Donald Trump Is the Best Ever President in the History
of the Cosmos
That’s
no more fantastical than the rest of his re-election campaign.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
July 25, 2020, 2:45 p.m. ET
It’s no longer interesting, or
particularly newsworthy, to point out that Donald Trump lies. It stopped being
interesting a long time ago. He lied en route to the presidency. He lied about
the crowd at his inauguration. His speech itself was one big lie. And the
falsehoods only metastasized from there.
Why? We’ve covered that, too, most
recently in all the chatter about “Too Much and Never Enough,” by Mary Trump,
who is not only his niece but also a clinical psychologist. He lies because he
grew up among liars. He lies because hyperbole and hooey buoy his fragile ego.
He lies because he is practiced at it, is habituated to it and never seems to
pay much of a price for it.
What intrigues me is that last part:
the impunity. I want to understand how he has gotten away with all of the
lying, because I’m desperate to know whether he’ll continue to.
That’s
the question at the heart of his re-election bid, because his strategy isn’t
really “law and order” or racism or a demonization of liberals as
monument-phobic wackadoodles or a diminution of Joe Biden as a doddering wreck. All
of those gambits are there, but they spring from and burble back to a larger,
overarching scheme. His strategy is fiction. His strategy is lies.
Can he sell enough Americans on the
make-believe that he really cares about the quality of life in cities and is
dispatching federal officers as a constructive measure rather than a
provocative one, in a flash of empathy versus a fit of vanity? He gave himself
away a few days ago when he punctuated a mention of
“the wonderful people of Chicago” with the needless notation that it’s “a city
I know very well.” Everything Trump says is self-referential, and everything he
does is self-reverential.
Can he feed voters the fantasy that his
actions in the infancy of this pandemic saved lives and that our country’s
world-leading death toll and un-flattened curve are more figment than fact or
at least more fluke than indictment? Can he convincingly don the mask of
a longtime evangelist for masks?
His recent interview with Chris Wallace of
Fox News was a trial run of this and … wow. Up was down. Black was white. A
superficial check of his cognitive coherence was
a profound spelunking of his cerebral glory.
He claimed that Joe Biden had pledged
to defund — no, abolish — the police, when
Biden had done nothing of the kind.
He boasted that America’s management of this pandemic made us “the envy of the
world,” when in fact we’re so densely diseased that we’re barred from entering most of Europe. Oh, and he’s
cruising toward four more years: All of those pollsters who predict otherwise
are incompetent fabulists. (Talk about projection.)
Then there are the Trump campaign’s
ads, which are “Veep”-grade caricatures of the usual fakery, not to mention
paragons of incompetence in their own regard. One that appeared on Facebook in
early July said, “WE WILL PROTECT THIS” — just like that, in URGENT CAPITAL
LETTERS — beneath a picture of a statue of Jesus. But Trump won’t be protecting
that statue, because, as eagle-eyed observers noticed, it was the Christ the Redeemer
monument that looms over Rio de Janeiro.
Another Facebook ad a few weeks later
comprised two side-by-side pictures. Under an image of Trump were the words
“Public Safety.” Under a separate image, of a police officer crumpled on the
ground amid protesters, were “Chaos & Violence.”
Scary! But, again, foreign. The scene
wasn’t Portland or Minneapolis or Washington or Chicago circa 2020, although
that was the obvious suggestion. The picture, it turns out, was taken in
Ukraine. Six
years ago.
For a more complete and very funny deconstruction of its infelicity, read Jonathan Last’s riff in The Bulwark.
The Trump campaign’s television
commercials, meanwhile, have painted a dystopia of rampant criminality in
Democratic-controlled metropolises where the police no longer function or
exist. One shows an elderly woman being attacked by a burglar
as she listens to a 911 recording that tells her to “leave a message.”
If this is Trump’s tenor in July, just
imagine October. By the time he’s done, Willie Horton will
look like Peter Pan.
It’s beyond ludicrous. But is it too
much? I once would have answered an emphatic yes. Now I just don’t know.
Every
president’s election illuminates the moment in which it occurs, and Trump’s
told us something important — and terrifying — about our relationship with the
truth. He relied like no candidate before him on a new infrastructure of
misinformation and disinformation, tweeting toward Bethlehem while his allies
made Mark Zuckerberg their stooge. If you’re peddling fiction, Twitter and
Facebook are the right bazaars.
But they’re hardly the only ones. The
web (how aptly named) has fostered the proliferation of “news” sites with
partisan and micro-partisan agendas. They amount to flourishing ecosystems for alternate realities. Many
Americans believe that Trump is an underappreciated martyr because they
marinate in selective, manipulated and outright fraudulent factoids. And Trump
and his minions have really figured out how to slather on the marinade.
When
Robert Mueller released the conclusions of his investigation into the Trump
campaign’s ties to Russia, everyone focused on its second section, about Trump,
when the first was at least as important. It documented the extent and ingenuity of
Russia’s attempts to pervert the election. But even many of the
people who paid it heed missed the point, which wasn’t Russia’s nefariousness.
It was the process’s corruptibility. It was the power of lies in a world gone
digital.
As for the power of a liar, well,
that’s what Trump is testing. He got away with lies in his business career because he chose
professional avenues paved with deception and crowded with con men. Plus he had
— and still has — a special talent for treating drivel as gospel, as long as
it’s tumbling from his lips. That’s the great advantage of the truly amoral:
They’re liberated from any tug of conscience, so there’s no suspicious
hesitancy in their words, no revelatory panic in their eyes. Damn the verities
and full steam ahead.
He got away with lies in 2016 because
of social media, because show business and politics had finally fused to the
point where one was indistinguishable from the other, and because many
Americans had grown so skeptical of traditional candidates that an utterly
untraditional one seemed more trustworthy on some level. Trump was the diet
that hadn’t yet failed them. They were ready to believe.
But to believe now is to ignore the
receipts. About 150,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Tens of millions
have tumbled into financial ruin or are on the precipice of it. Racial tensions
are at a palpable boil. And Trump keeps having to double back to correct his
predictions and retrace his missteps. Charlotte, Jacksonville, Charlotte: I’ve
lost track of where the Republicans are
convening next month and of who’s on board, though I remain
primed for Trump’s remarks. He alone can fictionalize it.
From
now until Nov. 3, Trump will take the grand inventions that attend any
presidential candidate’s campaign to a newly grandiose level, signaled by his insistence a few days ago that
he’d “done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of
Abraham Lincoln.” I love that “possible.” Trump, Lincoln: It’s a jump ball,
really.
So while this election is indeed a
contest between two men with two visions, it’s also something else. It’s the
tallest tale Trump has ever scaled, the greatest story ever told. It’s a
referendum on the reaches of his persuasion. It’s a judgment of the depths of
Americans’ gullibility.
Have we cut the cord to reality? Then
Trump has a chance. And America hasn’t a prayer.
