Sharknado Goes to Washington
MAUREEN DOUD
- Oct. 30, 2020
WASHINGTON — When I was growing up, my
brother Michael took me to see old movies at the American Film Institute.
“An American in Paris.” “Shane.” “Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington.” “Casablanca.”
The films shaped my image of America.
We were Gene Kelly, the exuberant hoofer who could dance and romance better
than the French. We were Shane, the laconic gunfighter who never used his gun
unless he had to. We were Jimmy Stewart, the idealistic senator who fought the
corrupt forces in our government. We were Humphrey Bogart, who pretended to be
cynical when he was really a lovesick patriot. And there was the wonderful Jean
Arthur in two of those movies, showing what a strong, saucy woman could do.
The nuns took us to new movies, like
“Lilies of the Field,” where I learned that we were Sidney Poitier, the
jack-of-all-trades who helped immigrant nuns in the Arizona desert build their
dream chapel.
We were the winners,
the good guys. We had swagger and vitality and an endless sense of possibility.
America wasn’t perfect, God knows. I
was raised here in the heart of the white patriarchy, where the Washington
Monument was an apt symbol.
But our aim was to brashly move forward
toward a more perfect union. All that rhetoric about us being a mosaic and a
quilt and a shining city on a hill and a beacon for the world? I bought it. I
came from a family that wore uniforms — police uniforms, military uniforms —
and growing up, I was proud of that.
I went to the Lincoln
Memorial at dawn the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Maybe it was sappy.
But after living through the ’68 assassinations and riots, Watergate, Vietnam
and the Iraq war, I wanted to celebrate the idea that our sense of possibility
was back, that we could be proud, smart and respected again in the world.
I imagined traveling
to France on President Obama’s press plane and watching him come down the
stairs, with his cool sunglasses and graceful lope, showing the French, who had
correctly scorned our stupidity and cozening on Iraq: Never mind Gene Kelly. Look
what we’ve got now.
I often wonder how we got from that
moment in only a dozen years, from my little champagne celebration at the
Lincoln Memorial to a state of such despair and jitters that we don’t even know
if the president will use the Supreme Court, midwifed by Mitch McConnell, to
purloin the election.
The most bizarre fact that sticks in my
head is this: In 2015, Donald Trump was agonizing over whether to go for the role as
the president in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” or to run for the actual
presidency.
How did we go from Abraham Lincoln to a
“Sharknado” reject?
It is not only Trump’s fault. He is the
Rosemary’s Baby of pernicious trends in this country over decades.
I have seen a lot of Republicans use
bigotry to lure racists, scare Americans and win the White House. But with
Trump, it is more blatant because he cuts out the middleman. He doesn’t hand it
off to capos.
For years now, image has replaced
substance and achievement as a path to power. But Trump — aided by a soulless,
rapacious Silicon Valley that keeps torquing up the algorithm for conflict and
conspiracy — has relentlessly tried to obscure our ability to tell the true from
the false.
Truth has been Balkanized.
Social media and the former reality
star have entwined to make cruelty and fake news central elements of the
nation’s discourse. Who could have conceived of a president calling a
vice-presidential candidate from the other party, a respected senator and
groundbreaker for women, “a monster”?
This fog of fakery
peaked with Covid-19, with Trump politicizing the mask and turning Democratic
governors and his own health officials into the enemy.
“Trump has turned fact and decency into
a partisan concept,” said Jake Tapper. “So that journalists who are skeptical
of both parties, and Republicans like Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake who are not
total sycophants, become antifa to 35 percent of the country, while all the
other Republican lawmakers who know better sat back and let it happen.”
Walter Isaacson, the historian,
observed, “What we have lost is the sense that we are one nation, all in this
together. Donald Trump is the first president in our history who has sought to
divide us rather than unite us. We will heal once he leaves, but the scar will
endure.”
I know, because of my family, that all
Trump supporters are not cult members or racists. But our conversations are
harder. They are anti-abortion and anti-regulation and got the conservative
Supreme Court they wanted. They see Trump as a man who has kept his promises,
with a playful sense of humor.
But liberals feel that Trump has no
humor and that they have lost their own. It’s exhausting to be this outraged
all the time.
Although the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner was always pretty lame, even before President Trump put
the kibosh on it, I learned a lot from hearing presidents deliver humorous
speeches — or try to.
I loved writing features about wacky
aspects of White House power — like the national security official under Bush
senior who got nicknamed “the Ferret” because of his ability to sprint across the
Oval Office rug and jump into pictures with the president.
Carol Lee wrote an amusing feature for
The Wall Street Journal about the little red fox that sashayed around the
colonnade outside President Obama’s Oval, a memory that Obama evokes in his new memoir.
Journalists don’t write those kinds of funny, human stories about Trump and his
enablers. The president’s spiral into lawlessness is too repellent — and
frightening — to allow levity.
I checked back with Jon Meacham, the
presidential historian, who marveled to me in 2016 that it was “as though Trump
blew up the science lab, exposing the raw nerve of America’s stream of
consciousness.”
He told me about a long
Negroni-and-pizza lunch in the early Clinton years with his old boss, the
legendary liberal editor of Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters.
“Charlie Peters defined intellectual
honesty as the ability to say something good about the bad guys and bad about
the good guys — to call them, in other words, as you saw them,” Meacham said.
“Trump blew that up, and part of the restoration drama we need is a return to a
semblance of this kind of reason-based politics.
“The Republican Party chose to abandon
the entire Enlightenment project of evidence-driven reality sometime between
the escalator and Covid, choosing a kind of Hobbesian total war of partisan,
even cultish, passions rather than an ethos that would have been recognizable,
at least in outline, by every president from F.D.R. to Obama. A Biden presidency
won’t bring the Kingdom of Heaven to pass, but it could, at its best, make
America remotely rational again.”
Just as I found it hard to walk past
the Supreme Court after the partisan travesty of Bush v. Gore, I now find it
hard to walk past the nest of vipers that is this White House. There have been
sex scandals and family grifting before. But the pervasive immorality (kids
separated from parents and put in cages, endless lies, siphoning government
money for the Trump family business, people like Omarosa Manigault Newman and
Stephen Miller running around), and the Republicans’ blind eye to it all, makes
it hard to see the White House the same way.
“Unfortunately, what the Trump
presidency has shown is how far someone with a lust for power and contempt for
democracy can go within our system,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential
historian. “Never has the expression ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty’ been more resonant. We have to go back to our founding period and
demand of our government to be the best that it can be. Sadly, now when people
say that, it’s almost with an unhappy, bitter laugh. But the founders did not
say it with an unhappy, bitter laugh. They said it with hope and expectation,
and we should, too.”
Even if Joe Biden
wins, it’s not going to be easy to restore what has been lost, or to forge a
new American identity.
Fortunately, the younger generation is
more tolerant, open and committed to justice. And taking the megaphone away
from Trump will lower the volume of lies and incivility, even as he will most
likely continue to be revealed as a fraud in investigations and lawsuits when
he loses presidential immunity.
“It’s going to take a hell of a lot of
work, not just by Biden but by all of us, to put our country back together,”
said Leon Panetta, the former Obama defense secretary. “The only pillar of our
democracy I haven’t wavered on is our sense of trust in the American people.
Tuesday is going to tell me a hell of a lot about whether that sense is well
placed.”
He muttered, “Dammit, I hope we never
make that mistake again.”
But we might.