Even as President Trump accepted the
Republican presidential nomination on the White House lawn, lawbreakers
rampaged through the capital.
Would our law-and-order president leap
off the podium and tackle them? He once said he would race unarmed into a building to
tackle a school shooter. But sadly he ignored these blatant lawbreakers,
presidential aides violating Hatch Act restrictions on political manipulation
of government.
It’s one law he doesn’t want to uphold.
Asked about the Hatch Act, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, scoffed, “Nobody
outside of the beltway really cares.”
Inside the beltway,
Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention conjure grave
national threats from raging anarchists.
“Your vote will decide whether we
protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent
anarchists, and agitators, and criminals,” Trump warned in his acceptance
speech.
The Republican convention
included video glimpses of
“Biden’s America,” with a scary scene of fire raging in the streets. But those
streets turned out to
be in Barcelona, Spain; it wasn’t “Biden’s America” or even America at all,
just another in a stream of lies. (By the count of The Washington Post, Trump
has uttered more than 20,000 false and misleading
statements since taking office.)
Of course, even if it had been filmed
in America this year, it wouldn’t have been Biden’s America, but Trump’s
America. The real Biden’s America, the period when he was vice president, was a
time of comparative calm, growing prosperity and improving health care.
Yet Trump is determined to terrify
Americans. “If you want a vision of your life under a Biden presidency, think
of the smoldering ruins of Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the
bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago,” Trump warned earlier.
It’s true that there
has been violence and looting in some American cities, and this is a genuine
challenge to order and economic recovery. But by any objective measure the
bigger risk comes from right-wing extremists.
“Right-wing attacks and plots account
for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994,
and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly
during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International
Studies concluded after
examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year.
“Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the
United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”
The anti-fascist protesters known as
antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to
have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds. Just
a few days ago, a Trump supporter, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, allegedly shot two
protesters dead in Kenosha, Wis. One can’t help wondering if Rittenhouse, an
impressionable 17-year-old living in Illinois, was galvanized to take a gun and
drive to Kenosha because of panic promoted by Trump and Fox News.
After fulminating about threats from
Black Lives Matter protesters, Tucker Carlson of Fox News seemed to defend the
Kenosha killings, saying, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with
rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
At the Republican convention, Vice
President Mike Pence warned voters, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,”
and cited a federal officer, Dave Underwood, “killed during the riots in
Oakland.” But the man charged with
killing Underwood was Steven Carrillo, a follower of the extremist right-wing
Boogaloo movement.
I covered the Portland protests and was
duly tear-gassed by the federal agents dispatched by Trump to create violent
street scenes. Sure, Portland had a genuine problem with protest violence, but
it was inflamed by Trump — and those leftists who did throw rocks or set fires
played into the hands of Trump, even as they damaged their own city.
I asked Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon what
she thought of Trump turning the state into a punching bag.
“He has nothing else,” she said. “He
has to scare the bejesus out of people.”
“This is all about
distraction from his appalling failure to provide a national response” to
Covid-19, she added.
Trump and his proxies used the G.O.P.
convention to defame Democratic-run parts of America as caldrons of violence.
In fact, the single state with the highest rate of violent crime is Alaska, a red
state with Republican leaders. The state with the lowest violent crime is
Maine, a swing state that currently has a Democratic governor.
“Don’t let Democrats do to America what
they’ve done to New York,” Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, pleaded in his
convention speech. Hmm. Let’s just note that there were 319 murders in New York
City last year under Democratic leadership; when Giuliani was mayor, the
lowest annual total was 649,
under a police commissioner who later went to prison.
Oh, and two Giuliani associates were
indicted last year on federal campaign finance charges, and he reportedly is
himself under criminal investigation. What distinguishes this White House on
law and order is simply its ties to criminals: Eight associates of
Trump have already pleaded guilty or been convicted of crimes since he took
office.
Even as Trump exaggerates threats from
“anarchists,” there are plenty of legitimate threats to the public that he
ignores. Climate change raises the risk of forest fires, drought, intense
hurricanes and flooding. And the coronavirus is claiming American lives at the
rate of more than one every 90 seconds — yet Trump simply pretends to have
defeated the virus, defying the need for masks and social distancing.
“The most basic duty of government is
to defend the lives of its own citizens,” Trump said in his 2016 convention speech. “Any
government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.” That’s a fair
point that Trump voters should consider: His missteps contributed to the
180,000 American deaths from the coronavirus; Trump is one reason the United
States has 4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of coronavirus
deaths.
There’s nothing new about politicians
trying to scare the public. The present fear-mongering recalls Nixon’s Southern
Strategy. Two years ago, Trump and Fox News tried to win Republican votes in
the midterm elections by manufacturing fears of an invasion by Central American
caravans; predictably, the issue disappeared as soon as voting ended.
“This is an old game
that the Trump campaign is playing,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard scholar and
co-author of “How Democracies Die.” “It is out of the authoritarian’s
playbook.”
Professor Ziblatt said he doubted that
scare tactics would win over many voters, but he fears that the alarmism may
activate fans in the Trump base to take the law (and guns) into their own
hands. “That is terrifying,” Ziblatt added.
“Imagine — if you can — not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken … You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage?”
Among the accomplishments Donald Trump parades most proudly is that he has won 18 golf club championships. Like so many of his claims, this one is pure fiction. When the sportswriter Rick Reilly investigated for his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, he found that 16 of the claims were transparently false, and no evidence existed to support the other two. In one instance, Trump said he had won a championship at the Bedminster, New Jersey, club he owns, even though he was in Philadelphia on the day the event was held.
When Trump does play, Reilly reported, he takes “mulligans” (extra strokes that aren’t counted in one’s score ), throws opponent’s balls off the greens and into the bunkers, and kicks his own errant shots back onto the fairway so often that one of his caddies nicknamed him Pele, after the soccer star. “Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf,” Reilly concluded. “He cheats like a three-card Monty dealer. He throws it, boots it and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs.”
How do we deal with a person whose core impulse in every part of his life is to deny, deceive, deflect, disparage, and double-down every time he is challenged? And what precisely is the danger such a person poses if he also happens to be the leader of the free world, during a crisis in which thousands of people are dying every day, with no letup in sight?
The first answer is that we must understand exactly who we’re dealing with, and we have not, because what motivates Trump’s behavior is so far from our own inner experience that it leaves us feeling forever flummoxed.
The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie, cheat, steal, and inflict pain to achieve their ends without a scintilla of guilt or shame, as Trump so demonstrably does.
In July 2016, shortly before Trump became the Republican nominee for president, I was interviewed by Jane Mayer for an article in The New Yorker that was eventually titled “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All.” Mayer described my experience with Trump over the 18 months it took me to write The Art of the Deal. During that time, I spent hundreds of hours with him.
Like many other Trump critics, I believed that he was driven by an insatiable narcissistic hunger to be loved, accepted, admired, and praised. That remains prima facie true, but it deflects attention from what drives Trump more deeply: the need to dominate. His primary goal is to win at any cost and the end always justifies the means. Ultimately, he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or feels. For Trump, the choice between dominating and being loved — saving himself or saving others — is no contest.
The catalyst for my shift came after a friend sent me a long paper written by Vince Greenwood, a Washington, D.C.-based psychologist. Greenwood makes a detailed clinical case that Trump is a psychopath, a term that is now used nearly interchangeably with sociopath. Psychologists continue to debate whether it’s legitimate to diagnose anyone from a distance without the benefit of a clinical interview. In Trump’s case, his life history is so well documented that a thorough assessment does seem possible. As I once did up close, we can observe every daywhich psychopathic traits Trump manifests in his behavior. The highly regarded Hare Psychopathy Checklistenumerates20 of them. By my count Trump clearly demonstrates 16 of the traits and his overall score is far higher than the average prison inmate.
The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie, cheat, steal, and inflict pain to achieve their ends without a scintilla of guilt or shame, as Trump so demonstrably does. What Trump’s words and behavior make clear is that he feels no more guilt about hurting others than a lion does about killing a giraffe.
“Let’s face it,” actor and Trump supporter James Woods tweeted recently, “Donald Trump is a rough individual. He is vain, insensitive, and raw,” to which Trump blithely responded: “I think that’s a wonderful compliment. Thanks James.” Absence of conscience gives Trump the license to invent his own rules, define his own reality, declare victory in any competition, and insist on his superior expertise on subjects about which he knows almost nothing.
What makes Trump’s behavior challenging to fathom is that our minds are not wired to understand human beings who live far outside the norms, rules, laws, and values that the vast majority of us take for granted. Conscience, empathy, and concern for the welfare of others are all essential to the social contract.Conscience itself reflects an inner sense of obligation to behave with honesty, fairness, and care for others, along with a willingness to express contrition if we fall short of those ideals, and especially when we harm others.
Repentance for one’s sins is a basic tenet of every major religion, but Trump adamantly resists seeking forgiveness from anyone for anything he’s done. “I have a very great relationship with God,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapperduring the 2016 presidential campaign. “I like to be good. I don’t like to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad. I try to do nothing that is bad.”
So long as we seek to understand Trump’s motivations and behaviors through our own lens, we will feel forever at sea. Viewing Trump through his lens helps clarify that his behavior is completely predictable, and why it has become more extreme during each year of his presidency. “When somebody’s president,” Trump declared on April 13, “the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total. It’s total.” When it became clear to Trump that total authority also meant personal responsibility, he backed off that claim. But Trump is akin to a battering ram. He just keeps coming at you. The only limitation on his behavior is whether he believes he can get away with whatever it is he’s trying to do.
“People with a strong sense of conscience speak truth to power,” Greenwood explains. “Trump speaks power to truth.” Since his election in 2016, Trump has told more than 18,000 lieswithout acknowledging or apologizing for any of them. The frequency of his lies has risen from five per day in the first year of his presidency, to more than 23 a day during 2020. For Trump, lying is second nature. Facts are simply obstacles to be batted away when they contradict his preferred fictions.
It is a fact, for example, that Trump has been a defendant in nearly 1,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — by government agencies seeking to collect unpaid taxes on his properties, contractors trying to get paid for services rendered to him and his companies, and women charging him with sexual assault. As far back as 1973, Trump and his father Fred were sued by the U.S. government for refusing to rent to African Americans in Trump Village, a housing project built by his father Fred. The two Trumps fought the charges for two years but eventually signed a consent order that included agreeing to take a series of actions to end their discrimination.
In 2015, Trump settled two class-action lawsuits charging him with defrauding students at Trump University by paying $25 million in penalties, and agreeing to close down the business. In 2018, in response to a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general against Trump and his three oldest children alleging “persistently illegal conduct,” the Trumps agreed to shut the phony foundation, and to allow its remaining assets to be directed to charities chosen by the court.
The second quality that sets Trump apart is his lack of empathy. In the face of a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, we expect leaders to feel our pain, and to respond with expressions of compassion and comfort. Not Trump. In 13 hours of comments he made over a recent three-week period, The Washington Postreported that he spent a total of two hours attacking others, including the media, 45 minutes praising himself and his administration, and a total of just 4.5 minutes expressing rote condolences for Covid-19 victims and front line workers.
Trump doesn’t appear to make heartfelt connections with anyone, nor to value relationships beyond the extent to which they serve his immediate self-interest. Turnover in his administration — 85% in the first 32 months — dwarfs that of his five most recent predecessors for their entire first terms. Trump treats even his relationships with family members as transactional. Consider the way he describes his relationship with his father, arguably the most important influence in his life. “I was never intimidated by my father, the way other people were,” he explained to me for The Art of the Deal. “I stood up to him and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike. I sometimes wonder if we’d have gotten along so well if I hadn’t been as business oriented as I am.”
Trump rarely speaks with affection about Melania, his third wife, or any of his children — with the exception of Ivanka — or his grandchildren. “I know friends who leave their businesses so they can spend more time with their children, and I say “Gimme a break,” Trump once explained. “My children couldn’t love me more if I spent 15 times more time with them.” But his children have sometimes described a different experience of their father. In 2004, Donald Jr. told a reporter that “My father is a very hardworking guy, and that’s his focus in life, so I got a lot of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather.” In 2006, Trump’s younger son Eric mused that he was largely raised by his older brother. “My father, I love and appreciate,” he said, “but he always worked 24 hours a day.”
Ivanka is the one child Trump has often praised, including for being “voluptuous and having the best body.”When she was 26, Trump told hosts of The View that “If Ivanka wasn’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Trump’s most emphatic declaration of love during the past four years has been directed at North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, one of the most ruthless dictators in the world. “I was being really tough and so was he,” Trump said in 2018. “And we would go back and forth and then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters. They were great letters, and then we fell in love.” What Trump especially admires in authoritarian leaders, among them Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro — all of whom he has lavishly praised — is their ability to exercise absolute power. “I wouldn’t mind a little bow,” Trump once said. “In Japan they bow. I love it. Only thing I love about Japan.”
Trump expects and demands loyalty, but it only goes in one direction. His mentor, Roy Cohn, served dutifully as his attorney for many years. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told biographer Tim O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.” For The Art of the Deal, Trump described Cohn to me as “the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed… literally standing by you to the death, long after everyone else had bailed out”
As for Cohn, he referred to Trump not just as his client, but also as one of his closest friends. Still, when Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, Trump effectively ended the relationship. “Donald found out about it and dropped him like a hot potato,” explained Cohn’s longtime secretary, Susan Bell. “It was like night and day.” According to Bell, Cohn wasn’t surprised. “Donald pisses ice water,” he told her ruefully.
The third trait that most characterizes Trump is his need for dominance, and the evident pleasure he takes in exercising it. “I love getting even when I get screwed by someone,” he explains in his book Think Big and Kick Ass. “Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder.” In the absence of a conscience to shape and limit his behavior, Trump defaults to a more primitive and predatory impulse. Life for him is a zero-sum game. He either wins or he loses, dominates or submits. This explains why Trump felt no compunction about lashing out this week at a frequent critic, Joe Scarborough, by falsely accusing him of murder, even in the absence of a shred of evidence to support his claim. Cruelty is second nature to Trump.
Perhaps nowhere is Trump’s need for dominance more evident than in his relationship with women, captured most vividly in his comments to Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them,” he bragged. “It’s like a magnet. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” More than 20 women have now publicly accused Trump of sexual assault.
Another tactic that Trump employs to assert his authority is declaring his unique expertise on virtually any subject. He instinctively disdains and dismisses the knowledge of experts, including scientists, and instead casts himself as the leading expert on anything and everything. Topics that Trump has claimed to “know more about than anyone” include ISIS, drones, social media, campaign finance, technology, polls, courts, lawsuits, politicians, trade, renewable energy, infrastructure, construction, environmental impact statements, nuclear weapons, banks, tax laws, income, money, and the economy. In fact, because he can never focus his attention for long, his knowledge about any subject tends to be superficial and severely limited. Trump has even felt free to contradict the health care professionals on his own team during the Covid-19 crisis, most notably in describing the potential healing power of injecting disinfectants into the body. “Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” he explained. “Maybe I have a natural ability.”
In order to protect our democracy and our shared humanity, it’s critical to push back, calmly and persistently
So what does all this tell us about how we can expect Trump to behave going forward? The simple answer is worse. His obsession with domination and power have prompted Trump to tell lies more promiscuously than ever since he became president, and to engage in ever more unfounded and aggressive responses aimed at anyone he perceives stands in his way.
In the end, Trump does what he does because he is who he is, immutably. The research now strongly suggests that the absence of conscience has a strong hereditary basis, even as it may also be activated by adverse childhood experiences. The genetic abnormality itself manifests in the limbic system, the set of brain structures involved in the processing of emotions. People without a conscience, it turns out, often have an undersized or under-active amygdala and less gray matter in the limbic area of the brain.
For four years, along with millions of other Trump critics, I have wrestled with the best way to respond to a president who is incapable of shame or empathy and cares only about his self-interest. There is no effective treatment for a person with these traits, and Trump wouldn’t seek one if there was, because he genuinely doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with him. The horrifying truth is that it’s precisely what he’s missing that gives him a permanent advantage over the vast majority of us who are guided by a conscience and concern for others.
Trump revels in attention, domination, and cruelty. “The sociopath wants to manipulate and control you,” explains Martha Stout, “and so you are rewarding and encouraging him each and every time you allow him to see your anger, confusion or your hurt.” Even so, in order to protect our democracy and our shared humanity, it’s critical to push back, calmly and persistently, against every single lie Trump tells, and every legal and moral boundary he violates. We must resist what Hanna Arendt has called “the banality of evil” — the numbness and normalizing that so easily sets in when unconscionable acts become commonplace. “Under conditions of terror, most people will comply,” Arendt has written, “but some peoplewill not.”
Understanding what we’re truly up against — the reign of terror that Trump will almost surely wage the moment he believes he can completely prevail — makes the upcoming presidential election a true Armageddon.
Vote as if your life depends on it, because it does.
Among the accomplishments Donald Trump parades most proudly is that he has won 18 golf club championships. Like so many of his claims, this one is pure fiction. When the sportswriter Rick Reilly investigated for his book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, he found that 16 of the claims were transparently false, and no evidence existed to support the other two. In one instance, Trump said he had won a championship at the Bedminster, New Jersey, club he owns, even though he was in Philadelphia on the day the event was held.
When Trump does play, Reilly reported, he takes “mulligans” (extra strokes that aren’t counted in one’s score ), throws opponent’s balls off the greens and into the bunkers, and kicks his own errant shots back onto the fairway so often that one of his caddies nicknamed him Pele, after the soccer star. “Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf,” Reilly concluded. “He cheats like a three-card Monty dealer. He throws it, boots it and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs.”
For
four years, Donald Trump has been asking us to believe
the unbelievable, to accept the unthinkable, to replace harsh realities with
simple fantasies. On Thursday night, using the White House as a gaudy backdrop,
the President made his case to the American people for four more years. His
speech capping the Republican National Convention was long, acerbic,
untruthful, and surprisingly muted in comparison to the grandeur of the
setting, which no chief executive before him has dared to appropriate in such a
partisan way. “We will make America greater than ever before,” he promised.
Even
for a salesman like Trump, it was never going to be an easy deal to close, what
with a deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, nationwide
protests over racial injustice, and even a killer hurricane smashing into the
Gulf Coast hours before his speech. Some seventy per cent of Americans
currently believe that the country is on the wrong track, according to recent
polls. Who can blame them?
This
should be devastating context for a President, any President, seeking
reëlection, a true picture of American carnage to replace the false one that
Trump conjured four years ago. Yet the strategy of Trump and his team is now
clear: to talk about how bad things would be in Joe
Biden’s America, a violent socialist ruin in which freedom itself
will no longer exist and rampaging protesters, like those now committing
“rioting, looting, arson, and violence” in “Democrat-run cities,” will be
coming soon to a suburb near you. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe
Biden’s America,” Vice-President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. “No one
will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said on Thursday night. To say this
sounded a bit off in actual America, Trump’s America, does not do justice to
the bizarre dissonance of this year’s Republican Convention.
Americans
know Trump pretty well by now, and so it was more than a little discordant to
hear him extolled throughout the Convention this week as a family man, promoter
of women, friend to African-Americans, champion of religious liberty, and lover
of immigrants, who interrupted his own Convention to preside over a White House
naturalization ceremony for five lucky new citizens. A courageous patriot who
works “from dawn to midnight,” as his daughter Ivanka told us, this Convention
Trump personally charmed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made peace in the
Middle East, and single-handedly saved U.S. industries and unborn babies. And
then there was his response to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the
Administration’s shining hour, in which the President bravely disregarded the
so-called experts to ban flights from China, thus saving millions of lives,
while working closely with America’s governors, providing medical workers with
all the resources they needed, reopening schools and businesses, and putting
the greatest economy in history on the path to a fast recovery. The trolling
was as epic as the setting was legally questionable: sitting and listening to
Trump were more than a thousand supporters, packed together tightly in white
chairs on the White House lawn, and almost none of them were wearing masks.
While thus publicly and flagrantly flouting public-health standards, Trump
touted his response to the pandemic as one that is focussed exclusively “on the
science, the facts, and the data.”
Did
they expect anyone to believe it? Who knows, but politically, at least, the
spectacle suggested a President entering his reëlection campaign not strong and
confident of victory but insecure and faltering, a President whose prospects,
left unvarnished by lies and fantasy, were so poor that his strategists had to
reinvent him as a different person altogether. The departure from reality was
so complete that I spent much of the week feeling sorry for the many
journalists now employed as real-time fact checkers.
The
truth is that Trump’s heart wasn’t really in the ridiculously uncredible
makeover anyway. Fear is his preferred political drug, and nasty personal
attacks are his default setting. This is what he is pushing, now and forever.
Minutes into his speech, he framed the election as a fight to “save the
American Dream” and “the American way of life” from Democrats who would give
“free reign to violent anarchists, agitators, and criminals who threaten our
citizens.” Trump attacked Biden by name forty-one times in his prepared
remarks, some kind of record in a Convention speech. Biden is a “destroyer of
American greatness” itself, Trump said, and he supports “the most extreme set
of proposals ever put forward by a major-party nominee.” He is a pawn of China
and the radical left, “a Trojan horse for socialism,” a representative of a
“failed political class,” and a loser on the wrong side of history. He and his
party will “demolish the suburbs.” They will “confiscate your guns.” Biden, in
short, will end America as you know it.
The
problem, of course, is that America as we know it is currently in the midst of
a mess not of Biden’s making but of Trump’s. Suffice it to say that, by the
time Trump’s speech was over and the red, white, and blue fireworks spelling
out “2020” had been set off over the National Mall, late Thursday night, more
than three thousand seven hundred Americans had died of the coronavirus since
the start of the Convention—more than perished on 9/11—and a hundred and eighty
thousand Americans total had succumbed to the disease, a disease that Trump
repeatedly denied was even a threat. His botched handling of the pandemic was
the very reason that his Convention was taking place on the White House lawn in
the first place.
But
the real message of the evening was that nothing, not even a deadly plague or a
cratering economy, can stop Trump from being Trump. He bragged. He lied. He
even ad-libbed a taunt at his critics, using the White House as his prop.
“We’re here,” he said, pointing to the flood-lit mansion behind him, “and
they’re not.”
Four
years ago, the Republican National Convention was not an electoral game-changer
for Trump, but it was an important marker for the man and his party. If you
listened closely, it was a herald of the scorched-earth campaign to come—and,
especially, of the fundamental dishonesty of the Administration that would
follow. Trump’s Presidency, just like that 2016 Convention, has always been a
puzzling combination of the incompetent and the dangerous; from the start, it
has been equal parts dystopianism and hucksterism, with a strong side of
nepotism thrown in. Pretty much all of it was on the giant gilded platform in
Cleveland, plain to see.
Perhaps
the most quoted line from Trump’s 2016 speech was a memorable expression of his
aspirational authoritarianism: “I alone can fix it.” That, it turned out, was
not a throwaway line or an odd exaggeration by a narcissistic political novice;
it was a precursor and a prelude to the radical reimagining of the Presidency
as a one-man show. Cleveland was a prologue. What happened at the White House
last night was its tawdry, perhaps inevitable, sequel.
Trump
appears to believe that what really worked about that Cleveland speech were his
repeated calls for “law and order.” The dark hellscape of America in the Obama
years was not the subtext of his candidacy back then; it was the text of it,
and if it did not actually exist—well, that was O.K., because Trump was more
than willing to invent it. Four years later, as an actual hellscape unfolds,
there is another act of invention: pretending that the cataclysm is not
happening, or spuriously claiming that the true crisis is not the pandemic or
the economic catastrophe or police brutality toward Black people but a plague
of illegal aliens and open borders and attacks on law enforcement—all the same
old racially coded appeals to the President’s white political base, freshened
up and brought back out against the backdrop of this summer’s protests, which
began with the police killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, and have
escalated once again this week following the police shooting of another young
Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “The more . . . violence reigns,
the better it is” for Trump, Kellyanne Conway, his soon-to-depart White House
counsellor, told Fox News on Thursday morning, as pictures of looting in
Kenosha dominated the news. Trump thinks law and order won him the election
four years ago. He thinks it will do so again in November.
Back in 2016, the only
unscripted drama at the Convention involved the final defeat of what remained
of the G.O.P. resistance to Trump, culminating in a prime-time speech by
Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who had stayed in the Republican primary race long
after it was apparent that Trump would win. Instead of endorsing Trump, Cruz
ended his appearance in Cleveland not with a pitch for Party unity and getting
behind the future President but with a defiant plea to “vote your conscience.”
As it turned out, it was not Cruz’s last-ditch rebellion that mattered; it was
the boos and jeers that followed him off the stage.
This
year, Trump wanted it to be all about him, and it was. There were no Ted Cruzes
left to resist (and indeed Ted Cruz, now a reliable Trump ally on Capitol Hill,
was not even invited). With a prime-time lineup heavy on Trump family members
and current White House officials, it appeared that Trump was “down to blood
relatives and paid staffers,” as the late John McCain loved to quip. Trump’s
ever-slavish Vice-President managed to mention him thirty-three times in his
thirty-six-minute speech.
Not
surprisingly, all the speeches praised Trump, which was over the top but also
telling. Last week, at the Democratic Convention, Biden was also praised—as a
loving husband and father, and a friend to Amtrak conductors; as a relentless
extrovert, given to randomly calling the mothers and grandmothers of the young
people he meets. A boy he befriended on the campaign trail recounted how the
former Vice-President gave him the courage to speak publicly despite the
childhood stutter that he was determined to overcome, as Biden had. No one said
anything remotely like that about Trump this week. Claims about him were
outlandish and untrue—he is “the bodyguard of Western civilization,” the Trump
youth activist Charlie Kirk said; a paragon of “total honesty,” averred his
wife, Melania, little more than a year after it was revealed that Trump lied
about paying hush money to a porn star to cover up their extramarital affair.
Even so, there was barely a suggestion that Trump was personally empathetic or
loving. The only speech that seemed to humanize the President at all came from his
White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she talked about how he
called her on the telephone when she was recovering from surgery.
Now
Trump is Republicanism, and Republicanism is Trump—at least for the duration of
2020. The Party’s transformation into an ideology of Trump and Trump alone was
made explicit from the start of this Convention, when the Republican platform
for the election was released on Sunday evening. “RESOLVED,” it said, “That the
Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the
President’s America-first agenda,” and his second-term plans, whatever they may be. That was it.
One
of the more enduring subplots to come out of Cleveland was Melania Trump’s
botched speech, which lifted portions from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008
D.N.C., a mini-scandal that lives on in countless memes about the largely
inscrutable and intensely private current First Lady. The plagiarism that
occurred at this year’s Convention, however, was not by Melania but by Trump
himself. The President can’t help but recycle his own lines. He has no other
playbook. He is fighting for law and order. His opponent is a phony, the
captive of sinister leftist forces. It’s what he said about Hillary Clinton in
2016, and what he said about Joe Biden on Thursday night. Even his 2016
campaign slogan, the one that he himself stole from Ronald Reagan, has been repurposed
for use once again in 2020, no matter how odd it sounds for an incumbent
President to be running on the promise to make America great again.
Running
as an incumbent was always going to be a problem for Trump. He is a divider, a
fighter; he prefers to be against things, not for them. He loves to take
credit—and to avoid responsibility. His speeches skew dark and
grievance-ridden, even in the best of times. And, despite Trump’s bombast and
lies, these are not the best of times. We don’t know if Trump will be reëlected
in November, but as he enters this final sixty-six-day race to Election Day, we
do know this: Donald J. Trump has only one script in politics, and he is
determined to use it over and over and over again.
