, to want so
desperately to do so.
As
it is, we are still in 2020, and I can barely summon the concerns and
controversies of a year ago, when the most pressing political question in Washington
was whether Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton would have to
testify in the impeachment trial of the President. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t,
though he would eventually call Trump unfit for office in a book whose contents
he did not share with the United States Senate and the American public when it
mattered most.) Now that the election and all the other mayhem associated with
it have happened, it’s hard to recall that 2020 began with me wondering whether
Biden still had a chance in the upcoming Democratic primaries, and pondering
why the promising Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris had flamed out so
quickly, before a single vote was cast. This was back when Trumpian outrages
seemed less threatening to the literal health of the nation.
How
much worse was 2020? Well, NBC’s list of the
President’s ten biggest lies in 2019 included Trump perennials like the idea that
windmills, because of their noise, “cause cancer,” and “people are flushing
toilets ten times, fifteen times,” and the U.S. will “be going to Mars very
soon.” All are bad, absurd, and embarrassing coming from a President, but would
not even rate in this year’s far deadlier, more consequential tally. Trump was
not just a circus this year; he was an actual catastrophe.
Which
is why the before times are so hard to conjure now, nine months into the
pandemic and nearly two months after an election whose aftermath has challenged
the very foundation of American democracy. I can remember, sort of, Nancy
Pelosi ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech, and the drama of Mitt
Romney becoming the only senator in history to vote to convict an impeached
President of his own party. I can recall, sort of, the anxiety that followed
the U.S. assassination of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qassem Suleimani, and the drama of Biden’s
remarkable comeback in the Democratic Presidential race.
In
reality, though, the year really began for me, for us, in February—on February
24th, to be precise, when Trump tweeted, “The coronavirus is very much under
control in the USA.” We already knew that this wasn’t true. I had spent the
previous weekend haranguing my visiting parents about the virus and begging
them to purchase N95 masks before it was too late. But somehow I did not fully
recognize until that moment that Trump was going to approach the biggest
public-health emergency of our lifetimes with a strategy of outright denial.
The Big Lie of 2020 had begun. So many more followed that it’s hard to remember
the breathtaking simplicity of this first untruth, the foundational lie from
which so many deadly consequences would flow.
“Just
stay calm. It will go away,” Trump said on March 10th, when thirty-one
Americans were dead. “It’s going to go away,” he said on August 31st, by which
point nearly two hundred thousand had died. “It’s going to disappear,” he said
on October 10th. “It is disappearing.” He said that the coronavirus was a
Chinese plot and that concern over it was a Democratic hoax, that he knew how
to treat it better than the doctors did, that it was just like the flu, and
that, if you got it, you would get better, as he eventually did in October.
“That’s all I hear about now. . . . covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said before the election. “By the way, on
November 4th, you won’t hear about it anymore.” But that wasn’t true, either,
and, since then, millions of Americans have been infected with the disease, and
December has been by far our deadliest month yet.
To
be sure, there are many, many other Trumpisms from 2020 that would have been
mind-blowing in another context, in any other year. That’s the thing about
historic, world-changing times; so much happens that you can’t remember it all.
Still, I am quite certain that, even amid the firehose of 2020 awfulness, the Worst Photo-Op in American History and the Worst Debate in American History and the Worst Case of Sore-Loserism in American History will rate a mention.
Thinking
back through the year, I realize, too, that there is much that we will not only
forget but may not even believe actually happened. Trump pressing his Attorney
General to prosecute his opponent weeks before the election? Trump holding
rallies with thousands of unmasked followers during a deadly pandemic,
including a superspreader White House event at which he introduced a Supreme
Court nominee whom Republican senators hurriedly confirmed just days before
Trump was defeated? “Person, woman, man, camera, TV”? “Obamagate,” which was
supposedly “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA”?
It’s just all too insane.
When
I Googled “craziest shit Trump did in 2020,” a column I wrote in September, on “Twenty Other Disturbing, Awful Things
That Trump Has Said This Month,” popped up. Although it was published just a
few months ago, I realized that I did not remember many of the examples cited
in it—the “super-duper” new “hydrosonic” missile that does not actually exist;
Trump’s accusation that Biden got a “big fat shot in the ass” of some unknown
drug; Trump’s admission that he was getting his information about the
uselessness of mask-wearing from “waiters.” This, as George W. Bush was
reported to have said about Trump’s ominous Inaugural Address, was some weird shit indeed.
Remembering
all of this is already both hard and painful. There is still much more to learn
about the disastrous events of the past four years in Trump’s Washington and on
his watch. But I recognize that there are powerful forces—in human nature, in
the politics of both the right and the left—that will push us toward
forgetting. The urge to move on from Trump is understandable, and potentially
very, very dangerous. As of noon on January 20th, no matter what other madness
comes between now and then, America will start to move on anyway.
Out
of all the books I read this year—and I read many, stuck at home during 2020’s
endless quarantine—the one that resonated perhaps the most was “Those Who Forget,” an account by the French-German author
Géraldine Schwarz of postwar Europe’s, and her own family’s, not entirely
successful effort to reckon with the crimes of the Second World War. It made
the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for
what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be. I still
don’t want to remember, but I know that forgetting is not an option, either.