Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe
With malice toward all; with
charity for none.
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 5, 2020
This spring I taught a seminar (via Zoom, of course) at the
University of Chicago on the art of political persuasion. We read Lincoln,
Pericles, King, Orwell, Havel and Churchill, among other great practitioners of
the art. We ended with a study of Donald Trump’s tweets, as part of a class on
demagogy.
If the closing subject was depressing, at least the timing was
appropriate.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe.
The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops,
or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s
unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely
inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words
that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for.
What does one learn when
reading great political speeches and writings? That well-chosen words are the
way by which past deeds acquire meaning and future deeds acquire purpose. “The
world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” are the only false
notes in the Gettysburg Address. The Battle of Gettysburg is etched in national
memory less for its military significance than because Lincoln reinvented the
goals of the Civil War in that speech — and, in doing so, reimagined the
possibilities of America.
Political writing doesn’t just provide meaning and purpose. It
also offers determination, hope and instruction.
In “The
Power of the Powerless,”
written at one of the grimmer moments of Communist tyranny, Václav Havel laid
out why the system was so much weaker, and the individual so much stronger,
than either side knew. In his “Fight
on the beaches” speech
after Dunkirk, Winston Churchill told Britons of “a victory inside this
deliverance” — a reason, however remote, for resolve and optimism. In “Letter
From Birmingham Jail,”
Martin Luther King Jr., explained why patience was no answer to injustice:
“When you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill
your black brothers and sisters with impunity … then you will understand why we
find it difficult to wait.”
In a word, great political writing aims to elevate. What, by
contrast, does one learn by studying Trump’s utterances?
The purpose of Trump’s presidency is to debase, first by
debasing the currency of speech. It’s why he refuses to hire reasonably
competent speechwriters to craft reasonably competent speeches. It’s why his
communication team has been filled by people like Dan Scavino and Stephanie
Grisham and Sarah Sanders.
And it’s why
Twitter is his preferred medium of communication. It is speech designed for
provocations and put-downs; for making supporters feel smug; for making
opponents seethe; for reducing national discourse to the level of grunts and
counter-grunts.
That’s a level that suits Trump because it’s the level at
which he excels. Anyone who studies Trump’s tweets carefully must come away
impressed by the way he has mastered the demagogic arts. He doesn’t lead his
base, as most politicians do. He personifies it. He speaks to his followers as if
he were them. He cultivates their resentments, demonizes their opponents,
validates their hatreds. He glorifies himself so they may bask in the
reflection.
Whatever this has achieved for him, or them, it’s a calamity
for us. At a moment when disease has left more than 100,000 American families
bereft, we have a president incapable of expressing the nation’s heartbreak. At
a moment of the most bitter racial grief since the 1960s, we have a president
who has bankrupted the moral capital of the office he holds.
And at a moment when many Americans, particularly conservatives,
are aghast at the outbursts of looting and rioting that have come in the wake
of peaceful protests, we have a president who wants to replace rule of law with
rule by the gun. If Trump now faces a revolt by the Pentagon’s civilian and military
leadership (both
current and former) against his desire to deploy active-duty
troops in American cities, it’s because his words continue to drain whatever is
left of his credibility as commander in chief.
I write this as someone who doesn’t lay every national problem
at Trump’s feet and tries to give him credit when I think it’s due.
Trump is no more responsible for the policing in Minneapolis
than Barack Obama was responsible for policing in Ferguson. I doubt the
pandemic would have been handled much better by a Hillary Clinton
administration, especially considering the catastrophic errors of judgment by
people like Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo. And our economic woes are largely
the result of a lockdown strategy most avidly embraced by the president’s
critics.
