Trump the Troglodyte
The
Supremes smack down a prehistoric president.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 20, 2020
There are leaders who are ahead of
their times, leaders who are behind their times, and then there’s Donald Trump,
who comes from another time altogether. He’s stuck somewhere closer to the
Stone Age than to Stonewall. And the Supreme Court just told him so.
In a 6-to-3 decision, the justices
ruled on Monday that gay and transgender people are protected by a landmark
federal civil rights law. It was a stunning milestone in L.G.B.T.Q.
progress.
It was also a major slap at Trump, whose administration has gone perversely far
out of its way not merely to halt advances during the Obama years but to turn
back the clock.
The court, even with two Trump
appointees, moves with the illuminated society around it. Trump just grovels
before his blinkered base. And while Trump is often clueless about public
opinion, the court seems to be at least loosely tethered to it, as with a 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday that nixed his intended
scuttling of a program that protected immigrants known as Dreamers from
deportation. In some polling, about three-quarters of
Americans support that program.
“Do
you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” Trump tweeted
just after the immigration decision was handed down. I merely get the
impression that a majority of the justices are sane.
It’s one of the great riddles of
Trump’s presidency: how a man so spectacularly out of touch and out of sync
with so many Americans could wind up ruling over us. And he falls further out
of touch and more clangorously out of sync by the second.
While the rest of the country graduates from “Gone With the
Wind” to “12 Years a Slave,” Trump clings to Tara tighter than
Scarlett ever did. While the National Football League finally blesses many players’ desire to
kneel during the national anthem, Trump still curses it.
While Juneteenth lodges ever deeper in
the national consciousness — and has been mentioned, annually, in official
White House statements — Trump has to have a black Secret Service agent explain
it to him, as Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal
reported on Thursday.
“Sleepy” Joe Biden? Trump, in the midst
of a great “awokening,” is
Rip Van Winkle. And should he ever be roused from his culturally oblivious
snooze, he’ll want meatloaf for lunch and a well-done steak for dinner. He’s an
impossibly beefy man in an Impossible Burger world.
No president’s agenda and sensibility
are in perfect tune with the country’s mood and the cultural zeitgeist, but
Trump’s discordance is earsplitting.
As Americans came to depend on
Obamacare, Trump came to kill it. As Americans grew receptive to restrictions
on firearms, Trump grew submissive to the N.R.A. As Americans focused on
climate change, Trump ramped up offshore drilling. He thinks that taking the
contrary position makes him courageous, when really it just makes him obtuse.
He’s an imagination-starved anachronism in visionary drag.
In fact I have a new theory for why he
chose the running mate he did. Mike Pence, who calls his wife, Karen,
“Mother,” was one of the few men in America who made Trump look
positively postmodern.
And that damned wall of Trump’s, the
wretched hallucination at the center of his political identity? Poll after poll
show that most Americans don’t want it —
not if Mexico pays for it, not if Martians pay for it, not if Trump, Pence and
Javanka put on coveralls and build the monstrosity themselves. (Actually —
correction — I suspect that most Americans would back that last
scenario, and by a lopsided margin if Stephen Miller and Betsy DeVos joined the
work crew.)
You would think that a man so
unreflective of his country could never command the affections and approval of
a majority of its people. And you’d be right.
Trump is the product and emblem of minority rule,
the ridiculously lucky beneficiary of ridiculous political circumstances.
Almost three million fewer Americans
cast ballots for him than for Hillary Clinton; he received 46 percent of the
popular vote. But thanks to the exigencies of the Electoral College, he won the
presidency nonetheless.
Most
candidates — and presidents — start to sweat when their approval rating dips
below 50 percent. Trump does a jig when his gets anywhere close to it.
The
Republican Senate majority that saved his presidency by acquitting him during
his impeachment trial is, like him, a seriously warped mirror of the country.
Republicans control the chamber not because, in aggregate, they
get more votes in Senate elections. They control it because its architecture
privileges less populous states, many of which lean Republican.
With the advent of the coronavirus
pandemic, Trump’s clash with his own country intensified. He sporadically
bristled at and raged about social lockdowns and other such cautionary measures
even as most Americans supported them.
His view of recent anti-racism
protests, his language about police brutality and
some of his stubborn positions in regard to racial justice go against
increasingly powerful currents in America, where a majority of people now embrace the Black Lives
Matter movement. His refusal to rename military
bases that pay tribute to men who fought for the Confederacy
goes against even military leaders.
And on gay rights? He’s a study in
regression. He went from shouting out L.G.B.T.Q. Americans at the Republican
National Convention in 2016 (a slightly misunderstood speech, as I previously explained) to smacking us down ever since.
His administration has packed federal
courts with judges hostile to gay rights. It has barred transgender Americans from
enlisting in military service. It has backed Americans who, citing religious
beliefs, don’t want to give L.G.B.T.Q. Americans medical care or bake us a cake. Last
June, when several United States embassies requested permission to fly the
rainbow flag in honor of Gay Pride, the State Department said no.
In
the days just before the Supreme Court’s historic ruling on Monday, the Trump
administration reversed an Obama-administration rule prohibiting
discrimination against transgender people in health care. And it is the
administration’s position — reiterated before the Supreme Court — that federal
civil rights laws don’t and shouldn’t prevent a gay or lesbian employee from
being fired on the basis of sexual orientation. The court begged to differ.
But then so do Americans — by a really big margin. According
to a recent CBS poll,
82 percent of them didn’t think it should be legal to fire someone for being
gay. That included 71 percent of Republicans who held that
position.
One lesson of all of the discrepancies
between public opinion and Trump’s opinion is that if a president persuades
Americans that he (or, someday soon, she) is successfully managing the economy,
there’s a lot of wiggle room to be both tyrant and troglodyte. Another, as I
mentioned earlier, is that the system is at least sort of broken.
A third is that Trump traveled toward
his presidential destiny not via that oft-cited escalator in Trump Tower but
via a time machine. I hope he kept the batteries charged, so it’s ready, after
November, to return him to the past.