The one constant in Trump’s presidency:
Tomorrow will be worse
Opinion by
Columnist
July 13, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. CDT
Whenever
you are asked to name the lowest moment of the Trump presidency, one answer is
almost always correct: Tomorrow.
As the
nation ricochets between chaos and calamity, the one reliable constant is the
near certainty that things will get worse.
On
Friday night, President Trump commuted the sentence of
longtime adviser Roger Stone, convicted by a jury of multiple felonies for
lying to federal investigators to protect Trump in the Russia probe. Trump’s
clemency came the same day Stone made the corrupt bargain explicit by saying he
resisted “enormous pressure to turn on”
Trump.
On
Saturday, Trump’s White House launched a public
broadside attempting to discredit its own chief infectious-disease expert,
Anthony Fauci, because Fauci sounded renewed alarms about the coronavirus,
which has killed at least 132,000 in
the United States and is accelerating out of control. Then, on Sunday,
as Florida reported a breathtaking 15,300 new cases of the virus in a single
day, and other states reported overwhelmed hospitals and
climbing death tolls, Trump tweeted a defense of
his decision to play golf during his 276th visit to one
of his golf clubs during his presidency.
On
Monday, Trump retweeted a TV clip in which one of his allies, Rep. Matt Gaetz
(R-Fla.), accused the left of
“cultural genocide,” an echo of white nationalists’ claims of “white
genocide,” and saying “the
organizers of Black Lives Matter, who pledge allegiance to the destruction of
America, have a lot more in common with the Confederate generals that they hate
than they would like to admit.” This followed Trump’s “white power” retweet and another instance of
his campaign allegedly appropriating Nazi
symbols.
Abuse
of power, flagrant disregard for American lives and racist provocations — all
in 72 hours. I had long feared the country couldn’t survive another four years
of Trump’s assaults. Now, I worry whether it can survive another 190 days.
Employers
from United Airlines to Brooks Brothers are retrenching, while states confront
a renewed threat of lockdowns — a direct result of Trump’s push to reopen the
economy without adequate safeguards. While other countries are keeping the
virus in check, this country now faces a protracted downturn. Incredibly,
states still don’t have enough testing and protective equipment. This time,
Trump can’t blame China.
Nearly
68 percent of Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction,
according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Even
half of Republicans say so.
Trump’s
own niece has written a book about
the president’s unfitness. Democratic opponent Joe Biden is now tied with or
ahead of Trump in Florida, Texas and Arizona. And Trump,
facing another potential attendance debacle at a rally in Portsmouth, N.H., on
Saturday, called off the event. He blamed the postponement on a tropical storm,
but the storm hadn’t been forecast to hit
Portsmouth, and the weather was dry.
Trump
is lashing out every which way: at allies who privately built a section of border wall in Texas
(it’s in danger of toppling because of
erosion), at “RINO” Republicans who condemned Trump’s Stone commutation, even
at Fox News (“the
Radical Left has scared Fox into submission”).
Meanwhile,
he warns the media about
a Biden presidency: “Is this what you want for your President??? With no
ratings, media will go down along with our great USA!” Trump supposes
journalists are driven by the same thing that motivates him: not the national
interest, but ratings.
This
motivation helps to explain a president who is so careless he doesn’t check for
typos before tweeting to 83 million people about a “Federal Monumrnt”; so
reckless that he’s pressing the Food and Drug Administration to bless
hydroxychloroquine again even though the preponderance of evidence says it’s
dangerous; so unfeeling that he would force schools to reopen without giving
them adequate funds to protect teachers and children; so corrupt that, even as
he frees Stone, his administration returns former
lawyer Michael Cohen to prison because Cohen refused to stop working on a book
critical of Trump; and so unpatriotic that his administration lifted a ban —
designed to protect U.S. troops — on foreign sales of gun silencers after a
lobbyist for the cause joined the White House staff, the New York Times reports.
All
that, too, was in the past few days alone.
Some
tell me they are weary of hearing about Trump’s abuses and they no longer are
surprised by his outrages du jour. I share their weariness — I feel as though
I’ve been a coroner working one car wreck after another for five years — but we
can’t afford to look away until he is dispatched so overwhelmingly that his
inevitable attempt to declare the election stolen won’t fly. Our very survival
depends on it.
